O n vices, penises and vulvas. Two unpublished texts by Arturo Costa Alvarez

Abstract

In this paper we present two unpublished texts by Arturo Costa Álvarez: “La filología española o un cultivo que ‘se va en vicio’” (1922?) and “Las cosas machos y hembras” (1923), preserved in the Costa Álvarez Fund at the Public Library of the National University of La Plata. In the former, we analyze how some of the conceptual axes that organize the production of Costa Álvarez based on the book Nuestra lengua (1922) are introduced. We also show how the text inaugurates a critique that, even though it is prior to the creation of the Institute of Philology of the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters of the University of Buenos Aires, anticipates and largely models the author’s subsequent positions. In the second text, we analyze how, based on a controversial gesture towards the authorities of the Institute, Costa Álvarez deploys certain grammatical and linguistic knowledge, the characteristics of which we assess here as a sample of non-academic linguistics of the period.