Transplants of the spirit: folklore and national language in Rodolfo Lenz

Authors

  • Pablo Concha Ferreccio Universidad de Chile

Abstract

This article examines the ideological and cultural implicances of Rodolfo Lenzs folklorical investigations. Our premise is that, from the notion of archive, his interest in folklorical research functioned as a strategy to refund and modernice an idea of nation through positivist means. In a ¿rst phase, the philologist scrutinized these materials searching for an authentically chilean kernel. Nevertheless, in a second stage, his innovations regarding language teaching made him relativize that approach and move to one based on folklor´s legitimacy. Our thesis is that from this point it is possible to draw a system for the national language, whose articulating space would be the school: this institution shapes a style of expression (derived from folklore) by establishing a dialogue, not without friction, between the popular language and the literary language

Keywords:

Rodolfo Lenz, linguistic ideologies, folklore, national language, Chilean condition