Reading, pose and uprooting. Pedro-Emilio Coll and “Hispanic-American bovarism”

Abstract

The reaction to the Decadence trend in Venezuela caused arguments between critics and writers on the subjects of uprooting and the Gallicized poses presumably caused by the books. My essay reviews these discussions so as to understand the meaning of copying and imitation in the Venezuelan fin de siècle, based on the considerations of Sylvia Molloy regarding the turn of the century pose as a “decisive motion of the cultural policy of Hispanic America at the end of the Nineteenth Century “. My intention is to understand the context in which the decadent pose of Pedro-Emilio Coll appears to be conceived to dislocate and destabilize other aesthetic positions. I will examine how the dislodgement purportedly produced by the reading allowed for the creation of an enunciation (which is also a place for receipt) characterized by irony, and based on the fragment, the glosa and footnotes. These traits will allow us to define an aesthetic which purports to be as Latin American as is opposite, criollismo.