A propósito de la recepción americana de la tradición europea: Ezequiel Martínez Estrada y Jorge Luis Borges

The aim of this paper is to confront the opinions of Ezequiel Martínez Estrada and Jorge Luis Borges, the two most significant Argentinian essayists of the 20th century, concerning American reception of the European cultural tradition. Both the convergences and the divergences between them are underlined. Although Martínez Estrada and Borges converge in criticism of their writings, fictional and non-fictional, a narrow nationalistic view of culture and literature — defending a more cosmopolitan stance — at the same time they diverge strongly about the more specific role that literature should play in modern Argentina and Latin-American societies. The comparison between these two writers also teaches us about some of the ways in which intellectual life has been conducted in the Latin-American cultural context over the years.