Argentinian Literature

Introduction

This entry is focused on Argentinean literature. Because of its historical context, Argentinean literature is more than poetry, fictions, or experimentations with writing; it is a political practice that involves writers, intellectuals, audiences, and the culture industry. Although Spanish is the main language there are some works that take part of the Argentinean corpus and use other languages (French, Poland, English, Yiddish mainly). In just two centuries of existence (the Argentinean Republic was created in 1810, after the independence from the Spanish Empire) this literature has built a strong tradition, which it uses to rewrite itself. Most of the intellectual generations in Argentina discussed and polemicized their antecessor and tradition. Narratives on national identity played a key role in Argentinian history alongside with innovations. Authors came back to the past to rewrite and reinterpret the master narratives. “Civilization and barbarism,” for instance, was a successful motto that Domingo F. Samiento established in 1845. In spite of the different interpretation of the terms, it was and it is a way of read Argentinian reality. When someone uses it, the motto is charged with all its history. Since the beginning, it has been not just an elite practice with a sophisticated and Eurocentric tradition but also a practice that involves a native and noncanonical set of knowledge and forms.

Introductory Works

In his prologue to Literatura Argentina y realidad política (Viñas 1964), the critic and writer David Viñas posits that “Argentine literature is the history of the national will.” In La Argentina en Pedazos (Piglia 1993), another critic and writer, Ricardo Piglia, affirms that Argentinian fiction is born “of the intention to represent the world of the enemy, of those who are different, of the Other (known as the barbarian, the gaucho, the Indian, or the immigrant). Such representation presupposes and demands fiction.” Both writers represent the modernization of Argentinian criticism in the second half of the 20th century, a criticism that employs materialist, psychoanalytic, and sociological perspectives. Along with critics like Josefina Ludmer (see Ludmer 2002) and Beatriz Sarlo (see Sarlo 1988), they have put forward hypotheses about Argentinian culture that place literature and fiction at the center of an interpretation of the national character. Each sees literature as a privileged practice for understanding societal conflicts. They read fictional production as a cross between the aesthetic and the political and literature as a discourse of strong public participation. Julio Ramos, in his analysis of Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, one of the founders of Argentinian literature, argues in Desencuentros de la modernidad en América Latina (Ramos 2001) that literature serves a strong state function in 19th-century Latin America: it constructs the arguments upon which the State is founded. He posits that the same is true of Argentinian intellectuals. These interpretations explore the place and function of intellectuals and letters in societies that live through rapid political processes and, following independence, experience an accelerated modernization. As Angel Rama argues in his classic La ciudad letrada (Rama 1996), the writing of Latin American intellectuals—and Argentinian ones in particular—links them closely to the construction of the State and the Nation. As early as the wars for independence, Argentinian intellectuals view the literature of the River Plate region not as an autonomous aesthetic discourse but rather as a practice linked to politics, an instance of struggle and encounter in public life. Because the River Plate Viceroyalty was not economically or socially important during the colonial era, cultural production is scarce. It nonetheless becomes relevant in the early 19th century, where we begin. Nouzeilles and Montaldo 2002 was the first intent in English to show the homogeneity and the debates at the interior of Argentinian culture.

Ludmer, Josefina. The Gaucho Genre: a Treatise on the Motherland. Translated by Molly Weigel. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002.
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Argues Argentinian literature begins with the “gaucho genre.” According to Ludmer, this writing arises out of a symbolic alliance between the voice of the gaucho (the creole, inhabitant of the Pampas) and the writing of well-educated and well-connected members of the social and political elite known as letrados. The letrado takes the political discourse of a faction in the struggle for power and puts it in the gaucho’s mouth.
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Nouzeilles, Gabriela, and Graciela Montaldo. The Argentina Reader: History, Culture, Politics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002.
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A reader from colonial times to the end of the 20th century. The volume includes a large number and a variegated kind of texts that explore the links between culture and politics in Argentina. Some literary texts have been translated into English for the first time.
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Piglia, Ricardo. La Argentina en pedazos. Buenos Aires: Ediciones de la Urraca, 1993.
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This book rewrites a large part of the Argentinian canon as comics. Piglia selects the works and develops a hypothesis of literature as a practice that is linked to the State. The themes of violence and conflict organize the texts. Guiding Piglia’s vision is the idea that fiction confronts the problem of representing the Other.
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Rama, Angel. The Lettered City. Edited and translated by John Charles Chasteen. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996.
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A seminal text that examines the role of letrados and intellectuals in Latin America from the colonial era to the late 20th century. Always linked to power, always allied with the power of writing, they design the exclusive place of culture. Rama studies the ways that letrados and intellectuals use writing not to integrate diverse societies but rather to exclude sectors of the population from “the lettered city.”
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Ramos, Julio. Divergent Modernities: Culture and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Latin America. Translated by John D. Blanco. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001.
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Ramos analyzes the modernizing projects of letrados in 19th-century Latin America and studies the relationship between writing and the State in Domingo F. Sarmiento, Andrés Bello, and José Martí, among others.
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Sarlo, Beatriz. Una modernidad periférica: Buenos Aires 1920–1930. Buenos Aires: Ediciones Nueva Visión, 1988.
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Sarlo’s hypothesis about modernity in early 20th-century Argentina can also be applied before and after that period: Argentinian culture modernizes rapidly but unequally, and this modernization produces a culture of mixing (of cultural traditions, discourses, practices, temporalities and languages), in which literature is one of the privileged spaces for the amalgamation of different traditions.
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Viñas, David. Literatura Argentina y realidad política. Buenos Aires: Jorge Alvarez, 1964.
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Viñas reads literature as a political practice of intellectuals linked to or confronted by power; national fictions construct projects of public participation. To Viñas, fiction is fundamental to the construction of hegemonies in Argentina.
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Writing and Politics

At the beginning of the 19th century, with the wars for independence from the Spanish empire in the background, Argentinian letrados found writing to be a means of political participation. The Spanish empire prohibited the printing press from coming to America; as a result, printed culture was slow to develop, although clandestine channels circulated revolutionary ideas. Around the struggles for independence, the learned and popular sectors of the population joined together to compose civic songs to rouse the revolutionary troops. The May Revolution (1810) and the Declaration of Independence (1816) marked the beginning of a period of the new State’s political organization. That State nonetheless became embroiled in a series of civil struggles between two parties: Unitarians (liberals in the European style) and Federalists (nationalists). A conflict thus emerged that would run throughout 19th-century Argentinian history. The protagonists were popular local leaders or caudillos (and their peasant militias, known as montoneras) versus liberal politicians (and the regular army). In 1829, Juan Manuel de Rosas, a federal caudillo and wealthy landowner from Buenos Aires, the country’s most important province, was elected its governor. Faced with the State’s political disintegration, Rosas became progressively stronger. Although only a provincial governor, he governed with the “totality of public power,” becoming increasingly authoritarian until 1852. In that year, he was overthrown by the caudillo Urquiza, who had the military and ideological support of the Unitarian party and nearly all Argentinian intellectuals. The figure of Rosas occupied 19th-century Argentina’s history and literature. During his administration, Unitarian party members, intellectuals, wealthy families, and many foreigners abandoned the country as a result of persecutions, jailings, and an increase in violence in the region. This section introduces the main intellectuals of the time and some critics who organize the cultural frame. Gutiérrez 1941, Varela 1943, Weinberg 1958, and Katra 1996 are the most important anthologies of the letrados of the period. Moreno 2008, written by a liberal politician, is a programmatic text to introduce Liberalism in Argentina. Sommer 1991 summarizes the main interpretation on foundational fictions in Latin America.

Gutiérrez, Juan María. Los poetas de la Revolución. Buenos Aires: Ediciones de la Academia Argentina de Letras, 1941.
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Gutiérrez, an intellectual, was very active in the wars for Independence. Liberty, the republic, and the nation are frequent allegorical topics of classically composed texts. These poets exalt patriotic heroes and make the nation’s history into an epic through odes, hymns, and other classical forms. This book compiles Gutiérrez’s writings about literature beginning at the time of the May Revolution.
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Katra, William H. The Argentine Generation of 1837: Echeverría, Alberdi, Sarmiento, Mitre. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1996.
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A thoroughly documented study of the participation of members of the Generation of ‘37 in culture and politics.
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Moreno, Mariano. Plan de Operaciones. Buenos Aires: Biblioteca Nacional, 2008.
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This text was the first statement of Liberalism in Argentina. Moreno proposed a republican form of Government as a criterion for the economy.
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Sommer, Doris. Foundational Fictions: The National Romances of Latin America. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991.
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According to Sommer, Latin America’s canonical fictions take the form of romances, where heterosexual passion is identified with the patriotic sentiment of founding a nation and procreating citizens for the new republics. Amalia is a fundamental text in this tradition.
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Varela, Juan Cruz. Poesías. Buenos Aires: Ediciones Estrada, 1943.
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The most important civic poet of the first Argentinian Republic. “A los valientes defensores de la libertad en la llanura de Maipú” (1818), “Triunfo de Ituzaingó” (1827), “Canto a San Martín y Balcarce,” and “El 25 de mayo de 1838” are among his most significant poems.
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Weinberg, Félix. El Salón Literario. Colección El Pasado argentino. Buenos Aires: Hachette, 1958.
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A fundamental compilation of texts by writers of the Generation of ‘37 (Marcos Sastre and Esteban Echeverría, among others). Preceded by a historical introduction that analyzes the participation of intellectuals in public life.
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Literary Practice and the Generation of ’37

Despite the repression and control of the opposition, however, a group of letrados met at Marcos Sastre’s bookstore in 1837 to found the Literary Salon. This group included Esteban Echeverría, Juan Bautista Alberdi, and Juan María Gutiérrez, who later became known as the Generation of ’37. Persecuted by the Rosas regime, they went into exile. During this long and violent period, literature was a useful tool for politicians from all factions. Much of the first Argentinian literature to frame the nation’s history as the struggle between civilization and barbarism was written in Chile, Uruguay, Bolivia, and Brazil (the most common destinations of the exiles). Sarmiento 2003 (originally published in 1845) formulated this view of the national history, the most influential work in Argentinian literature. In each of the texts cited in this section, political violence and the division of the country became axes of national interpretation. This section compiles the foundational fictions of Argentinian culture. Echeverría 1870–1874a, Echeverría 1870–1874b, Mármol 2001, Alberdi 1952 and, especially, Sarmiento 2003 are not just powerful fictions but also fundamental narratives about the new country. These texts developed the first version of Argentine identity as a struggle between civilization and barbarism and described the violent scene of a permanent fight between European culture and native forces of nature, traditions, and knowledge. Echeverría’s La Cautiva (Echeverría 1870–1874a) is a romantic poem that founded essential topics for Argentinian literature: the desert and the pampa’s landscape, the barbarism of the Indians, the authority of the State, the frontiers at the interior of the country, and the ethnic and cultural heterogeneity as a permanent fight. In Echeverría 1959, Echeverría underlined the fight at the interior of national culture organized as a violent struggle between civilization and barbarism, unitarism, and Rosas’ supporters. Sarmiento’s Facundo (Sarmiento 2003) is the master narrative focused on civilization and barbarism but is also a key text to redesign the landscape and the topics of the 19th century: the role of the State, the functions of intellectuals. Halperín Donghi, et al. 1994 discusses and contextualizes all the main topics in Sarmiento’s text, and Sorensen 1996 develops the history of Facundo in Argentinian culture. Shumway 1991 is a history of main Argentinian ideas with the canonical author’s materials.

Alberdi, Juan Bautista. Bases y puntos de partida para la organización política de la República Argentina. Buenos Aires: Ediciones Estrada, 1952.
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With Rosas’ defeat and expulsion in 1852, Unitarians returned to Argentina looking to recover the political unity that eluded them while scattered in exile. Alberdi writes Las Bases as an original text of national reconstruction; it will be a foundation of the 1853 Argentinian Constitution. Although Las Bases is a political text, Alberdi’s public figure and participation in Argentinian culture make it part of the national literary canon.
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Echeverría, Esteban. “La Cautiva.” In Obras completas de Don Esteban Echeverría. By Esteban Echeverría. Buenos Aires: C. Casaralle, imprenta y librería de Mayo, 1870–1874a.
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This long romantic poem is considered the first work of Argentinian literature. The poem is the literary founding of the Pampas, where a tragic plot unfolds: a white woman is robbed and, along with her husband and son, taken captive by the region’s indigenous inhabitants. Although the couple manages to escape, they do not survive the territory’s inclemency.
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Echeverría, Esteban. “Dogma socialista.” In Obras completas de Don Esteban Echeverría. By Esteban Echeverría. Buenos Aires: C. Casaralle, imprenta y librería de Mayo, 1870–1874b.
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Another foundational text for the political thought of the Generation of ‘37 (and ideological support for the Literary Salon and its successor, the May Association). A doctrinaire collection about liberalism, it is dedicated to “the youth of Argentina.”
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Echeverría, Esteban. El matadero (The Slaughterhouse). Edited and translated by Angel Flores. New York: Las Americas, 1959.
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El matadero is a short story or novella written between 1838 and 1840 but published posthumously in 1871. In Buenos Aires under Rosas, an ignorant mob subdues, tortures, and kills a young Unitarian from the city’s elite class. The conflict is presented as the struggle between civilization and barbarism. This work has been rewritten at various times in the history of Argentinian literature.
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Halperín Donghi, Tulio, Iván Jaksic, Gwen Kirkpatrick, and Francine Masiello, eds. Sarmiento: Author of a Nation. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994.
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A fundamental compilation of readings of Sarmiento’s work. Contributors include: Tulio Halperín Donghi, Sylvia Molloy, David Viñas, Francine Masiello, and Beatriz Sarlo.
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Mármol, José. Amalia (English). Translated by Helen R. Lane; edited by Doris Sommer. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001.
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The novel relates a young Unitarian’s persecution by the Mazorca, Rosas’ secret police. A story of romantic love and a classic of 19th-century Argentinian fiction, it takes places against the backdrop of the era’s political violence.
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Sarmiento, Domingo Faustino. Facundo: Civilization and Barbarism; The First Complete English Translation. Translated from the Spanish by Kathleen Ross. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003.
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Blends biography of the Argentinian caudillo Facundo Quiroga with a sociological interpretation of the country, a pamphlet against the Rosas dictatorship, and Sarmiento’s political plan. Published as a serial during its author’s exile in Chile. Argentinian history, according to Sarmiento, is the struggle between civilization and barbarism, European culture versus local knowledge and practices. European culture must prevail in order to create a modern country. Introduction by Roberto González Echevarría.
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Shumway, Nicolas. The Invention of Argentina. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991.
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Through an analysis of canonical authors, Shumway explores what he considers the failure of 19th-century intellectuals to create a unifying framework for the country. He also looks at the ways that the political will of the letrados designs the—many times imaginary—contents of the nation.
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Sorensen, Diana. Facundo and the Construction of Argentine Culture. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996.
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A book that analyzes not only Facundo but also readings of it since its publication. An excellent demonstration of historical and political debates surrounding culture and Argentina.
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The Generation of ’80

The country’s institutions are organized after Rosas’ fall in 1852. The parties manage to contain their internal struggles and thwart the caudillos; nonetheless, a new enemy enters the creole consciousness: the nation’s indigenous inhabitants. They had been kept to the south of Buenos Aires province through “peace treaties” with creole governments, including that of Rosas. But in 1879 General Julio Argentino Roca leads the “Desert Campaign,” a military crusade to exterminate the indigenous population. The few survivors are taken to different urban centers. Roca wins the 1880 presidential election. The period of the Generation of ’80 begins, characterized by economic development, political corruption, urban modernization, and massive European immigration. The works cited in this section show the fictional representations of those conflicts and how the critics interpreted them. Lucio V. Mansilla, Eugenio Cambaceres, Julián Martel, and Eduardo Holmberg constituted an elite group united by class, culture, and politics ties. Their texts (see Mansilla 1905, Cambaceres 1967, Martel 1946, and Holmberg 1957) spoke a common language of interest and values focused on how to deal with the European tradition and local situations at the same time. All of them were familiar with French, British, and German literatures and wanted to found a modern and autonomous national literature but explored the native scene and the contemporary society. Cané 2000 is the cultural biography of those authors, focused on their intellectual training and class links. López 1992 described the radical transformation of Buenos Aires city from small town to a modern city. Juana Manuela Gorriti was a woman writer, a rebel character who had to found her own tradition; addressed to women but written for a broader audience, Gorriti 1977 introduced new issues and, especially, a new voice in a field dominated by male discourses. José María Ramos Mejía was an academic, historian hygienist, and politician interested in searching for connections between history and psychology (see Ramos Mejía 1994); he was a very authoritative voice in his time.

Cambaceres, Eugenio. En la sangre. Buenos Aires: Editorial Universitaria de Buenos Aires, 1967.
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An urban novel from an elite writer featuring a new enemy: immigrants. Following realist conventions, the novel narrates the history of the threat of immigration to Argentinian society.
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Cané, Miguel. Juvenilia. Buenos Aires: Ediciones de la Biblioteca Nacional, 2000.
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A story of youth, memories of adolescence. The book narrates a generational experience, that of the Generation of ’80 and the ways the Argentinian upper classes shape the nation and State.
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Gorriti, Juana Manuela. Cocina ecléctica. Buenos Aires: Librería Sarmiento, 1977.
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In the late 19th century, when it was very difficult for a woman to be a writer, Gorriti produces a literature that blends recipes, national idiosyncrasy, and feminine advices. She also writes fiction and essays on the rights of women.
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Holmberg, Eduardo. Cuentos fantásticos. Buenos Aires: Hachette, 1957.
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The volume collects the stories of this scientist and writer. Holmberg is considered the first writer of police stories and science fiction in Argentina. His writing combines the era’s knowledge of criminology, sociology, and the scientific imagination.
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López, Lucio Vicente. La gran aldea. Buenos Aires: Centro Editor de América Latina, 1992.
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This novel is a classic of how the Argentinian elite saw the changes in Buenos Aires during the turn of the century.
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Mansilla, Lucio V. Una excursión a los indios ranqueles. 2 vols. Buenos Aires: Imprenta de La Nación, Biblioteca de “La Nación,” 1905.
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The Argentinian newspaper La Tribuna publishes the texts that make up this book in 1870. Mansilla travels to the territory of the Ranquel Indians during Sarmiento’s presidency to forge a peace treaty. A cultured traveler and member of the elite class, Mansilla describes his experience like an anthropological voyage toward an Otherness that must be conquered culturally. This book locates the indigenous as a political problem in elite discourse.
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Martel, Julián. La Bolsa. Buenos Aires: Ediciones Estrada, 1946.
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Martel is the pseudonym of José Miró (b. 1867–d. 1896). In the same line as Cambaceres, this novel fictionalizes the threat that foreign economic speculation poses to Argentinian society. Martel shows the conflicts of contemporary Buenos Aires, a city subject to economic speculation, and blames foreigners for the country’s ills.
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Ramos Mejía, José María. Las multitudes argentinas. Buenos Aires: Secretaría de Cultura de la Nación/Marymar, 1994.
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The book is a history of Argentina from Colonial times to present (1898, first edition). The crowd played a central role in the development of national identity.
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The Critics

Between the extensive materials focused on Generation of ’80, this subsection introduces seminal essays and authors that developed extensive hypothesis on the period and its writers, intellectuals and cultural field. Viñas 1982, Ludmer 2004, Groussac 1924, and Terán 2000 were the main critical texts to frame the cultural production of the period.

Groussac, Paul. Crítica literaria. Buenos Aires: J. Menéndez e hijo, 1924.
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The book brings together a lot of critics’ essays on canonical European authors and contemporary Argentinians.
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Ludmer, Josefina. The Corpus Delicti: A Manual of Argentine Fictions. Translated by Glen S. Close. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2004.
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Although a book about literature and crime, through the figure of Juan Moreira (1878) and his future derivations, Ludmer explores the “World of ’80,” the formation of the modern creole elite, the uses of literature, and violence and its continuations in Argentinian literature.
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Terán, Oscar. Vida intelectual en el Buenos Aires de fin-de-siglo (1880–1910). Derivas de la cultura científica. Buenos Aires: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2000.
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Terán studied the birth of new disciplines in turn of the century Argentina: psychiatry, criminology, sociology, social psychology. He showed that intellectuals, academics, and writers shared interests in scientific explanation of all kind of behaviors.
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Viñas, David. Indios, Ejército y Frontera. Mexico City: Siglo XXI Editores, 1982.
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An excellent reader that compiles literary and political texts on the necessity of exterminating the indigenous population, taking their land, and eliminating the “internal frontiers” of the natives’ spaces within the national territory. In presenting fragments from politicians, writers, intellectuals, and scientists, Viñas develops a critical history of the ideological justifications for extermination.
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Gaucho Literature and Popular Forms

It is a unique characteristic of Argentinian literature that lettered cultural production and circulation occurs from an early date alongside a type of popular text that can be categorized as gaucho literature. Although generally poetry, by the end of the 19th century the genre also includes narrative texts and plays. The first gaucho poems, so named for a style that reproduces the orality of the “gauchos,” the workers of the Argentinian countryside are eminently political. The most important text of the genre is Hernández 1964. Composed of two parts, “La Ida” (1872) and “La vuelta” (1879), the first-person poem Martín Fierro relates the story of a gaucho persecuted by the state justice system who must kill and go into exile among the indigenous after his abuse by authorities (who include the police, the local authorities, and the army). Participation in national politics is less important than the assertion of claims by traditionally marginalized sectors of the population (those excluded from politics, law, and the market). The following works are the canonical texts of the genre. Hidalgo 1969 was the first political text in gauchesque language by a very well known author in his time; all of Hidalgo’s texts were related to specific and concrete political events and the audiences recognized characters and situations. Hilario Ascasubi organized a hard opposition to Rosas’ government in Ascasubi 1945. At the end of 19th century, Gutiérrez 1961 and Mocho 1943 took the gauchesque genre as literary tradition and minimize the political intervention of literature; these works used more literary and novelesque techniques but most of the plot were based in real events. William Henry Hudson wrote in England, in English, but some texts (see Hudson 1918) focused on his past in Argentina; he was read by Argentinian authors as part of the gauchesque genre.

Ascasubi, Hilario. Paulino Lucero. Buenos Aires: Estrada, 1945.
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Another important name of the genre is Hilario Ascasubi, who composed couplets in the voice of an anti-Rosas gaucho in Paulino Lucero (1846). Like Hidalgo’s gauchos, Paulino Lucero is a fighter who confronts power.
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Fray Mocho. Viaje al país de los matreros. Buenos Aires: Ediciones Estrada, 1943.
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Pseudonym of José Sixto Álvarez. He was journalist and writer; one of the first costumbrista in Argentina. He was the founder of Caras y Caretas, the most important magazine in the fin-de-siècle.
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Gutiérrez, Eduardo. Juan Moreira. Buenos Aires: Editorial Universitaria de Buenos Aires, 1961.
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The genre changes radically in the late 19th century. Juan Moreira (1878), by Eduardo Gutiérrez, narrates the story of a gaucho persecuted by justice who becomes a popular hero when he defends his rights against a legal system that pursues him relentlessly. Based on a real gaucho, Gutiérrez’s saga blends traditional elements of the gaucho genre with the melodramatic elements of a serial.
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Hernández, José. Martín Fierro: El gaucho Martín Fierro; La vuelta de Martín Fierro. Edited by Ángel J. Battistessa. Buenos Aires: Peuser, 1964.
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The gaucho genre, and especially Martín Fierro, reveals two opposing legal systems: the law of the national State and the common law of the Pampas. Martín Fierro relates the gaucho’s disappearance as a result of the new political project. José Hernández chooses a popular genre to describe these transformations.
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Hidalgo, Bartolomé. Cielitos y Diálogos patrióticos. Montevideo, Uruguay: Universidad de la República, 1969.
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Although some are anonymous, the first gaucho texts widely disseminated in the Argentinian countryside are those of the Uruguayan-born Hidalgo, one of the most popular authors of the 1810s and 1820s. The texts are “Cielitos y Diálogos patrióticos,” compositions in verse that take the form of popular dance songs (cielitos) or improvised musical recitations between two voices with clear allusions to local politics known as payadas (diálogos).
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Hudson, W. H. Far Away and Long Ago: A History of My Early Life. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1918.
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Born in Argentina to American parents, Hudson considers England “his” homeland and writes various books in English. Far Away and Long Ago is an autobiography where he relates his life in Argentina. Argentinian writers—Borges among them—consider Hudson part of the gaucho tradition and the national literature.
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Reflections on Gaucho

When immigrants arrived to Argentina in the turn of 19th century, the gaucho disappeared and was replaced by the rural worker. Argentina changed its ethnic, linguistic, cultural, and economic structure in just a few years. Most of Argentinian intellectuals felt threatened with the new face of the country and founded a strong “new tradition” whose main feature was the appeal to gauchesque genre. In 1910, with the celebrations of the first Centennial of the Revolution and Independence, many intellectuals wrote new versions of Argentinian literary tradition based on gauchesque works. They read them as Argentinian canon. Leopoldo Lugones, the poet of national identity, delivered a series of lectures on Martín Fierro; see Lugones 1916. Ricardo Rojas, a writer and academic, was the founder of Argentinian literature as discipline; he created the chair at University of Buenos Aires, the Argentinian Literature Institute, and wrote Rojas 1917–1922, the first Argentinian literary history. Rojas argued that gauchesque genre was the basis of Argentinian culture, nationality and identity. In the 1960s, Angel Rama politicized the criticism on gauchesque genre and opened a debate about popular culture (see Rama 1976). Two decades later, Prieto 1988 interpreted the genre inside a wide tradition that he called “criollismo.” This tradition had its best expression in Caras y Caretas, a very popular magazine published at the turn of the century (see Ruffinelli 1968). Finally, Masiello 1992 took a gender perspective on popular culture.

Lugones, Leopoldo. El Payador. Buenos Aires: Otero, 1916.
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A key book in the construction of the national identity. Lugones interpreted gauchesque literature as cultural patrimony of the country; he described Martin Fierro as the epic poem of Argentinians, the foundational text of their nationality.
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Masiello, Francine. Between Civilization and Barbarism: Women, Nation, and Literary Culture in Modern Argentina. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1992.
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This book examines the role of women in 19th-century Argentinian culture. Absent from institutional spaces, women find alternative ones.
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Prieto, Adolfo. El discurso criollista en la formación de la Argentina Moderna. Buenos Aires: Editorial Sudamericana, 1988.
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According to Prieto, the turn of the century brings increased interest in creole subjects, as a result of immigration, the diffusion of writing, and the organization of national traditions through massive literacy. Serials, poems, songs, biographies, and folkloric meetings cause the fashion for gaucho subjects to spread through popular and lettered culture.
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Rama, Angel. Los gauchipolíticos rioplatenses. Literatura y Sociedad. Buenos Aires: Calicanto, 1976.
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A study of the literary and social functions of gaucho poetry in the River Plate region.
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Rojas, Ricardo. Historia de la Literatura Argentina. 4 vols. Buenos Aires: Impr. de Coni Hermanos, 1917–1922.
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Lavish celebrations mark the 1910 Centennial of Argentinian Independence. Ricardo Rojas publishes his monumental Historia de la Literatura Argentina in the years that follow. He begins with the volume titled “Los Gauchescos,” in which he asserts that gaucho literature is the cornerstone of Argentinian nationality and Martín Fierro the epic poem of Argentinians.
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Ruffinelli, Jorge, ed. La revista Caras y Caretas. Buenos Aires: Galerna, 1968.
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Anthology of the most important magazine in the turn of the century (1898–1941).
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The Centennial and Modernization

With the national State organized, the 20th century brings rapid political and cultural modernization. Leopoldo Lugones writes his Odas seculares in 1910 for the Centennial of the May Revolution, an event that is celebrated with a grand display of international guests and sumptuous parties. At that point and counting only the city of Buenos Aires, however, more than half of the population had been born abroad. Social mobility, increasing literacy, and the appearance of a cultural industry combine to bring literature to increasingly broad sectors of Argentinian society. These sectors not only consume literature but also begin to participate actively in the literary field. As a result, changes sweep the Argentinian literary and cultural fields by the end of the 1910s. A new state policy of obligatory education contributes to this change: to “nationalize” immigrants, elites launch a state educational plan that raises literacy rates. The literature field started a process of professionalization during the first decade of the 20th century; Revista Nosotros became the center of the new writings and most of the famous writers were its contributors. Lugones was the “poet of the motherland” and he devoted Lugones 1923 to celebrating the greatness of the country. In the contexts of new writings, Ingenieros 1913 opened the space of social sciences as a discourse scientific and political at the same time. Some writers (see Gálvez 1922) created realistic fictions to explain some of the scientific theory of the moment; others (see Wast 1929) mixed social interpretations with melodramatic plots. There was also a parodic narrative of identity, which was developed in Cancela 1922 and Payró 1920. Finally, minorities such as Jewish people and women were represented in Gerchunoff 1959 and Storni 1999.

Cancela, Arturo. Tres relatos porteños. Buenos Aires: Gleizer, 1922.
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A writer and journalist who focuses on local customs in the style known as costumbrismo and ironizes aspects of Argentinian culture: Europeanism, authoritarianism, identity, and knowledge. His stories make light of the aspirations of the learned middle class in particular.
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Gálvez, Manuel. Nacha Regules. Translated by Leo Ongley. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1922.
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With a writing style that resurrects 19th-century realism, Gálvez introduces the new urban themes of modernization. Critical of modernity, he explores prostitution, the loss of spiritual values, the new materialism, and violence, all from a conservative perspective.
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Gerchunoff, Alberto. The Jewish Gauchos of the Pampas. Translated by Prudencio de Pereda. London and New York: Abelard-Schulman, 1959.
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In the Centennial year, this Jewish immigrant writes a classic that blends Jewish traditions with those of the new nation in a harmonious utopian vision of an immigratory country. Quickly translated into Yiddish, the book becomes a paradigm of the homogenizing ideas of the Argentinian state.
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Ingenieros, José. El hombre mediocre: Ensayo de piscología y moral. Buenos Aires: Renacimiento, 1913.
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A criminologist, essayist, and sociologist, Ingenieros introduces a writing style for the social sciences but that also seeks broader dissemination at the end of the 19th century. The book analyzes the danger that mass society poses to spiritual values.
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Lugones, Leopoldo. Odas seculares. Buenos Aires: Editorial Babel, 1923.
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In this book, and especially in the “Oda a los ganados y las mieses,” Lugones pays tribute to Argentina’s grandiose past and even more grandiose future, and becomes the national poet of the elite.
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Payró, Roberto. El casamiento de Laucha. Buenos Aires: Ediciones Mínimas, 1920.
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Journalist and writer, Payró builds his literature as a critic of middle class culture and the desires of social mobility.
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Storni, Alfonsina. Poesía. Vol. 1 of Obras. Edited by Delfina Muschietti. Buenos Aires: Losada, 1999.
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Alfonsina Storni is the most significant poet of the beginning of the century. A teacher and journalist, her poems introduce a controversial identity: the woman who simultaneously rebels against and obeys the rules of a society that does not acknowledge her. With a transgressive voice, Storni attacks the sexual and political limits imposed on women.
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Ulla, Noemí, ed. Revista Nosotros. Buenos Aires: Galerna, 1969.
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Anthology of the most important journals in the early 20th century Argentina (1907–1943).
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Wast, Hugo. Peach Blossom. Translated by Herman Hespelt and Miriam Hespelt. London and New York: Longmans, Green, 1929.
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A very popular novelist from the early 20th century. He writes novels with Christian morals that denounce modern corruption.
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The Avant-Garde

The increase in readers leads to a proportional increase in the number of newspapers and magazines. In 1912, seeking to modernize their corrupt and conservative image, elites pass the Sáenz Peña electoral law, making voting universal, obligatory, and secret for males. Its main impact, however, is symbolic: the creation of a citizenship with broader rights to participation and, thanks to economic development and aspirations of social ascension. These changes radically modernize Argentinian society. The avant-garde scene had in Argentina two aspects: an aesthetic movement created around the magazine Martín Fierro; and a political group of writers who tried to link aesthetics and ideology (known as the “Boedo Group”). The appearance of writers with a new cultural formation transforms the literary field in particular. The most significant of these are Jorge Luis Borges and Roberto Arlt. Horacio Quiroga was a realistic narrator who did not adhere to the avant-garde but was a prestigious and popular author who first introduced new narrative techniques in Quiroga 1918. Ricardo Güiraldes wrote a new classic text, Guiraldes 1926, a bildungsroman in gauchesque terms, a new rescue of patriotic and rural values against the development of the city of Buenos Aires and the urban culture. Borges, Olivero Girondo, and Raúl González Tuñón, throughout different avant-garde aesthetics, created “the poetry of the city”; Buenos Aires was the main setting for poems in Girondo 1999 and González Tuñón 1930. Norah Lange was the sole woman in the avant-garde period; her writings, collected in Lange 1942, were focused on intimacy and the exploration of subjectivity. Leoónidas Barletta and Elías Castelnouvo introduced the social realism in Argentina; Barletta 1933 and Castelnuovo 1959 explore not the literary avant-garde but the political one. Probably the strangest writing of the period was Macedonio Fernández’s. He developed a narrative in which there are no characters or plot but instead reflections on subjectivity and the act of writing; see Fernández 2010 for his antirealist novel. During the first decades of the 20th century the most popular cultural practice were dramas, comedies, and films. Although the film industry was not healthy, the theatrical activity reached high standards and acceptance. Armando Discépolo was the great author of most of the canonical plays of the period; see Discépolo 1987–1996 for a collection.

Barletta, Leónidas. Royal Circo. Buenos Aires: Tor, 1933.
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A member of the “Florida” group of writers (so named for the elegant Buenos Aires street where elite writers could be found), Barletta’s work is characterized by a realist narrative. In this episodic novel, he uses the characters of a circus to analyze different types of marginality. Barletta also founds the People’s Theater.
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Castelnuovo, Elías. Larvas. Buenos Aires: Imprenta Claridad, 1959.
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Castelnuovo represents the Boedo group of writers; Larvas is one of his realist texts. The narrative takes place in the world of the oppressed and exploited. Literary forms are less important than the ideological declarations of a self-proclaimed “leftist” literature.
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Discépolo, Armando. Obra dramática. 3 vols. Edited by Osvaldo Pellettieri. Buenos Aires: Editorial Universitaria de Buenos Aires, 1987–1996.
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Discépolo is central to the intense theater movement of the early 20th century. Derived from the circus, gaucho theater blends the “lower genres” popular at the time (one-act comic plays called sainetes or entremeses and operettas called zarzuelas) and produces a creole grotesque. Discépolo’s work represents the world of immigration, costumbrismo of the urban lower classes.
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Fernández, Macedonio. The Museum of Eterna’s Novel: The First Good Novel. Translated by Margaret Schwartz. Rochester, NY: Open Letter, 2010.
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Macedonio Fernández (b. 1874–d. 1952) is one of the most influential Argentinian writers; he first influences the young writers of the Martín Fierro-era avant-garde and then the young writers of the 1960s when part of his work is published posthumously. His enigmatic work challenges literary conventions around authorship, subjectivity, genre, and characters. The totally antirealist novel Museo de la novela de la eterna is composed of prologues.
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Girondo, Oliverio. Obra completa. Edited by Raúl Antelo. Spain: Galaxia Gutenberg, 1999.
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This activist of the Buenos Aires avant-garde engages in the most extreme formal and linguistic experimentation in Argentinian poetry. Featuring fragmentary writing, a new photographic vision, the liberation of language considered “poetic,” and classic themes of modernist poetry, Girondo’s poetry creates a new and deterritorialized voice.
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González Tuñón, Raúl. La calle del agujero en la media. Buenos Aires: M. Gleizer, 1930.
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A poet, González Tuñón participates in the aesthetic renovation of the early 20th century. His poetry features popular rhythms and focuses primarily on the urban world of the lowest sectors of society: the port, prostitution, the streets of the city center, and life in the neighborhoods. Celebratory in tone, his work makes poetry the property of the poorest immigrants.
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Guiraldes, Ricardo. Don Segundo Sombra. Buenos Aires: Proa, 1926.
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The great scholarly classic of 20th-century Argentina. A bildungsroman of a small-town boy without a family who joins up with a gaucho and learns the values of the land. Although he revisits gaucho themes, Guiraldes writes a text of national and individual affirmation against the immigratory and politicized society of the 1920s.
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Lange, Norah. Cuadernos de infancia. Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 1942.
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A poet, Lange also produces a number of intimate writings, which she conceives of as a literary genre and uses to develop a writing style that is critical of representation.
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Quiroga, Horacio. Cuentos de amor, de locura y de muerte. Buenos Aires: Sociedad Cooperativa Editorial Limitada, 1918.
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Born in Uruguay, Quiroga’s literary career unfolds in Argentina, between Buenos Aires and the province of Misiones. A critic of modernity, he writes urban short stories but is better known for his “Jungle Tales,” fictionalizations of the margins and social plunder of modernization. Some of his short stories are fables that have become classic children’s literature.
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Reflections on the Avant-Garde in Argentina

There is extensive critical scholarship on the Argentinian avant-garde movement. This subsection provides most of the texts that analyze how avant-gardist those writers were. The works cited also question the uniformity of the literary field and introduce the massive culture as a key category to understand the avant-garde process in Argentina. The avant-garde magazine Martín Fierro was published in Buenos Aires between 1924 and 1927, for a total of forty-five issues (see Salas 1995). Its contributors include Evar Méndez (its editor), Jorge Luis Borges, Oliverio Girondo, Eduardo González Lanuza, Pablo Rojas Paz, and Raúl Prebisch. All of the entries in this section explore the avant-gardist movement that developed in Argentina. Sarlo 1985 focuses on popular culture and its links with the avant-garde context. Montaldo 2006 questions the cultural context of the main texts and authors and is interested in the dialogue between the different actors and works. Schwartz 2002 presents a comparative view between different avant-garde movements in Latin America. Rosenberg 2006 tries to understand Rio de la Plata’s avant-garde in the global context.

Montaldo, Graciela, ed. Yrigoyen entre Borges y Arlt. Buenos Aires: Paradiso, 2006.
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A compilation of critical essays on early 20th-century literature in Argentina. It pays special attention to the polemic of the 1920s between social literature (known as “Boedo” literature for the street that housed the publisher of this group of writers) and a European-style avant-garde (“Florida” literature for the elegant Buenos Aires street where elite writers could be found, including the contributors to Martín Fierro magazine).
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Salas, Horacio, ed. Revista Martín Fierro: 1924–1927. Buenos Aires: Fondo Nacional de las Artes, 1995.
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Aims to shatter academicism and traditional criticism, publishing a manifesto of the avant-garde, introducing notes on new art, and featuring satirical columns and graphic design new for the era. Curiously, although it is considered an avant-garde magazine, Martín Fierro magazine takes the name of the new classic of gaucho literature.
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Rosenberg, Fernando J. The Avant-Garde and Geopolitics in Latin America. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006.
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A recent essay about the Latin American avant-garde that focuses on the River Plate region. Rosenberg argues that, rather than an incomplete form of the European version, the Latin American avant-garde should be seen as an active form of interrelation in a world that begins to be global in the early 20th century.
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Sarlo, Beatriz. El imperio de los sentimientos: Narraciones de circulación periódica en la Argentina (1917–1927). Buenos Aires: Catálogos, 1985.
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A study of the development of narrative for a popular audience alongside traditional and avant-garde literature in early 20th-century Argentina. According to Sarlo, this popular narrative plays a fundamental role in the creation of a middle-class imaginary.
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Schwartz, Jorge. Vanguardias latinoamericanas: Textos programáticos y críticos. Buenos Aires: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2002.
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A detailed compilation of texts by the main authors or groups of the Latin American avant-garde and critical reflections.
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Jorge Luis Borges

Borges spent seven years in Europe between 1914 and 1921, where he absorbed the avant-garde experience. Upon returning to Buenos Aires, however, he began a literary program to reestablish Argentinian literature. He became a whirlwind of literary activity, contributing to the most important avant-garde magazines, Martín Fierro and Proa, and publishing six books during the 1920s: the books of poems Fervor de Buenos Aires (1923), Luna de enfrente (1925), and Cuaderno San Martín (1929) and the essays Inquisiciones (1925), El tamaño de mi esperanza (1926), and El idioma de los argentinos (1929). Sarlo 1993 summarizes this program in Borges, un escritor en las orillas by saying that Borges squarely chose urban literature, focusing on the suburbs and margins of Buenos Aires and a mixture of varied cultural traditions (among the most significant are classical literary tradition, modern European tradition, and the national gaucho tradition). In 1979, Borges won the Cervantes Prize, the most prestigious Spanish-language literary award. This section comments on the works in which Borges has built and discussed his aesthetical project. This section introduces Borges’s works and main editions (see Borges 1975, Borges 1978, Borges 2009, Borges 1999, Borges 1926, and Borges 1963 for a wide range of his works) and his critics. From a poststructuralist approach in Molloy 1994 to a institutional analysis in Louis 1997, criticism on Borges is opened to a wide variety of theories. Sarlo 1993 focuses on sociological readings of Borges; Balderston 1993 investigates the author’s intertextuality and the relationship with reality; and Pauls and Helft 2000 reads Borges as a popular author.

Balderston, Daniel. Out of Context: Historical Reference and the Representation of Reality in Borges. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993.
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The book is a painstaking analysis of Borges’s literary genealogies, especially the works in the English tradition.
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Borges, Jorge Luis. El tamaño de mi esperanza. Buenos Aires: Proa, 1926.
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Borges develops his aesthetic program in this early book of essays.
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Borges, Jorge Luis. Evaristo Carriego. Buenos Aires: Emecé Editores, 1963.
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This book is a biography of the Argentinian poet Evaristo Carriego, through whose poetry Borges explores the aesthetic possibilities of the suburbs. It is also an essay about Buenos Aires and Argentinian culture.
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Borges, Jorge Luis. Obras Completas. Edited by Carlos V. Frías. Buenos Aires: Emecé Editores, 1975.
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Borges begins to edit and rewrite his texts in the 1930s. This volume contains a great number of his works, although some books are missing (Inquisiciones, El tamaño de mi esperanza, and El idioma de los argentinos were not included). The books of poems and essays have been corrected and also feature texts that were not included in the original or subsequent editions (themselves already corrected and added to).
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Borges, Jorge Luis. The Aleph and Other Stories, 1933–1969, Together with Commentaries and an Autobiographical Essay. Edited and translated by Norman Thomas di Giovanni. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1978.
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El Aleph is a collection of short stories that feature the themes of classic Borges: reality, time, perception and representation, and the use of genres (fantasy, police writing).
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Borges, Jorge Luis. Selected Poems. London: Penguin, 1999.
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“The Streets” (Fervor de Buenos Aires/), “General Quiroga Rides to His Death in a Carriage” (Luna de enfrente/), “The Mythical Founding of Buenos Aires” (Cuaderno San Martín/). These poems reveal Borges’s initial poetic program: to give the city of Buenos Aires, as an allegory for the nation, a creole mythology.
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Borges, Jorge Luis. Obras Completas: Edición crítica. Edited by Rolando Costa Picazo and Irma Zangara. 3 vols. Buenos Aires: Emecé Editores, 2009.
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Includes the texts that Borges omitted from the first Complete Works as well as his latest books.
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Louis, Annick. Jorge Luis Borges: Oeuvre et manoeuvres. Paris: L’Harmattan, 1997.
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An excellent essay about Borges’s operations on his own work. Louis argues that it is fundamental to understand that Borges constructed his work through not only writing but also reordering, rewriting, and correcting. The study covers texts published in books as well as magazines, newspapers, and cultural supplements, reading them all together.
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Molloy, Sylvia. Signs of Borges. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994.
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Molloy engages in excellent and precise formal analyses of Borges’s most important works.
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Pauls, Alan, and Nicolás Helft. El factor Borges. Buenos Aires: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2000.
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According to Pauls, Borges’s literature is erudite but also features elements of the new mass media and popular writing styles. Strong arguments that Borges writes and translates for both a specialized readership and a general audience.
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Sarlo, Beatriz. Jorge Luis Borges: A Writer on the Edge. London and New York: Verso, 1993.
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This book explores intelligent and well-documented hypotheses about Borges’s cultural education, his relationship to Argentinian tradition, and his links to cultures in other languages. Borges is the product of a “culture of mixtures” and finds edges (the borders of the city, of languages, of cultures) to be the most aesthetically productive spaces.
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Roberto Arlt

Although the novels and theater of Roberto Arlt are well known in his era, it is his participation in the new mass journalism of the twenties that make him a successful writer. In the daily newspapers Crítica and El Mundo he publishes his “Buenos Aires etchings,” urban chronicles that discuss the new, the marginal, and the conflicted and analyze cohabitation in the modern and multicultural city. Arlt’s major novels, Mad Toy (Arlt 2002) and Seven Madmen (Arlt 1984), created the fictional topics of modern urban lower and middle classes in Buenos Aires. They seemed to be realistic novels, but Arlt mixed the realistic view with the imaginary and fantasies of the bourgeois dreams of the immigration society: the labor world but the will of social promotion, the new interpersonal relationships but the trap of the marriage, the social mobility but the frustration of the young people, the promises of democracy but the failure of the real politics. In his journalistic articles (see Arlt 2000) Arlt focused on little stories of common people or on his personal view of contemporary events. Sarlo 2008 interpreted the dreams and nightmares of Arlt’s fictions in the cultural context of Argentinian immigrant and lower classes imaginary. Saítta 1998 inserted Arlt’s discourse in the literary and journalistic context of his days.

Arlt, Roberto. Seven Madmen. Translated by Naomi Lindstrom. Boston: D. R. Godine, 1984.
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Written in 1930, the book is part of a series that includes Los lanzallamas (1933). Both books explore the same conflicts as El juguete rabioso but do so with an aesthetic sophistication that gives depth to the earlier work’s realist intentions. Characters outside of societal norms experience a world of conspiracy and conflicts.
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Arlt, Roberto. Aguafuertes porteñas. Buenos Aires: Losada, 2000.
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The book brings together some of the articles written by Arlt for newspapers. Arlt described the life in the city of Buenos Aires and its main characters.
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Arlt, Roberto. Mad Toy. Translated by Michele McKay Aynesworth. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002.
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Published in 1926, the novel is a bildungsroman in four episodes in which the protagonist, Silvio Astier, a poor young man with aesthetic and scientific aspirations, attempts to negotiate his place in a society that rejects him for his poverty. Silvio becomes a critic of society and avenges its weakest sectors through humiliation and betrayal rather than social action or revolution.
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Saítta, Sylvia. Regueros de tinta: El diario “Crítica” en la década del 1920. Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 1998.
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An analysis of the different eras of the daily newspaper Crítica (1913–1962), run by Natalio Botana, and the ways it changes not only journalism but also Argentinian culture at the beginning of the century.
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Sarlo, Beatriz. The Technical Imagination: Argentine Culture’s Modern Dreams. Translated by Xavier Callahan. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008.
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Sarlo studies modern Argentinian literature’s tendency to experiment with the technical imagination (radio, film, and television) and also explores the dissemination of knowledge among newly literate sectors of the population.
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Argentina in the World Culture

Following the intense experimentation of the early part of the century, Argentinian culture suffers its first moment of repression and censorship following the 1930 military coup led by General Uriburu that topples the democratic government. The literary world returns to traditional values. New figures emerge who are committed to a classical cultural vision characterized by modern, European values that distance themselves from the mass and popular cultures of the prior years. Victoria Ocampo, a member of the political and economic elite, founds Sur magazine in 1931. See King 1986 for a detailed study focused on Sur magazine. The most sophisticated Argentinian intellectuals contribute to it; Mallea 1983 and Ocampo 1959 represent the magazine’s aesthetics. Ocampo invites foreign writers and artists, founds a prestigious publishing house, and develops a rigorous politics of translation that follows modern European and American canons. This section also includes a great anthology of her works (see Ocampo 1999 and Ocampo 1977), a kind of intellectual diary of her function in the literary field, as well as Bioy Casares and Borges’s collaborative writing (see Borges and Bioy Casares 1981) as further examples of the Sur group. Bioy Casares 2003 represented the sophisticated search of new ways to interpret science fiction and reshape the Sur’s aesthetic against realism.

Bioy Casares, Adolfo. The Invention of Morel. Translated by Ruth L. C. Simms. New York: New York Review, 2003.
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A fantasy novel that examines the relationship between reality and fiction. The story of a solitary character who builds a scientific machine to insert himself into the lives of others. Alain Resnais made it into a film titled Last Year at Marienbad. In 1979, he won the Cervantes Prize.
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Borges, Jorge Luis, and Adolfo Bioy Casares. Six Problems for Don Isidro Parodi. Translated by Norman Thomas di Giovanni. New York: Dutton, 1981.
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Borges and Bioy Casares share a long and productive intellectual friendship, writing books together using the figure of a fictitious author, Honorio Bustos Domeq. This book collects police stories posed and solved by the detained detective Isidro Parodi. The stories parody not only the genre but also Argentinian characters, speech, and customs.
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King, John. Sur: A Study of the Argentine Literary Journal and Its Role in the Development of a Culture, 1931–1970. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1986.
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A complete study of the magazine, its founder, and the intellectuals that surround it: Jorge Luis Borges, Eduardo Mallea, José Bianco, Adolfo Bioy Casares, and Silvina Ocampo, among many others.
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Mallea, Eduardo. History of an Argentine Passion. Translated by Myron Lichtblau. Pittsburgh, PA: Latin American Literary Review Press, 1983.
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Mallea, a member of the Sur magazine group, was important in the 1940s and 1950s for his introspective and aesthetical novels. This book, an essay on Argentinian identity, promotes a return to spiritualism.
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Ocampo, Silvina. La furia y otros cuentos. Buenos Aires: Sur, 1959.
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These stories, in the style of fantasy literature, explore the boundaries between reality and fiction. They incorporate complex and problematic psychologies as well as the strangeness of the feminine world and the world of children. Ocampo published the celebrated Antología de la literatura fantástica (The Book of Fantasy, 1940) with Borges and Bioy Casares. All three writers explored the genre during the 1930s and 1940s.
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Ocampo, Victoria. Testimonios. Buenos Aires: Sur, 1977.
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As a member of Argentinian elite and as a writer Ocampo wrote a series of ten “testimonies” that stated her personal view of authors, historical and cultural events, and her impressions of cultural contemporary life.
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Ocampo, Victoria. VO: Writer, Feminist, Woman of the World. Translated and edited by Patricia Owen Steiner. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1999.
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As a cultural manager, Victoria Ocampo is the most significant figure of the 1930s and 1940s in Argentina. In addition to promoting authors, books, translations, and aesthetic values through her magazine, she writes essays, an autobiography in several volumes, and volumes of testimonies. In them she narrates her relationship to culture, her editorial undertakings, and her relationships with writers and artists.
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Intellectuals and the National and Popular Scene

In 1945, General Juan Domingo Perón assumes power, marking the beginning of one of the most significant populist movements in Latin American politics. Ocampo and her group directly oppose the regime, as do many other and less traditional intellectuals. Many intellectuals on the left are also critical of Peronism. Very few declare themselves Peronists. Among those that do, the most significant are Leopoldo Marechal (author of Adán Buenosayres, found here in Marechal 1997, originally published in 1948) and Raúl Scalabrini Ortiz (see Scalabrini Ortiz 1931). Ezequiel Martínez Estrada, an essayist on national thought who also writes poetry and narrative, is unique in the sense that, although he shares certain values with the Sur group and is decidedly anti-Peronist, he nonetheless tries to understand the phenomenon as part of the country’s controversial formation in Martínez Estrada 1948 and Martínez Estrada 1971. All the books in this section deal with national identity issues. Borges 1999 criticized nationalism and fixed identities, as did Witold Gombrowicz, a Poland author who spent decades in Argentina, in Gombrowicz 2001.

Borges, Jorge Luis. “The Argentine Writer and Tradition”. In Selected Non-Fictions. By Jorge Luis Borges. Edited by Eliot Weinberger. Translated by Esther Allen, Suzanne Jill Levine, and Eliot Weinberger, 420–426. New York: Viking, 1999.
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In “El escritor argentino y la tradición” (originally a lecture given in 1951), one of Borges’s most cited essays, he develops his hypothesis of a national literature. He concludes that Argentinian literature, “younger” than consolidated traditions, can use the materials and forms of any other tradition to contribute to universal culture. “The universe is our patrimony,” he concludes in an open polemic with the Peronist cultural nationalism dominant at the time.
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Gombrowicz, Witold. Diario argentino. Buenos Aires: Adriana Hidalgo, 2001.
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World War II surprises the Polish writer Gombrowicz while he travels in Argentina; he stays in Buenos Aires until 1963. Devoid of contact with Argentina’s literary world, he surrounds himself with a group of young writers, and they begin to translate his novel Ferdydurke (1937) from the Polish. His writing becomes a referent of writers of the seventies and eighties who consider his books part of the national literary corpus.
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Marechal, Leopoldo. Adán Buenosayres. Edited by Jorge Lafforgue and Fernando Colla. Madrid: ALLCA XX; Ediciones UNESCO, 1997.
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A novel about a poet, Adán Buenosayres, who joins a group of friends in the search for the keys to the national tradition. It proposes, during Peronism, the composition of a purely Argentinian literature. The very heterogeneous novel includes some real-life fragments (such as avant-garde characters from the 1920s, like Borges or the painter Xul Solar) and elements of Western literary genres. It can vaguely be connected to Joyce’s Ulysses.
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Martínez Estrada, Ezequiel. Muerte y transfiguración de Martín Fierro. Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1948.
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Martínez Estrada uses the canonical text Martín Fierro to return to the theme of Argentinian identity in this highly extensive critical analysis. An essay that dazzles with multitudinous, arbitrary, and at times contradictory arguments as well as an excessive writing style.
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Martínez Estrada, Ezequiel. X-ray of the Pampa. Translated by Alain Swietlicki. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1971.
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An essay about Argentinian identity. Blending modes of interpretation from social psychology, history, sociology, literary criticism, and politics, Martínez Estrada describes “the Argentinian character” as the product of a “false” formation, without real underpinnings and prone to a state of crisis.
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Scalabrini Ortiz, Raúl. El hombre que está solo y espera. Buenos Aires: Anaconda, 1931.
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Important in its moment, this book engages in a contemporary debate over the characteristics of Argentinian identity in the context of social and cultural changes in an increasingly anonymous Buenos Aires.
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The Sixties

The 1960s in Argentina, as in most of the world, were a time of intense political and cultural renovation. Entering an “internationalist” period, literature was a source of grand experiments, although the tradition of national themes was not abandoned. Although Argentinian literature shared the era’s commitments, it was not defined by the aesthetic of the so-called Latin American Boom. In general, Argentinian fiction did not feature “magical realism”; instead, it tended toward experimentation with history, psychoanalysis, political and literary theory, literary genres, and mass culture. This section collects the canonical texts of the period and introduces the different tendencies of the literary field (basically the politicization of most of the authors and the loyalty to aestheticism of a small but active elite). Di Benedetto 1956 was an early example of this period. Julio Cortázar was a mesmerizing personality who created sophisticated short stories (see Cortázar 1998) and novels (see Cortázar 1975) and is the best-known writer of Argentina from this era. Manuel Puig redirected the erudite literature of the elites to the massive and popular culture with his novels (see Puig 1971 and Puig 1979). Alejandra Pizarnik, the enfant terrible of the poetry, explored subjectivity in Pizarnik 1971. Literary and cultural magazines and the new journalism were thresholds of modernization during the sixties; young writers and poets used the magazines as platforms to manifest their new aesthetics or political assumptions. Between a huge number of new and sometimes ephemeral periodical press, El Escarabajo de Oro (short stories and narratives), Los Libros (political and critical thought), and Primera Plana (new journalism) were the main magazines that helped to introduce new topics and debates in Argentina.

Cortázar, Julio. Hopscotch. Translated by Gregory Rabassa. New York: Avon, 1975.
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Forms part of the cultural movement known as the “Latin American Boom” but does not share its aesthetics. An experiment in reading and writing, it is also a novel of the sixties youth who sought spaces of individual freedom in the administrated world. The novel has a unique feature: instead of the normal sequence, a “Table of Instructions” tells the reader in what order to jump from chapter to chapter.
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Cortázar, Julio. Bestiary: Selected Stories. Translated by Alberto Manguel, Paul Blackburn, Gregory Rabassa, Clementine Rabassa, and Suzanne Jill Levine. London: Harvill, 1998.
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Cortázar is a renowned short story writer. His genre is fantasy, and he uses it to introduce new narrative procedures and explore both the idea of representation and literary language. Like Borges and Bioy Casares, Cortázar finds a field of aesthetic experimentation in colloquial language.
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Di Benedetto, Antonio. Zama. Buenos Aires: Ediciones Doble P, 1956.
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A great and little-known Argentinian novel, an early example of sixties modernization. The story takes place in the colonial era but interpolates the present. A novel of waiting.
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El Escarabajo de Oro.
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A literary magazine founded by the writer Abelardo Castillo that was published from 1961 to 1974. It was fundamental to the new generation of writers and in modernizing European references.
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Los Libros.
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A literary magazine founded by Beatriz Sarlo, Ricardo Piglia, and Carlos Altamirano that was published between 1969 and 1974. The project focused on books reviews, introducing new theoretical perspectives and politically engaged points of views.
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Pizarnik, Alejandra. La condesa sangrienta. Buenos Aires: Aquarius, 1971.
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With respect to Pizarnik, personality matters as much as poetry. A poetry that violently confronts meaning, it is full of literary references but also resorts to ingenuity. Pizarnik’s halo of mystery attracts many disciples. She is a poet in Rimbaud’s tradition.
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Primera Plana.
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A weekly magazine on current affairs that appeared between 1962 and 1971. Jacobo Timerman was the founder. The magazine brought new issues and debates to the political and cultural field.
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Puig, Manuel. Betrayed by Rita Hayworth. Translated by Suzanne Jill Levine. New York: Dutton, 1971.
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With his first novel, Puig creates new narrative procedures in Argentina: the disappearance of narrative authority, fiction in colloquial language, and experimentation with mass media. He questions costumbrismo, realism, and mimesis through the story of provincial characters who find that the language of spectacle can make their lives significant again.
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Puig, Manuel. Kiss of the Spider Woman. Translated by Thomas Colchie. New York: Knopf, 1979.
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In a cell shared by a political prisoner and a homosexual, two identities repressed in contemporary Latin America come together. Through dialogue and symbolic exchange, the novel intertwines the characters’ apparently disparate desires and hopes. In 1992, the musical Kiss of the Spider Woman was produced in the United States, based on Puig’s novel with music by John Kander, lyrics by Fred Ebb, and libretto by Terrence McNally.
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Political Engagement

A period of radical political experience started during the 1960s. Unions’ struggles, popular manifestations, strikes, the return of Perón (exiled in Spain), and the emergence of guerrillas were the main symptoms of a new phase in Argentinean history. Alongside a general politicization of the society, the literature engaged with this climate. Most of the authors in this section wrote political texts and were political activists. There is an essential antecedent: Contorno magazine, published between 1953 and 1959 (see Viñas 2007). It was the tool of a new generation who intervened in the culture and politics at the same time. The Viñas brothers (Ismael and David), Juan José Sebreli, Carlos Correas, and Noé Jitrik were the main voices. Contorno tried to reshape the relationship between intellectuals and Peronism and politicized criticism. The facsimile edition is invaluable in understanding the politicization of Argentinian culture during the second half of the 20th century. Rodolfo Walsh was a partisan activist writing testimonial books such as Walsh 1969. Gelman 1996 is a collection of political poetry that introduced a new colloquial language, much like the poems in Urondo 1972. Gené 1970 created a new theatrical scene with its militant style. Lynch 1967 details the conflicts of the urban middle class and its engagement in political situations. Haroldo Conti wrote nonideological texts (see, for example, Conti 1971) but was an engaged intellectual. Andrés Rivera took the workers and their conflicts at the core of his fictions (see Rivera 1982).

Conti, Haroldo. En vida. Barcelona: Barral, 1971.
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One of the most original narrators, Conti wrote short stories and novels focused on the life of common people. He was another victim of dictatorship.
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Viñas, Ismael, ed. Contorno: Edición facsimilar. Buenos Aires: Ediciones de la Biblioteca Nacional, 2007.
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This facsimile edition reproduces the whole collection of the magazine founded by Ismael and David Viñas. Advanced students at the University of Buenos Aires in the humanities and social sciences signed the articles, which were devoted to rethink Argentinian culture.
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Gelman, Juan. Gotán. Buenos Aires: Seix Barral, 1996.
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This volume collects the poet’s first four books, which mix poetically elaborated language and colloquial speech. A questioning of literature combines with urban themes and the political condition of being human. Gelman is the great renovator of Argentinian poetry of the second half of the 20th century. He also has written poetry in Ladino (Dibaxu, Buenos Aires: Seix Barral, 1994). In 2007, he won the Cervantes Prize.
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Gené, Juan Carlos. Cosa juzgada. Buenos Aires: Granica, 1970.
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Juan Carlos Gené starts in the seventies a movement of theatrical renovation. His works renew Argentinian scenarios introducing new forms of questioning the national character.
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Lynch, Marta. La señora Ordóñez. Buenos Aires: Jorge Alvarez, 1967.
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Lynch is an important author whose narratives criticized the bourgeois habits of the creole elite. Feminism, family, and politics are frequent issues in her work.
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Rivera, Andrés. Nada que perder. Buenos Aires: Centro Editor de América Latina, 1982.
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Andrés Rivera’s (pseudonym of Marcos Ribak) first works are focused on workers’ narratives. In 1992, Rivera won the National Award of Literature. Most of his novels tell the stories of well-known characters of Argentinian history.
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Urondo, Francisco. Todos los poemas 1950–1970. Buenos Aires: Ediciones de la Flor, 1972.
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Popular culture and political engagement define the poetry of Urondo, who disappeared under the last dictatorship.
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Walsh, Rodolfo J. Operación masacre. Buenos Aires: Editorial Jorge Alvarez, 1969.
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Known as a short story writer, Walsh joins the long Argentinian tradition of political literature with this nonfiction work. After Perón’s fall in 1955, his followers were persecuted and repressed. Operación masacre narrates the killing of various Peronist militants, using sophisticated literary procedures, reconstructed survivors’ discourses, and clandestine information (the government is the first implicated in the assassinations).
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Aestheticism in the Experimentation Moment

Authors of the traditional elite continued developing a more classical literature. Although in their works aestheticism is the main characteristic, politicization also reached their writings. Sábato 1981 and Mujica Láinez 1969 were written in a more conventional European tradition than the other writers of the period.

Mujica Láinez, Manuel. Bomarzo. Translated by Gregory Rabassa. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1969.
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Like many Latin American novels of the moment, this one represents an ambitious undertaking: to relate the key parts of the Italian Renaissance. It attempts this feat through the historical figure Duke Pier Franceso Orsini in his garden of monsters at Bomarzo. Historical fiction takes erudition and decadence as its principal narrative values.
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Sábato, Ernesto. On Heroes and Tombs. Translated by Helen R. Lane. Boston: Godine, 1981.
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With the legacy of Peronism and a climate of aesthetic and cultural renovation, the 1960s in Argentina begin with a novel that frames the era’s quest for a great fable of national identity. Fictionalizing the established themes of national history with something of Sartrean extistentialism, Sábato’s novel was very important in its moment. In 1984, he won the Cervantes Prize.
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The Radical Experimentation

The literature of the 1960s was very successful and expanded the audiences of fiction and poetry. The Boom literature consolidated new forms of expression and representations in few years. Younger authors refused the widespread of the narratives of the sixties and experimented with more radical techniques and topics. This section introduces texts of that trend (Lacanism, Marxism, and linguistics were part of the new discourses). García 1968, Gusman 1973, and Lamborghini 2003 were works that mobilized the cultural scene in Buenos Aires. Copi was a “secret author” well known among small but active circles (see Copi 2002). Héctor Libertella continued the radical experimentation of those years (see Libertella 1968) until his death. Fogwill 2007 is a translation of Fogwill’s most well-known novel Los Pychiciegos, a nonrealistic work on the Malvinas/Falkland Islands war; the text used the ghost of the Argentinian soldiers and the language to talk about the war. Fogwill saw the war not just as a conflict between Argentina and Great Britain but also as a violent fight at the interior of Argentinian context under the dictatorship. Bellessi 2009 introduces a gendered perspective to classical poetry; Bellessi positions herself between the great female tradition and the popular voices of national culture. Cozarinsky represents a new kind of author in Cozarinsky 1985, one who is interested in a wide scope of cultural practices from literature to cinema (Cozarinsky is also film director); in his literary works he mixes reflections, close readings, fiction, and insight into national and international modernist traditions.

Bellessi, Diana. Tener lo que se tiene: Poesía reunida. Buenos Aires: Adriana Hildalgo, 2009.
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Classical poetry and popular language, a combination featured in all of Bellessi’s poetry. She is one of the most well-known Argentinian poets.
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Copi. Cachafaz: La sombra de Wenceslao. Buenos Aires: Adriana Hidalgo, 2002.
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Copi is the pseudonym of Raúl Damonte, an Argentinian writer who spends much of his life in France and writes most of his work in French (which includes stories, a weekly comic strip, novels, and theater). The Spanish-language play Cachafaz (1981) revisits the gaucho tradition of political and social violence in Argentina but also incorporates the violence of gender. One of the most unique Argentinian writers.
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Cozarinsky, Edgardo. Vudú urbano. Buenos Aires: Anagrama, 1985.
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Short stories, novels, and films compose Cozarinsky’s complex work. The book contains different scenes of the contemporary youth culture.
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Fogwill, Roldolfo Enrique. Malvinas Requiem: Visions of an Underground War. Translated by Nick Caistor and Amanda Hopkinson. London: Serpent’s Tail, 2007.
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A first novel about the Malvinas War. A radical vision of the soldiers’ experience in the war that the Argentinian dictatorship declared against Great Britain in 1982. Fogwill is both a narrator and poet.
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García, Germán. Nanina. Buenos Aires: Jorge Álvarez, 1968.
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One of the novels that begins the narrative experimentation of the 1960s. Its plot integrates psychoanalytical and theoretical discourse. The novel was prohibited and judicial proceedings conducted for its supposed immorality during the dictatorship.
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Gusmán, Luis. El frasquito. Buenos Aires: Noé, 1973.
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In a climate of cultural repression, Gusmán’s first novel is controversial notwithstanding its experimental and little-representative discourse.
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Lamborghini, Osvaldo. Novelas y cuentos. Edición de César Aira. Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 2003.
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An Argentinian writer with a fetish for literary experimentation. The volume contains, in addition to a large part of his narrative work, two mythic texts: El fiord and Sebregondi retrocede. Lamborghini considers the relationship between language and politics through texts that mix Lacanianism, Marxism, the European literary tradition, and structuralism with gaucho literature and the Peronist political tradition.
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Libertella, Héctor. El camino de los hiperbóreos. Buenos Aires: Paidós, 1968.
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One of the most experimental writings in Argentina. His novels introduce new procedures and sophisticated issues.
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Literature under Dictatorship

Argentina experimented with one of the cruelest dictatorships from 1976 and 1984. Jail, torture, disappearance, and the deaths of thousands of people followed a military coup on March 24, 1976. Artists and intellectuals were targets of the state repression; most of them had to leave the country or live under strict censorship. Experimentation and explicit politicization of culture had to be erased. The works in this section introduce the survival of a critical culture under repression. Saer has produced a vast literature, where literature is understood as a means to explore both experience and the formal possibilities of language. The novel El entenado (see Saer 2009 for a good translation) consolidates an eccentric writing. In Nadie nada nunca (Nobody nothing never), Saer has built a radical fiction on violence under the dictatorship; without mention of the contemporary historical context, Saer 1993 explores the disarticulation of interpersonal links, the threats of some of state institutions, and the isolation of the population in a small town in Argentina. Ricardo Piglia wrote the most appealing novel of the period, Respiración artificial (see Piglia 1994), which was read as a metaphor of the dictatorship and was a cult text in the early 1980s. Tununa Mercado and Luisa Valenzuela, despite their different aesthetics, both wrote a more intimate experience of the political (see Mercado 2001 and Valenzuela 1992). Tomás Eloy Martínez used mixed techniques (journalism, short stories, and testimonies) to historicize the violent period of Dictatorship in Martínez 1996. Gambaro 1984 fictionalizes political struggles in the classical tradition of Greek tragedy. Avelar 1999 and Taylor 1997 both seek to understand the cultural production of the period.

Avelar, Idelber. The Untimely Present: Postdictatorial Latin American Fiction and the Task of Mourning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999.
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Focused on the Southern Cone, this book reads Argentinian literature from the 1970s and 1980s in the context of the dictatorships. It reviews the crisis of the identitary novel of the Boom and the new assumptions of intellectuals and aesthetics following repression, torture, and genocide. It also contains excellent readings of Ricardo Piglia and Tununa Mercado, among others.
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Gambaro, Griselda. Teatro. Buenos Aires: Ediciones de la Flor, 1984.
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One of the most significant dramaturges, Gambaro’s work develops different forms of opposition to power, based on gender, family, politics, and economics. Her work Antígona furiosa stands out as an allegory of the disappeared from the last military dictatorship.
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Martínez, Tomás Eloy. Santa Evita. Translated by Helen Lane. New York: Knopf, 1996.
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In the traditions of his earlier books and of nonfiction literature, this novel, first published in 1995, describes an investigation into the construction of the myth of Eva Perón in Argentinian history, politics, and culture. Following the steps of Rodolfo Walsh’s short story “Una mujer” and some of the procedures of Operación masacre, the book explores the relationship between literature and politics.
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Mercado, Tununa. In a State of Memory. Translated by Peter Kahn. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2001.
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Exiled to Mexico during the military dictatorship, Mercado explores the relationships among gender, memory, family, nation, and politics in her writing. This collection of stories is united by the precariousness of a narrative voice that is always at the brink of disintegration in exile.
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Piglia, Ricardo. Artificial Respiration. Translated by Daniel Balderston. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994.
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Emblematic novel of the 1976–1984 military dictatorship era. First published in 1980, using different sequences and narrative tenses, the novel explores moments of repression and authoritarianism in Argentinian political and literary history. Piglia also develops a critical history of Argentinian fiction, around the axes of politics, violence, and the centrality of Borges and Arlt.
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Saer, Juan José. Nobody Nothing Never. Translated by Helen Lane. London: Serpent’s Tail, 1993.
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The basic nucleus of characters and spaces that repeat in Saer’s novels crystallize politically against a background of deaths and disappearances in Nadie, nada, nunca. Although not a “novel of the dictatorship,” the indeterminate nature of the events is an oblique reference to the experience of repression. Beginning with a triple negation, the novel narrates the experience of misunderstanding.
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Saer, Juan José. The Witness. Translated by Margaret Jull Costa. London: Serpent’s Tail, 2009.
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Although he resides in France, Saer focuses his work on “the zone,” a literary and experiential space in and around the city of Santa Fe, in northeastern Argentina. El entenado is the story of a cabin boy captured by the indigenous inhabitants when the first Spanish conquistadores arrive in the zone.
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Taylor, Diana. Disappearing Acts: Spectacles of Gender and Nationalism in Argentina’s “Dirty War.” Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997.
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Seminal book on culture, aesthetic, and dictatorship. Taylor introduces the idea of performance to understand the multiple manifestations of arts under and after state repression and violence.
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Valenzuela, Luisa. Black Novel with Argentines. Translated by Toby Talbot. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992.
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Valenzuela is popular novelist that addresses topics of feminism, genre literature, and light political frames.
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The Return of Literature

After different crises in Argentina, the 1990s were the years of the country’s radical transformation toward a neoliberal political and economical model. The market ruled most of the relationship and culture was penetrated by consumerism. In an adverse context, an extraordinary group of Argentinean authors explored new forms of resignifying the literary practice. Although their works are not coincident, most of the authors listed in this section created a new literary landscape. César Aira is, without a doubt, the main figure. Aira 2008 and Aira 2006 are only two novels of Aira’s prolific production; his more than sixty novels establish not simply a set of works but an internally articulated project that expands in multiple directions. These two novels are centered in Argentinian literary and historical traditions, but Aira mixes this perspective with outrageous fictional episodes that question realism. Aira 2008 presents a gauchesque literature rewritten in a surreal modern context; Aira 2006 takes a real character (the German painter Rugendas) and reinterprets the travel literature of the 19th century. Perlongher 1987 presents poetry based on a parodic or critical version of past Argentinian narratives and the political present. Arturo Carrera understands poetry as a reinvention of a new language and a space to explore personal and national identity; in Carrera 1997 the author uses the immigrant tradition of his family to review Argentinian history.

Aira, César. An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter. Translated by Chris Andrews. New York: New Directions, 2006.
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A version of the story of the German painter Rugendas and his experience in the Pampas. The events narrated drift from the real history to reflections on art. As in all his works, Aira returns to avant-garde perspective to narrate historical events.
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Aira, César. Ghosts. Translated by Chris Andrews. New York: New Directions, 2008.
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Aira has published more than sixty novels in thirty years. Taken together, these books construct a writing style that, perhaps along with Saer’s, is the most original since Borges’s. All of Aira’s works begin with a certain realist tone that progressively evolves to question realism. Aside from their originality, his novels always contain theories of art, reality, representation, literature, and Argentina.
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Carrera, Arturo. El vespertillo de las parcas. Buenos Aires: Tusquets Editores, 1997.
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Neo-baroque poet Carrera explores past worlds: childhood, parents, immigrants, and their languages. His style is absolutely personal and introduces the will to understand poetry as a reinvention of aesthetic.
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Perlongher, Néstor. Alambres. Buenos Aires: Ediciones Último Reino, 1987.
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Politics and gender create a very original poetry. Perlongher wrote seminal essays on neo-baroque aesthetic, which he calls neo-barroso.
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The New Scene

Most of the authors in this section have a consolidated work. Nevertheless the experimentation is one of the main traits of their writings. Experimentation takes divergent forms: the sophisticated use of the “I” in fictional works, the hybridization of genres, and the dialogue with multiple traditions. Although the landscape of the last literary authors is extremely variegated, the texts reunited in this section show the different trends of the fiction. These include the best-known authors of the contemporary Argentinian scene whose works have been translated to different languages and usually define tendencies. Pauls 2007 explores the “love story” in postmodern times; obsessions and desire join literature to develop a story framed in the political conflict of the last decades. Chejfec 1999 tells the story of friendship in Buenos Aires; reflections on identity become introductions to philosophical insights on history and art. Moreno 2001 uses journalism to question literature and writing; all of Moreno’s work explores different kinds of borders (e.g., gender, writings, moral values, political issues). Cohen 2006 explores science fiction and the constructions of possible worlds with the materials of everyday life. Feiling 1995 covers genre literature and is a reference for the author’s generation because of his erudition and literary knowledge. Sánchez 1993 explores female lives and locates its plot in the confluence of past traditions and present conflicts. Caparrós 1992 has an ironic perspective on world issues from ecology to human rights, from prostitution to child labor. Kohan 2002 fictionalizes local and current issues; under the form on new realism the author takes contemporary topics (for example, the fall of communism, globalization, the Malvinas/Falkland war, torture, human rights, sport passions) and creates frescoes of general topics. Bilbija and Celis Carbajal 2009 inaugurates a new form of circulation of literature, fiction, and poetry in Argentina. The Argentinian crisis of 2001 gives rise to violence, political and economic changes, and new relationships between different sectors of society. It also brings about cultural changes. Akademia Cartonera describes a group of artists that began working with street children who survive by collecting cardboard to sell to recyclers. They form a cooperative whose motto, “Each book is unique,” is materially true. Authors such as César Aira, Ricardo Piglia, and Rodolfo Enrique Fogwill, among others, are part of a catalog that began with Argentinian writers but now includes many other Latin Americans. Cardboard publishers have since been founded in other Latin American countries (including Chile, Peru, Brazil, Bolivia, and Mexico). Akademia Cartonera collects “manifestos” of the cardboard publishers, along with essays about the phenomenon.

Bilbija, Ksenija and Paloma Celis Carbajal, eds. Akademia Cartonera: A Primer of Latin American Cartonera Publishers = Un abc de las editorials cartoneras en América Latina. Madison: Parallel Press, University of Wisconsin-Madison Libraries, 2009.
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A group of artists began working with street children who survived the Argentinian crisis of 2001 by collecting cardboard to sell to recyclers. The artists found a publisher called Eloísa Cartonera to publish texts by prestigious writers (who donated their rights) for sale at very low prices. The traditional book form is replaced with a photocopy between two covers made of cardboard collected from the street.
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Caparrós, Martín. Larga distancia. Buenos Aires: Planeta, 1992.
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A book describing travels around the world from a novelist and journalist. Along with Eduardo Anguita, Caparrós publishes a two-volume collection of testimonies from the revolutionary struggle of 1970s Argentina titled La voluntad.
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Chejfec, Sergio. Los planetas. Buenos Aires: Alfaguara, 1999.
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An original writer who experiments with the limits of writing and of what can be said. Completely reflexive, his fiction tends to center on the narration of thoughts and ideas. Los Planetas is the story of an adolescent friendship in dictatorship-era Argentina.
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Cohen, Marcelo. Donde yo no estaba. Buenos Aires: Norma, 2006.
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Cohen is a consolidated narrator that has explored science fiction and realism. This is a philosophical novel that intent to insert itself in the tradition of classical narratives.
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Feiling, Carlos. Amor a Roma. Buenos Aires: Editorial Sudamericana, 1995.
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Although he is the author of novels and essays, Feiling’s volume of poetry is notable for a complex relationship between language and the tradition of classical poetry.
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Kohan, Martín. Dos veces junio. Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 2002.
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Politics and national sentiment intertwine in this novel. It is set in 1982, while Buenos Aires hosts soccer’s World Cup and the nation suffers under the bloody military dictatorship.
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Moreno, María. A tontas y a locas. Buenos Aires: Editorial Sudamericana, 2001.
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María Moreno is one of the most significant journalist-writers of the late 20th century. In daily newspaper columns, she introduces controversial topics (including abortion, sexuality, transexuality, and marginality) and links them to Argentinian politics and history. This book collects columns that appeared mainly in the daily newspaper Tiempo argentino during the first three years of the 1980s.
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Pauls, Alan. The Past. Translated by Nick Caistor. London: Harvill Secker, 2007.
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A film and literary critic, journalist, and translator, Alan Pauls is a highly significant narrator who has redefined the forms of fiction in early-21st-century Argentina. His highly literary fictions question the very idea of fiction. El pasado is the stunning story of a sentimental relationship.
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Sánchez, Matilde. El dock. Buenos Aires: Planeta, 1993.
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The novel tells the story of a woman who “inherits” the son of a friend killed in a terrorist attack. The story is told indirectly, through a reconstruction of confusing events. Gender and politics unite in this novel, as they do in all of Sánchez’s intense narratives.
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The Critics

This subsection introduces the main critics of the new literature. They problematize different topics of the period: the relationship between politics and literature, the status of the aesthetics under globalization, and the new cultural practices. Masiello 2001, Speranza 2006, and Laddaga 2007 organize the last decades of 20th-century Argentina according the topics of dictatorship, the conceptual art influence, and the presence of the autobiographical dimension, respectively.

Laddaga, Reinaldo. Espectáculos de realidad: Ensayo sobre la narrativa latinoamericana de las últimas dos décadas. Rosario, Argentina: Beatriz Viterbo, 2007.
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This book is a brilliant attempt to understand literary aesthetics at the end of 20th century; includes essays on Borges, Lamborghini, and Aira, among others.
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Masiello, Francine. The Art of Transition: Latin American Culture and Neoliberal Crisis. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001.
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An intelligent study of the way the dictatorships and neoliberal politics together impose a new understanding of culture. Also examines modes of cultural reaction to political and economic violence.
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Speranza, Graciela. Fuera de campo: Literatura y arte argentinos después de Duchamp. Barcelona: Anagrama, 2006.
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From Arlt to Aira, Speranza reads Argentinian modern literary tradition as a development of a conceptual aesthetic.
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