¿Un cronista provinciano? Dos textos desconocidos de Rubén Darío en El Orden de Tucumán

Abstract

Hand in hand with recent theoretical and empirical developments related to the notion of archive, the field of Spanish American Modernism Studies is currently undergoing a stage of profound transformation. The validity in Literary Studies of a “new” philology not only highlights problems in the editions of classical texts from the fin de siècle period, but also invites researchers to review the clichés associated with this movement. In this sense, the case of Rubén Darío (1867-1916), whose texts remain in a state of notable precariousness, is exemplary. This article comments and recovers two unknown chronicles published in El Orden, a local newspaper in the Argentine province of Tucumán, that were written by this author. Besides their evident documental value, these texts, which were conceived at the farewell to his residence in Buenos Aires in 1898, acquire relevance if they are connected to the concerns that Darío will cultivate on his imminent trip to Europe. On one hand, they can be read as yet another episode of Buenosairean “calibanism”; on the other hand, they can be understood as an anticipation of a critical perspective towards the mythification of the concept of progress in the Parisian Universal Exhibition of 1900.