The waste of the canon: the serial according to Paul Groussac

Abstract

In Paul Groussac’s essays published in La Biblioteca, especially in “La educación por el folletín” (1897), a concern of the Argentine critical canon is manifested in the face of a literary production that is conceived as garbage, in full proliferation and directed at a population that is also thought of as social waste. In an approach to the contemporary reception of Zola by young professional writers, Groussac challenges, first of all, a literature of the militant writer, aimed at the general public, in which the social conflict that involves the workers and the lumpen resonates. The criticism of the feuilleton also supposes a conservative response to modern political and aesthetic tendencies that it considers dissolving, in defense of an Apollonian concept of society, centered on the family, consistent with the civilizing, social-scientific and moral principles of Latinity and christianity. His critical and literary productions also dialogue with government discourses and with the crepuscular theses of contemporary psychiatry. In them one can find an oscillation between a hygienist role, which distinguishes what is healthy from what is pathological in the arts and sciences, and an experimentation or assimilation of this literary production aimed at social surplus, which positions him, unexpectedly, as a writer of serial literature.