ABSTRACT
This article studies the letters from Luis Emilio Soto to Luís da Câmara Cascudo (1923-1925) preserved at the Instituto Câmara Cascudo (Natal, RN). Unlike countries such as England, France and Germany, which constituted their intellectual (and disciplinary) traditions and cultural identities through disputes and direct exchanges among themselves, Brazil and Argentina followed predominantly parallel paths, with little attention to each other, guided by the dominant poles of the world intellectual system; a dynamic that can be understood by the oppositions local/universal and periphery/center. Although focused on the analysis of the initial processes of institutionalization of modernism and the avant-garde in Brazil and Argentina, this text is equally a comparative history of the intellectual world, interested in the development, disputes, and exchanges between the literary critics in question, who polarized the literary life of Brazil and Argentina during the period.
Keywords:
Modernisms; Avant-garde; Cultural mediations; Correspondence; Intellectual history