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.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
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.
References
Acree, William. (2011). Everyday Reading. Print Culture and Collective Identity in the Rio de la Plata, 1780–1910, Vanderbilt University Press.
Albornoz, César. (2005). La Cultura en la Unidad Popular: porque esta vez no se trata de cambiar un Presidente, in Julio Pinto Vallejos, editor, Cuando hicimos historia. La Experiencia de la Unidad Popular, LOM, pp.147–176.
Althusser, Louis. (1971). Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses, in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, Monthly Review Press.
Aman, Kenneth and Cristián Parker. (1991). Popular Culture in Chile. Resistance and Survival, Westview Press.
Amunátegui i Reyes, Miguel Luis. (1914). Enseñanza de la gramática, Anales de la Universidad de Chile, volume 134.
Anderson, Benedict. (1991) Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Verso.
Bennett, Tony. (1987). Texts in History: the determinations of readings and their texts, in Derek Attridge et al (editors), Post-structuralism and the Question of History, Cambridge University Press, pp.63–81.
Castro-Klarén, Sara and John Charles Chasteen (editors) (2003). Beyond Imagined Communities. Reading and Writing the Nation in Nineteenth Century Latin America, The Woodrow Wilson Center Press and The Johns Hopkins University Press.
Cornejo Polar, Antonio. (1995). La Literatura hispanoamericana del siglo XIX: continuidad y ruptura (hipótesis a partir del caso andino), in Esplendores y miserias del siglo XIX. Cultura y sociedad en América Latina, Beatriz González-Stephan et al. (editors), Monte Avila Editores, pp.11–23.
Dannemann, Manuel. (2004). Poetas populares en la sociedad chilena del siglo XIX, Archivo Central Andrés Bello, Universidad de Chile.
González-Stephan, Beatriz. (2004). On Citizenship: The Grammatology of the Body-Politic, in Ana del Sarto, Alicia Ríos and Abril Trigo, editors. The Latin American Cultural Studies Reader, Duke University Press, pp.384–405.
Grez Toso, Sergio. (1995). Editor, La Cuestión social en Chile. Ideas y debates precursores, Dirección de Bibliotecas Archivos y Museos.
Lenz, Rudolf. (1912). Para qué estudiamos gramática, Anales de la Universidad de Chile, volume CXXXI.
Littau, Karin. (2006). Theories of Reading: Books, Bodies, and Bibliomania, Polity.
Lyons, Martin. (2003). New Readers in the Nineteenth Century: Women, Children, Workers, in Cavallo, Guglielmo and Roger Chartier, editors, A History of Reading in the West, University of Massachusetts Press, pp.313–344.
Martín Barbero, Jesús. (1987). De los medios a las mediaciones, Barcelona: Gustavo Gilli.
Memorias de los Ministros de Justicia, Culto e Instrucción Pública entre 1845 y 1886, in Archivo Nacional, Santiago, Chile.
Orellana, Marcela. (1996). Lira popular: un discurso entre la oralidad y la escritura, Revista Chilena de Literatura, 48, pp.101–112.
Ossenbach, Gabriela and Miguel Somoza, (editors). (2001). Los Manuales escolares como fuente para la historia de la educación en América, Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia.
Periódicos chilenos en la Biblioteca Nacional (Collection of Chilean Newspapers at the National Library), Santiago, Chile.
Poblete, Juan. (2003). Literatura chilena del siglo XIX: entre públicos lectores y figuras autoriales, Editorial Cuarto Propio.
———. (2000). Lectura de la sociabilidad y sociabilidad de la lectura: la novela y las costumbres nacionales en el siglo XIX, Revista de Crítica Literaria Latinoamericana 52, pp.11–34.
———. (2002). Governmentality and the Social Question: National Formation and Discipline, Benigno Trigo, editor, Foucault in Latin America, Routledge, pp. 137–151.
———. (2019). Formación de una sociedad lectora, Historia Crítica de la Literatura Chilena, Rojo, Grinor. et al. editors, Volume II, LOM, pp.315–332.
———. (2017). La Lectura popular: entre la biblioteca y la hoja suelta, Taller de Letras, 61, 2017, pp.51–64.
Pratt, Mary Louise. (1995). Género y ciudadanía: las mujeres en diálogo con la nación, in Esplendores y miserias del siglo XIX. Cultura y sociedad en América Latina, Beatriz González-Stephan et al. (editors), Monte Avila Editores, 261–276.
Rabasa, Magaly. (2019). The Book in Movement: Autonomous Politics and the Lettered City Underground, University of Pittsburgh Press.
Rama, Angel. (1984). La Ciudad Letrada. Ediciones del Norte.
Romero, Luis Alberto. (1989). ¿Cómo son los pobres? Miradas de la elite e identidad popular en Santiago hacia 1870, Opciones, 16, May-August.
Santa María, Fernando. (1995). Ojeada sobre la condición del obrero y medios de mejorarla, in Grez, La Cuestión social.
Sarmiento, Domingo Faustino. (1887–on). Bibliotecas Populares (originally 1854), Volume 4, Obras Completas, Felix Lajouane, editor.
——— Memoria sobre educación común, Santiago, 1856.
Schwartz, Marcy. (2018). Public Pages. Reading Along the Latin American Streetscape, University of Texas Press.
Subercaseaux, Bernardo. (2010). Historia del libro en Chile. Desde la Colonia hasta el Bicentenario, LOM.
Sunkel, Guillermo. (1985). Razón y pasión en la prensa popular, ILET.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2022 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
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
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13227-8_14
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-031-13226-1
Online ISBN: 978-3-031-13227-8
eBook Packages: Social SciencesSocial Sciences (R0)