The antimodernist pedagogy of Matías Calandrelli: misunderstandings between literature and criticism

Abstract

At the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th, modernism aroused enthusiastic defenses and harsh censures. We propose the recovery and study of what was the most bitter anti-modernist campaign, the one carried out by the Italian philologist Matías Calandrelli (1845-1919) in the pages of the Revista de Derecho, Historia y Letras, the newspapers El Nacional and La Prensa, and in the book Crítica y arte. The study of these materials allows us not only to account for the specific content adopted by criticism against modernism, but also to reflect on the way in which both the conception of literature and the protocols of criticism were being transformed. By analyzing the disagreement between the conception of criticism as pedagogy and the modern concept of literature, the aim is to contribute both to a history of criticism of modernism and to a history of the transformations of criticism itself.