La educación por el folletín : prácticas de lectura y escritura en la prensa latinoamericana del siglo XIX

Abstract

Relationships between press and literature during the 19th century are usually approached with a series of presumed values. The Enlightened distinction from the 19th century between press (“journalism”) and literature (“fine arts”) has surreptitiously permeated most traditional approaches, preserving a dual and hierarchic logic that ultimately outshines all possibilities of analysis. It is in this context that the feuilleton —prototypical product of the periodical press— has been regarded as a minor genre, a sort of subliterature or paraliterature; its reading and writing practices have therefore been dismissed by the analysis. Some studies have recently started to review these theoretical assumptions from a cultural perspective so as to better understand production contexts. Following this trend, the author attempts to outline some critical hypothesis on the relationship between press and literature in a stage previous to the effective expansion and professionalization of its techniques and discourses, examining for this purpose some newspapers of the Río de la Plata, Chile and Brazil.