Vom Schreien und Schreiben einer Nation. Mündlichkeit, Schriftlichkeit und Affekte in Esteban Echeverrías "La cautiva"

Abstract

Based on the sociological thesis, which perceives affects as social instruments that appear whenever formerly stable worldviews start to falter, the present article subjects the long poem La cautiva by Esteban Echeverría to a critical analysis. Belonging to the canon of nation-building literature, the text stages the conquest of the Pampa by two lovers and their love death. If the text reads at first glance as an affectionate proclamation of an Argentine nation, a connotative semantics of orality and literality reveal an increasingly distant relationship with the former and a turning towards the latter. Not the indigenous people alone, but rather the spoken or shouted word with which the text connects them, is subject to limitation, thus paving the way for the visibility of the written word and facilitating the national project.