Cultural heritage and controversy. Conflicts and disputes around the legitimation of traditional poetry in popular songbooks in Argentina (1920-1950)

Abstract

In this work we focus on a corpus consisting of a series of texts of varied genre –letters, critical reviews, introductory studies for compilations of Argentinian popular poetry–. We examine within this corpus, based on categories addressed by Discourse Studies –in particular, from the perspectives of Marc Angenot and Dominique Maingueneau–, a constituent dispute in the formation of the field of studies related to popular literature in Argentina: the dispute over the documentary value of the materials collected in Encuesta Folklórica de 1921 (the Folk Survey of 1921). To do this, we focus on two moments that we find particularly significant: an initial stage, which revolves around the publication in 1926 of the first of the great popular songbooks compiled by Juan Alfonso Carrizo, and then a consolidation moment for institutional positions, which revolves around the publication in 1941 of the Romancero of Ismael Moya by the Institute of Argentine Literature, of the University of Buenos Aires. In these two moments of the controversy some issues, related to two interwoven plots, come into play: a plot that we can think of as a theoretical one, involving the status through which studies on popular culture in the Argentina are thought, conceived these studies as a discursive field (Maingueneau, 1984: 34) crossed by conflicts and disputes, but unified by hegemonic elements; and a political plot, which refers to the positions of the agents involved in the dispute, enrolled within the space of two large discursive formations (Arnoux, 2006: 36). On one side we are in the framework of an institutional and democratic nationalism and, on the other, in a Hispanic and Catholic traditionalism, which sometimes can identify itself, not without tensions, also as a nationalism.