An Intellectual Constellation. Press, Literature and Modernity in the Journal Ahasverus (Buenos Aires, 1854)

Abstract

This article analyzes the journal Ahasverus, directed by Camille Duteil and published by the Imprenta de Mayo in Buenos Aires in 1854, in order to account for its editorial particularities during the secessionist period of the State of Buenos Aires. The analysis approaches the publication as an intellectual constellation that reconfigured literary dialogue in the post-Rosas context, a literary-journalistic device that constructed an authorial figure to articulate a poetics of transnational modern knowledge. The main conclusion argues that, despite its brief existence, Ahasverus was not a mere failed project, but rather a distinctive intervention within the porteño cultural field in a context of an expanding readership. Its experimentation, though ephemeral, articulated at an early stage the central tensions of River Plate cultural modernity, defined by the conflict between the appropriation and critique of modern knowledge, making it an indispensable piece for mapping the complex origins of a singular modernizing project in the mid-nineteenth century.