Search

The edition of La novela de la poesía (2012) already made evident two fundamental issues in Tamara Kamenszain's writing: on the one hand, a specific inscription of the passage poetry/novel/essay; on the other, the book (the edition, the support, the object) as a link. More recently, El libro de Tamar (2018) and Libros chiquitos (2020) illuminate in a special way two other constitutive aspects of the process: one, the temporal spiral between the program of the 70s and the present of writing, which converts the series in a long duration narrative; two, the problem of limits in the form of scale. In this paper I propose to read, at the intersection of El libro de Tamar and Libros chiquitos, three scenes as inflections in a long duration story with the test of time and limits: the tempo of the prose (the writing of the poem as the rhythm of the narrative and the prose as the distillation of the real of the verse), the magnitudes of the book (the book and the masterpiece of the 70s, the poetics of the little books as a inflection of the contemporary sublime), the intersection between the inscription of the present and the creation of a community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the framework of a broader investigation into the imaginaries of the afterworld in present-day Argentine literature, this paper aims at addressing the ways in which Carlos Ríos's Cuaderno de Pripyat (2012) narrates the afterworld of an identifiable historical event, the Chernobyl disaster, creating further tension between the crisis itself and the possibility of a post-apocalyptic setting that brings a radical and immeasurable interruption into play. First, we analyze the ways in which this multiplication of temporalities affects the presentation of the testimonies collected in the story. Next, the paper focuses on the collage as a possible explicative key to the fragmentary composition of the story based on the tension between the rationality of that which remains and that of referential oversaturation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A problematic link made of tensions and contradictions relates Elvira Orphée to Tucumán, the Argentinian province where she was born and the space represented in many of her texts. This paper explores one of the aspects of this problematic link by revealing the fact that the author's figure is fictionalized in Pretérito perfecto, novel published in 1983 by another writer from Tucumán, Hugo Foguet. After pointing out the elements which allow to relate Negra Fortabat, the character in the novel, to Orphée, the analysis meditates on the probable reasons for such fictionalization and on its implications regarding the image that Foguet constructs of himself as a writer. It is postulated that the figurative presence of Orphée in Pretérito perfecto works in at least three directions, intimately related to each other: 1) to develop the dispute over how to write a novel in general and how to write a novel about Tucumán in particular; 2) to incarnate the counter figure of a writer, which enables to make a necessary tabula rasa over every antecedent and to show, in that way, how disruptive and foundational the novel by Foguet is in itself; 3) to represent the tensions between a peripheral literary field located in Tucumán and a central literary field located in Buenos Aires [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the set of recently published novels on the subject of post-dictatorial memory, that of the visual artist Gerber Bicecci (1981) stands out for a writing that uses, among other apparently disparate expressive elements, Venn diagrams, to name the ineffable generated by the disappearance, exile and silence imposed. This paper intends to analyze the writing of Conjunto vacío, highlighting the creative self-reference, and the reading effects based on the coexistence of visual and linguistic codes of different species. According to my interpretation, the novel answers this and other questions that Argentina's society is still around forty years after the last dictatorship, at which time the crystallized and deceptive responses directed especially to the new generations return. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Antonio Di Benedetto (1922-1986), one of the most important Argentinean writers of the twentieth century, published in 1953 Mundo Animal, a volume of short stories in which the animal figure becomes fundamental, as its title makes explicit. Within vinthe fictional universe of the work, this figure is incarnated in the human and vice versa, suggesting that humanity, beyond its exclusive attributes-reason and language-, shares a broad common substratum with other living beings. This existential configuration not only provokes hesitations in the reader, but has also ontological implications, that is, it leads to questioning about meaning schemes and the human condition in these fantasticallegorical stories. The purpose of this paper is then to investigate and interpret Di Benedetto's fictionalization of these encounters and borders between the animal and the human, analyzing different textual manifestations of this question: the quid pro quo procedure, the non-human narrators, the animality of children, the relationship with psychic pathologies, the ontological proximity between the two worlds, the metaphor of the mirror, and the corporality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on contributions from historical reading, bibliographical material and analyses of Louis Marin's visual representation, this paper addresses the formats of a group of printed texts published by the gaucho-esque writer Luis Peréz between 1830 and 1833, specifically a series of loose leaf pages and the two newspapers El Gaucho and La Gaucha. Its aim is to explore links between the material features of these works, the type of reader which the author attempted to attract, and the meaning and ideology of his texts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Juan José Saer’s literature and essays, as well as most of the criticism about the author, allow for exploration of the idea of “zone” expressed in diverse forms throughout his career. This paper attempts to revisit some of these considerations and address the pictorial aspect of his works. The various avant-garde movements that began to emerge between the late fifties and early sixties helped shape a new image of the Argentine littoral region. Saer, who often met with avant-gardists in the cities of Santa Fe and Rosario, joined in these literary and visual renewal movements and incorporated into his literature forms, materials, and manners of observation that resulted from these various abstract tendencies, mainly abstract expressionism and geometric abstraction. The aim here is to observe how Saer “disrealizes” the traditional landscape based on these figures and thus challenges the hasty relationship that early critics established between his texts and a more or less traditional realism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A widely accepted hypothesis among readers and critics states that Oliverio Girondo maintained an avant-garde position throughout his literary career. However, it is possible to read an unsuccessful attempt at avoiding experimentation in his intermediate works, such as Interlunio (1937), Persuasión de los días (1942), and Campo nuestro (1946), written between two different avant-garde periods in Buenos Aires: one in the 1920s, the other in the 1950s. In analyzing these works, this paper shows Girondo’s hesitations about the idea of literary renewal following the 1920s, as well as the influence of nationalist ideals that contrast the internationalism that he had expressed in his preliminary works. It also explains his subsequent radicalization, in the late 50s, stemming from his connection with a group of young poets that sought to reclaim a place for experimentation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In El Torito de los Muchachos (1830), Luis Pérez deploys voices, not always Gauchos and Federalists, but sometimes Uniterian and literate, who utter fictional truths in the form of a confession. In a historical moment in which the press was a vehicle of influence on public opinion, Pérez aims his publications toward broad swaths of the public to include of illiterate groups through oral readings. This paper analyzes the ways in which these confessions allowed truths to stand up amid a war of words, as they sought to occupy an imagined public space on whose field discursive conflicts were fought. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Dos partidos en lucha (1875), and especially in La bolsa de huesos (1896), Eduardo Holmberg configures fictional narrations in which Darwinian theories and the contemporary debates and dilemmas of science acquire a significant centrality. In both cases, and in addition to an emphatic adherence to Darwinism and a clear apology for the scope of scientific practice, it is possible to detect a problematization of the institutional place of science, its feasible connections with the society and politics, and its role within the state structure. As a correlate, both narrations reveal tensions around and reformulations of one of their central axes, which is also central to the work of Charles Darwin: the modes of thinking, emphasizing or relativizing the link between human life and animal life. The aim of this paper is to address the interaction between these two issues in Holmberg's fictions, through a contrastive textual analysis that contemplates the cultural context of the period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The memory of peoples is built upon the clash between different discourses and sectors which strive to occupy a privileged place in this collective symbolic space. Other discourses work deconstructing those hegemonic narratives, reporting what they have left aside and giving voice to those who have been systematically silenced. This work tries to account for the way in which La lengua del malón, by Guillermo Saccomanno, builds itself as a counter-discourse, which allows to discern the position of some social sectors in reference to discourses and devices that determine what is adequate, moral, vulgar, tasteful, normal. To the same extent, this paper attempts to exhibit those sectors's complicity in keeping hierarchies, categories and institutions, which are conservative, oppressive and repressive, together with their alliances with those who interrupted democratic and popular processes. The novel is based on the coup d'etat which overthrew Perón's government in 1955, and it hints the continuing relationship with other tragic moments of the Argentinian history: the extermination of native peoples and the dictatorship that started in 1976. La lengua del malón is built as a narrative of abjection suffered by those who fail to answer those hegemonic parameters supporting not only the official history, but also the society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper studies Victor Juan Guillot's detective stories, hitherto, completely ignored by the literary criticism and the historiography of the detective genre in Argentina. We assert that in these stories it is possible to see the transition from a certain detective narrative -which was clearly predominant from late 1870s to 1930s, having melodramatic features and close links with the political and social reality-into a new kind of tale much closer to the English detective story of the Golden Age, and further from empirical national life. In Argentina, this new type of detective tale will be developed vigorously during the 1930s and the 1940s. Thus, we attempt to show that the detective stories included in Historias sin importancia (1920) and El alma en el pozo (1925) are in the same line with the early tradition of the genre in Argentina, while the stories included in Terror: cuentos de crimen y misterio (circa 1935) have mostly the same features as those of the 1930s. We also seek to put on view how Guillot's conception of the detective story in 1925 anticipated Jorge Luis Borges's conception of the genre in the 30s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Literary criticism on Ricardo Piglia s narrative has often been oriented to micro-analyses, as if a permanent focus on minimal features was required: a sentence, a phrase, a quote. This leads to a further problem: the difficulty in envisaging a macro approach and systematization of the originality of Piglia's narrative process. Thus, this paper intends to provide a broader view in an attempt to identify four recurrent rhetorical devices in his work: understatement, paradox, ellipsis and synechdoque, in relation to some literary genres (Bildungsroman, detective fiction and paranoid fiction). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]