Estudios de Teoría Literaria (Nov 2020)
Facundo and Museo de la Novela de la Eterna, two ways of reading reality and fiction
Abstract
The following paper is a contrastive analysis between two paradigmatic texts of Argentine literature: Facundo o civilización y barbarie (1845) by Domingo Faustino Sarmiento (1811-1888) and Museo de la Novela de la Eterna (1967) by Macedonio Fernández (1874-1952). The research focuses on the generic complexity of both texts that are reluctant to be read as novels because of their antithetical relationship with fiction. However, the opinion of the criticism is not unique in either case for reasons that we’ll explain below. Make so different books dialogue is aimed at propose a narratological dichotomy that distinguishes between the “referential idealism” in Facundo and the “non-referential realism” in Museo, a binomial that we consider effective to understand why both texts are generically difficult to classify.
