Lenguas (latino)americanas. Entre literatura y diplomacia: vindicaciones por un universal plural. João Guimarães Rosa y Octavio Paz en la alargada Segunda Guerra Mundial (1936-1948).

This dissertation examines the intellectual and political intersections between literature and diplomacy during a decisive period of the 20th century (ca. 1935-1950). It takes as pivot of analysis the works and trajectories of two important Latin American diplomats/writers: Brazilian João Guimarães Rosa and Mexican Octavio Paz. By exploring the intricate consubstantiality of diplomacy and literature in these two authors and their respective careers and productions, the dissertation advances an interpretation of their two similar, yet different, critiques of hegemonic universalism – which they constructed as a way to articulate simultaneously (Latin)America in the 20th-century world and the world in Latin America. Through archival research and close-readings of both authors' published and unpublished correspondences and works, the dissertation recovers the nuances of these particular universals, relocating the diplomatic and cultural role played by Mexico and Brazil within the world's complex reconfigurations between 1935 and 1950.

In five chapters, the dissertation deals with: the poetic and political beginnings of Paz during the Spanish Civil War in 1937; Rosa's important diplomatic work in Hamburg (1938-1942) at the peak of the nazi power and horror – tracing the "Germanic extension" of Rosa's sertão or the " sertaneja dimension" of Germany, as well as the resignification of Brazilian "cordialidade"; Rosa's years in Hamburg as a deep questioning of metaphysics and barbarism, considering them in situ and through his obsession with language itself; Rosa's stays in Bogotá in 1942-944 and 1948 and his views of Hispanic America and of Brazil's continental and international ambitions in the post-war era; and, finally, Paz's auto-reflections on Mexican condition during his diplomatic mission in San Francisco during the founding of the United Nations (1943-1945).