El “ Suelto”: una tradición discursiva del ámbito periodístico en la década de 1920

Abstract

This article is the partial result of a project that aims to describe some aspects of journalistic discourse in Argentina in the 1920s from a historical perspective. Assuming that discursive modes of production are determined by various socio-pragmatic historical conditions (cf. Jacob / Kabatek, 2001), and starting from the concept of discursive tradition developed by various different authors (Schlieben-Lange, Koch, Kabatek, Oesterreicher, Jacob), which can explain the relations of these determinations, we want to focus on a tradition typical of jour­nalism, the “short item” (“suelto”), in the context of the constellation of discursive traditions of the newspaper “La Razón”, one of the most important newspapers in the country at that time. It was the third largest national daily, and it was a pioneer in the process of modernizing journalism that developed in the second decade of the century, marking the transition from a heavy dependency on politics to a financially independent professional journalism, a process that was made possible, among other things, as a result of the formation of a mass society, and of the spread of literacy (Saítta, 2000). Taking into account that a discursive tradition can un­doubtedly be described by a specific configuration of features for different textual dimensions, it is particularly interesting to note, as part of that process, the rearrangement of communica­tive functions in the discursive “economy” of the newspaper –which also appeared as a single addressor (Peralta, 2005)–, and the place it gave to the “short item”. Finally, it should be noted that, in general, newspapers –a frequent source for the historian- are relatively little studied in their own discourse, an object that we consider relevant insofar as the press was -and is- a social and political actor of the first magnitude.

Keywords

• Discurso periodístico
• Argentina
• La Razón