Conclusion: On Lettered Cities and the Writing of Lyric

Abstract

I began this study with a reconsideration of Rama’s interpretation of lettered-city policies in post-1810 Latin America. According to this critic, one such virtual polity was made possible by the nationalization, in the aftermath of Spain’s colonial rule, of existing bureaucratic apparatuses now charged specifically with systematizing and publicizing the new republics’ self-legitimating body of knowledge (scientific, juridical, literary, sociological, etc.). In Rama’s view, the hypertrophy of the institutions of writing that thrived within those apparatuses was designed to produce ultimately a robust centralizing state in which the modernizing forces of secular progress (public education, transportation, industrial development, etc.) would slowly yet steadily eradicate the traces of religious superstition, Spanish traditionalism, and the so-called indigenous “barbarism.”