Materiales para una historia del Instituto de Filología de la Universidad de Buenos Aires (1927-1946)

Abstract

This paper proposes a history of the Instituto de Filología [Institute of Philology] of the Facultad de Filosofía y Letras at the University of Buenos Aires between 1927 and 1946, as the center was chaired by Amado Alonso. Through an exhaustive documentary reconstruction, it refers in detail the administrative decisions of Alonso, the institutional vicissitudes of the center and the scientific production of its researchers. By linking institutional, scientific and academic aspects, this work provides insight into the theoretical course of the Argentinean center. Some of the disputes that characterize the functioning of the recently formed scientific field of philological and linguistic studies become evident. In particular, we show that tensions between two projects -the nationalist project of Ricardo Rojas and the one of the Spanish scientific regeneration represented by Ramón Menéndez Pidal- come into play in different dimensions. The disputes affect both the institutional life of the center and its scientific bias, i.e. the definition of an object for the discipline and the creation of a theoretical perspective to address it. Under the guidance of Amado Alonso, the Institute of Philology set a scientific agenda that, incorporating the idealism and the stylistic as theoretical supports, and assuming a synchronic perspective in conjunction with a positive assessment of language change, entails a departure from the Menéndez Pidal’s philological tradition and the emergence of Latin American dialectology as a linguistic subdiscipline.