Paul Groussac’s Void: The French Writer and the Argentine Tradition

The French-Argentine Paul Groussac embodied a wide range of writerly functions and cultural-political positions within the Argentine cultural field between the 1880s and the 1920s: writer, playwright, chronicler, traveler, literary, art, and music critic, historian, educator, editor, and director of the National Library during 44 years. This essay considers his place in the history of Argentine literature looking at two of the many ways in which he inscribed himself in it. The first takes up the production and reproduction of the ontological privilege of French identity as a form of legitimization for his public—and often polemic—interventions, through which he sought to establish scholarly-disciplinary practices, protocols, and conventions that would articulate an entire critical field around his own authority. The second proposes to think his alternatively weak and strong inscriptions in the literary tradition through his own narrative production: his fiction and dramaturgy, travelogues, and biographical sketches. In other words, this essay situates Groussac in an Argentine literary tradition (conceived as an organic and institutionally sanctioned textual corpus) he believed to have founded and established, a selfrepresentation that led Borges to say that Groussac saw himself as “a missionary of Voltaire among the mulattage.”

A través de la pantalla: Infancias queer en la literatura argentina del nuevo milenio

Childhood is taken up time and again in Argentine literature of the first decades of the 21st century. These are novels that engage various forms of humor, from extreme satire to imposed naivety. This broad register serves to destabilize ideas established throughout the 20th century about the management of the lives of minors. Imaginaries formed by television have become part of several texts, together with what could be termed the “infant library”, that is to say, the children’s literature read by contemporary writers. Argentine narrative of the period accounts for the serious social crisis caused by the hegemony of neoliberalism, as well as its consequences on children’s lives, revealing the fissures in the discourses surrounding their rights. The present article examines these issues in relation to three recent novels: Quedate conmigo (2017) by I. Acevedo, La maldición de Jacinta Pichimahuida (2007) by Lucía Puenzo and Osos (2010) by Diego Vecchio. They will be addressed here within the theoretical frameworks offered by Kathryn B. Stockton in her book The Queer Child (2009). --- La infancia es retomada por la literatura escrita en Argentina durante las primeras décadas del siglo XXI en novelas que apuestan a diversas formas del humor. Desde la sátira extrema hasta una ingenuidad impostada, aparece un registro amplio que sirve para desestabilizar ideas fijadas a lo largo del siglo XX en lo relacionado con la administración de la vida de los menores de edad. Los imaginarios televisivos entran a formar parte de los textos fundiéndose con la “biblioteca infante”, es decir, con las lecturas que acompañaron las infancias de los y las escritoras contemporáneos. La narrativa argentina del período también da cuenta de la grave crisis social producida por la hegemonía del neoliberalismo, así como sus consecuencias en las vidas de las infancias, lo que tendió a mostrar las fisuras de los discursos en torno a sus derechos. Estas discusiones quedan registradas en las tres novelas—Quedate conmigo (2017) de I. Acevedo, La maldición de Jacinta Pichimahuida (2007) de Lucía Puenzo, Osos (2010) de Diego Vecchio—que serán abordadas aquí desde los marcos teóricos ofrecidos por la teoría queer, en particular por la propuesta de Kathryn B. Stockton.

Walking the city and the neighbourhoods of Buenos Aires. Argentine Literature in the 1920s and 1930s

This article presents an overview of Buenos Aires, city and neighbourhoods, from the viewpoints of several authors who participated in the literary life of the 1920s and 1930s, portraying the evolution of modernity and the social question –inequalities. Novels, short stories, poems and magazines from the period in question were used to frame these issues and unravel the objectives set. It concludes by exposing the variety and diversity of the city and the neighbourhoods of Buenos Aires, as well as the people who inhabited them and the Buenos Aires literary currents of the period, headed by Jorge Luis Borges, on the one hand (Florida group), and Roberto Arlt (Boedo group), on the other.

Rescate editorial. Nunca es tarde cuando la dicha es buena (1858) de Tomás Gutiérrez

This editorial rescue presents and contextualizes, within Nineteenth-Century Argentine literature, the sentimental brief novel or “novelita”, entitled Nunca es tarde cuando la dicha es buena, originally published in Las Violetas. Ensayos Literarios in 1858, by the unknown author Tomás Gutiérrez. This novel, mentioned by Hebe Molina and Myron Lichtblau in their studies of Argentine literary history of the 19th century, has remained unknown since the last decades of the 19th century, until now, when it is rescued from a single copy found in the Argentine Academy of Letters. Its re-edition is framed within a study of the sentimental literature of the 1850s and 1880s and contributes to the understanding of this literature, apparently only passatist and innocent, as a key discourse in the construction of subjectivities, roles of gender, sexual behaviors and forms of intimacy in the decades after Rosismo and before the consolidation of the Nation State in 1880. The moral character, the intertextuality with Christian resonance and its condition, at the same time, of first literary commodity (Velázquez, 2017) converge in the formation of this hybridized cultural device full of rich social implications. Also, the question of love marriage vs. forced marriage appears, both here and in other sentimental novels of the time, shows some of the topics that, around the sentimental sociability of the time, had created generational, racial and social class controversies.

Sensible/visible: les hijes de detenides desaparecides en Hasta que mueras, de Raquel Robles (2019) y Yo la quise (2020), de Josefina Giglio

The literature of the children of forced disappeared victims, including that of Raquel Robles and Josefina Giglio, who went through the traumatic experience of the last Argentine civic-military ecclesial business dictatorship in 1976, has been the subject of multiple approaches by vernacular critics (Reati, Domínguez, Basile), or foreign (García Díaz, Bolte, Gatti, et al). In this study, I name the group as lowercase in order to displace the institutional character that, although important, can reduce the perspective that I am trying to display. This perspective focuses on questioning what the writing of children of the disappeared contributes in terms of complexity to literary studies within the framework of memory-literature articulation. Thus, I notice an accumulation of writings, whether in the multiple arc of narrative or poetry, where the assumption of the voice that enunciates, in some cases, works the experience in the first person from styles already registered in literature, although the experiences of the authors enhance writings that are difficult to place in literary trends. As if literature were to make visible the very tension that its politicity implies from the narrative voices with one foot in the lived experience and the other in the creative laboratory; It is also necessary to point out that this experience places state politics as the central node since it reconfigured the life not only of the authors but of all society, in this case Argentina. In the selected novels we are faced with what Jacques Rancière (2015, 2011) understands as a principle of action, from which neither literature nor readers can be far from a new ethos. From this it is possible to connect with certain experiences that emerge in this case from both novels and that affect our perception of reality and history. Argentine literature, born in the very bosom of the nation-state, is not the same after the sons once they intervened in the street in the second half of the 90s of the last century to demand justice, they speak in the new millennium and write experiences that affect us all, and that reshape the ways of thinking politics, literature and history.

Argentine Literature as Part of the Latin-American: Debates, Characteristics and Dialogues

The article will suggest that the texts and ways of reaching some materials and perspectives in Argentina, remains at a national level. It is important to notice that in order to read criticism and theory regarding Latin American literature, Spanish from Río de la Plata separates at some point the fields. In that regard, one of the greatest assets and achievements of Argentinian literary research concerns the relationship between politics and fiction. In connection with this it might be asked how we can think of Argentinian literature without linking it to the social discourse? How can we think of the comparative field of Latin-American and Argentinian literature as one academic area of studies? In our view, comparatism seems to be one of the loneliest areas of studies in terms of the fields of theory, fiction and criticism. We thus suggest that in Argentina, literary research and criticism in general are strictly concerned with only one option: the national culture. Thus, exclusively, western theoretical frames are chosen to read literature and comparative perspectives are mostly applied to European studies. That is why I insist on the fact that comparative literary research is not represented institutionally at all.