Alonso, Amado (1896–1952)

Amado Alonso (b. 13 September 1896; d. 26 May 1952), Argentine writer and literary critic. Born in Lerín, Navarra, Spain, Alonso directed the Institute of Philology at the University of Buenos Aires from 1927 to 1946, a position that allowed him to exercise considerable influence on the introduction of European formalism and stylistics into Argentina, and from there into Latin American literary and linguistic scholarship. In 1938 Alonso, along with Pedro Henríquez Ureña, published Gramática castellana, one of the classic structuralist analyses of the Spanish language. The Gramática, designed to be used in secondary-school courses, had numerous reprintings in subsequent decades. Alonso authored many important studies on Iberian and Latin American literature, including early studies on Jorge Luis Borges. His most important text, however, remains Poesía y estilo de Pablo Neruda (1940), probably the first full-length monograph on a Latin American poet to be written from the point of view of formalist stylistics, in addition to being one of the earliest studies on the Chilean poet. In 1945, Alonso translated into Spanish Ferdinand de Saussure's Curso de lingüística general (1945), one of the founding texts of modern linguistics. Whether writing specifically about poetry or exploring the poetic dimension of prose, Alonso exemplified the importance accorded by the literary criticism of the period to the questions of the specific qualities of literariness.

See alsoBorges, Jorge Luis .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Diego Catálan Menéndez Pidal, La escuela lingüística española y su concepción del lenguaje (1955).

Emilio Carilla, Estudios de literatura argentina, siglo XX, 2d ed. (1968), pp. 163-172.

Laurence Samuel Johnson, "The Literary Criticism of Amado Alonso and His Principal Disciples" (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1970).

Additional Bibliography

Gómez Alonso, Juan Carlos. La estilística de Amado Alonso como una teoría del lenguaje literario. Murcia: Universidad de Murcia, 2002.

Quiroga Torrealba, Luis. Tres lingüistas de América: Andrés Bello, Angel Rosenblat, Amado Alonso. Caracas: Fondo Editorial de la Universidad Pedagógica Experimental Libertador, 2003.

                                     David William Foster