Ricardo Rojas and Literature as a Document of Collective Memory: Between the Literary Canon and a Battle Cry

Abstract

The present article aims to raise some questions about literature and the question of national identity from History of of Argentinean literature by Ricardo Rojas. Rojas defines the literature as the document of the collective memory of the people. Literature as a testimony, a witness, a unique way of representing reality; a way of seeing, feeling and expressing the world. Here, language comes into play as a form of expression. Rojas`s first conscious stumble wil be a territory and a history of his own an internationalist language. The second stumble, the youth of history in geography. Our hermeneutical assumption is that this work, in the attempt to claim the existence of national literature -elaboration of a literary canon- and in the absence of a homogeneous system, unity or model form wich to depart, integrates the anomalies into a heterogeneity that loses coherence to time that expresses its own thing of the Argentine cultural reality: an immigration society.