Abstract
I focus on two of the spaces that helped constitute a popular sociability in Chile around the last part of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries: the government-sponsored popular libraries and the penny leaflets as complex social and textual spaces of agential conflict, values, and interests in the development of a popular sociability in Chile. More specifically, I study the role popular reading may have had in what I have called a “reading formation” in the Chilean nineteenth century. The popular library and the penny leaflets mark the two poles of freedom and control of a popular reading subjectivity. The library proposes an order and a space, certain carefully chosen contents contained within the boundaries of official book culture and its restricted and well-monitored circulation of approved works. The penny leaflets, instead, refer in principle to the rebellious and resistant nature of popular culture. They also evoke the latter’s permanent contingency, which is both non-permanence and escape. My second proposition, however, is that neither the libraries nor the penny leaflets should be interpreted simplistically. The penny leaflets were not spaces of absolute freedom, beyond market and social determinations. Neither was the library (popular or not) a homogeneous institution entirely free of contradictions.
This is an extended version of the essay published originally in Spanish as “La lectura popular: entre la biblioteca y la hoja suelta”, Taller de Letras 61 (2017): 51–64. Reproduced with permission from the publisher.
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Notes
- 1.
In the Latin American context, both now and in the nineteenth century, popular is both “of the people”, that is to say, referring to the cultural ways of the poor who account for the majority of Latin Americans and “enjoying a degree of popularity” within mass mediated culture. Because of the degree of relative development of Latin American societies, “popular” in Latin American Spanish refers thus to both the culture of the poor in general and the one more specific that is produced and circulated through mass mediated means. See Aman and Parker (1991: 9, note 2).
- 2.
For my own period-based definition of the concept of sociability in the Latin American nineteenth-century context, see Poblete (2000). Sociability is here a concept used at the time to understand voluntary social practices, including reading and cultural conversation, in formal/informal and public/private settings. It is a competence developed in the context of everyday life.
- 3.
Both elite’s exaggerated fears and the empirical basis of this relative democratization of reading are properly understood if one considers the actual literacy rates in Chile during the second half of the nineteenth century: if in 1854 only 13.5% of the population could be considered literate, by 1875 that percentage is 22.9 and in 1885 it has risen to 28.9%. The relative increase is particularly marked among women who, by the end of the century, have come close to also matching the literacy rates of males. See Poblete (2003) pp. 38–39. In this context, when I speak here of proto-massive culture I mean a historical expansion as perceived by the relevant social actors during the Chilean nineteenth century.
- 4.
Quoted by Subercaseaux, 59. The problem of the popular resistance to the moralization of the contents of their reading practices in the popular libraries created to serve them, was also common in the European nineteenth-century context. See Lyons (2003) for an illuminating summary.
- 5.
The reference is to Louis Althusser’s “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses” (1971).
- 6.
Andrés Bello (1781–1865) was a Venezuelan-Chilean polymath, who founded a number of key Chilean institutions in the nineteenth century, including the University of Chile, and wrote one of the most influential Spanish Grammars in the Latin American history of the language. Miguel Luis Amunátegui i Reyes (1862–1949) was a Chilean humanist and politician who presided the Chilean Academy of the (Spanish) Language for close to two decades.
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Poblete, J. (2022). The Value of Books and Reading as Social Practices in Nineteenth-Century Chile: The Perspectives of Government and Citizens. In: Thumala Olave, M.A. (eds) The Cultural Sociology of Reading. Cultural Sociology. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13227-8_14
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