Abstract

VILLA CHIAPPE, Santiago. Regarding the Caribbean : : Arciniegas and Benítez Rojo . hist.crit. [online]. 2005, n.29, pp.185-195. ISSN 0121-1617.

Aspects of style or rhetoric are very important in the way historians present their subject. The figures they use in their descriptions, the genres they try to emulate, and the images they conjugate imply thematic perspectives that are part of the “content” of any text on history. This article seeks to explore said question from the viewpoint of a comparative analysis of two texts about the Caribbean : German Arciniegas's work, Biografía del Caribe, and Antonio Benítez-Rojo's work, La isla que se repite. Both assume different ways of dealing with and representing the Caribbean . Based on the ideas of literary theorists like Mikhail Bakhtin and Edward W. Said, we will see how it is possible to discover “occult” thematic aspects, in each of these histories, through a study of both their style and form. It is thanks to a transdisciplinary perspective, which conjugates the study of history with that of literature, that new aspects can be discovered in the writing of history .

Keywords : Presentation; representation; Caribbean; literary genre; Arciniegas; Benítez-Rojo; link; chaos.

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