The year 1926 is a milestone for Argentine literature as it marked the publication of three books which represented a radical innovation for narrative prose: the novels Don Segundo Sombra, by Ricardo Güiraldes, and El juguete rabioso (The Mad Toy) by Roberto Arlt; and Horacio Quiroga’s Los desterrados (The Exiles), a short-story collection. These three books can be seen as a reconfiguration of a literature that, since its origins, had space as its privileged protagonist. Güiraldes’ novel postulates an idealized image of the countryside that, in the third decade of the twentieth century, was consciously anachronistic and nostalgic. In Arlt’s novel, the modern city is a symbol of novelty and even of the future, and also a constant source of irresolvable conflicts. In turn, the stories from Los desterrados, which take place in the frontier territory of Misiones, updated the fictional possibilities of the border understood as a contact zone. The publication of these three books in 1926, then, implied a renewal of the spaces privileged by Argentine literature: the countryside, the city, and the border. In addition, they are testimony to how the 1920s marked a definitive change in the ways of being a writer.

This chapter analyzes the works of brother and sister Lucio Victorio Mansilla and Eduarda Mansilla, two fundamental figures in the cultural life of nineteenth-century Argentina, whose personal trajectories took them to Europe and the United States. Journalist, military man, and politician Lucio penned what can be considered the first ethnographic record of the Indigenous peoples of the Pampas; Eduardo was an accomplished novelist, travel writer, journalist, and musician who published in both Spanish and French. In this chapter the work of both siblings is read together. It takes into account the centrality of Lucio in the field of Argentinean literature and proposes that Eduarda illuminates different areas of the cultural intellectual life of nineteenth-century Argentina. Focus is on Una excursión a los indios ranqueles (1870) by Lucio V. Mansilla and two novels by Eduarda Mansilla – El médico de San Luis (1860) and Pablo ou la vie dans les pampas, published in French in 1869 and translated by Lucio – to reflect on the relationship between narration and the state, practices of everyday life, sociability, and family stories, as well as their circulation and consecration mechanisms.

Victoria and Silvina Ocampo are two writers of undeniable importance for the Argentine literary tradition. Even more when read through a feminist lens. Recognizing that there’s a lot of critical material written about them, this chapter proposes a different approach. Through the intersection between archive, fiction, and domestic spaces, it addresses the relationship between the sisters, their works, and their day-to-day environment. According to gender studies, houses, family relationships, and friendships (together with the forms of obedience, love, and conflict they imply) offer an opportunity to study the construction of a system of individual, sexual, and generational identities that will influence the Ocampos’ works as well as their ways of intervening in culture, interrupting and deviating traditions and standards, voices, and writings.

This chapter analyses the impact of the 1810 Revolution and its aftermath in the making of Argentine literature. Political affairs fueled the circulation of locally produced printed matter. Patriot leaders engaged in writing, and memoirs, letters, speeches, proclamations, and newspaper articles soon became part of a new arena of public debates. This new print culture was also aimed at reaching lower-class audiences, crucial for the victory of the patriotic endeavor. Texts were often read aloud for those who were illiterate – the overwhelming majority of the population– and even published in translation in Indigenous languages. Thus, the Revolution generated a zone of encounter between the literate classes and the oral culture of plebeian sectors.  This zone of encounter, together with the revalorization of the gauchos, gave birth to a surprising cultural expression  called gauchesque poetry, the first literary genre of a distinctive local flavor. A rather peculiar type of literature, it was a written genre imitating the oral style of rural inhabitants. The plebeian voice thus acquired a central location in the nascent local letters, thus destabilizing the boundaries between social classes and their cultures. This transgression would have a lasting impact on Argentine literature.

In 1957 Rodolfo Walsh published the first edition of Operación masacre, a thoroughly researched book that denounces the execution by the military régime of a group of civilians a year before. In the next few decades until his disappearance in 1977, Walsh would publish new expanded versions of the text that included documents that supported the veracity of his own investigation. Operación masacre is a rare case of where a political event engenders a new type of writing designed to tell the very story that has inspired it, and in so doing creates a new literary genre. In Operación Masacre, we read a text that is both a new writing and a new genre, produced in the urgency of political intervention, and with the desire to affect it and interpellate it. The relationship between literature and politics is dramatized in this text, as it will soon be dramatized in Walsh´s life. This chapter addresses the constitution of nonfiction in Walsh´s text, the relationships with his other works, and his legacy after his kidnapping and ensuing disappearance in 1977 at the hands of the military dictatorship.

Domingo F. Sarmiento was a nineteenth-century Argentine writer whose ideas and literature have had a wide-reaching and important impact on both the national and continental stage, particularly the opposition between civilization and barbarism, as formulated in his book Facundo (1845). This chapter poses that almost all of Sarmiento’s work can be understood through the tension between the short-term impact of politics and the long-term impact of literature, be it in the years of his exile in Chile, in the time of his presidential candidacy, or throughout his journalistic work. Also, it proposes a reading of Sarmiento’s trajectory and his most important literary production (1845 Facundo, 1849 Viajes, and 1850 Recuerdos de provincia) not only in relation to the different circumstances in which he lived but also in light of his particular representation of modern phenomena related to the spectacle and the attention of the masses. In this way, it seeks to offer a nuanced perspective of a fundamental Argentinian author and to engage in new dialogues and frame the contradictions within the romantic environment in which Sarmiento participated and the modernization to which he aspired.

This chapter maps out two decades of novelistic production starting with Respiración artificial by Ricardo Piglia in the midst of the dictatorship. An archival pursuit of a history of violence constitutive of national foundations, the narrative insinuates the possibility of a national project where silenced voices might have a hearing. Whereas in Piglia, modernist fragmentation signals an enigma that needs to be solved, in Reina Roffe’s La rompiente a shattered and disrupted memory both names the horror and promises a break away from archival sites of authority. Los Pichiciegos by Rodolfo Fogwill offers a vision of the Malvinas/Falklands War that is both hallucinatory and hyperreal, facing simultaneously the darkness of the present and a visionary glance revealing novel forms of destitution in the making. In novels published in the 1990s such as Matilde Sanchez’s El dock, Rodolfo Fogwill’s Vivir afuera, Sergio Chefjec’s El aire and Los planetas, the characters’ aimless wanderings might be said to explore the failure of memory as historical direction, as national reckoning, as a form of political representation, as harnessing community, yet memories of the horror persist beyond any general project of political reconstitution and the capacity of literature to repair or bestow meaning.

Primarily poets, writers Alfonsina Storni and Alejandra Pizarnik had in common being daughters of immigrants, and both committed suicide. Storni’s poetry during her lifetime was popular and accessible, with topics of women, love, and modernity. Poet, journalist, dramatist, and maestra (schoolteacher), she gained early fame but only partial critical success. She crafted a defiant public image and even staged her suicide after a long struggle with cancer. She protested the stigma of being an unwed mother and other injustices borne by women. In contrast, Pizarnik initially reached a smaller but influential reading public; many young readers identify with her elusive and fractured poetry-theater of interiority. Rebellious and bisexual, she was the daughter of Jews who had escaped the Holocaust but lost their world. Loss, mourning, and sometimes violence, abjection, and terror are recurring topics, as in The Bloody Countess. As with Storni, there is confessionalism, but Pizarnik’s “I” is not a stable subject but a wandering marker, emphasizing the body, sexual desire, and fragmentation. Pizarnik’s struggle with language becomes a battle against the breakdown of the world.

This chapter looks at politically defiant women’s theatre and performance in Argentina from the 1960s onward though the concept of the skin. It pays special attention to the varying ways in which women in theater and performance have engaged with the ever-pressing and pervasive issues of gender-based violence, power, the body, family, memory, and resistance. Drawing upon Griselda Gambaro’s visionary Información para extranjeros (1971/1987), we suggest multidirectional dialogues with the process of state-led terror and forced disappearance perpetrated during the 1976–83 military dictatorship. While discussing varying traditions of contestation and rebellion across feminist theater and performance, we build this dermography of contemporary women’s theatre and performance in which Piel de Lava (Skin of Lava) is not only the name of a group but the symbol of a new form of politically committed, “post-traumatic” feminist performance. In those terms, the chapter discusses some of the most audacious and innovative recent feminist pieces, including Lola Arias’ installations suggesting implicated forms of spectatorship, Romina Paula’s singular approach to motherhood through desiring mothers and dissident daughters, as well as the alternative forms of staging gender disobedience proposed by Albertina Carri and Analía Couceyro in their rereading of Tadeys (2019).

Borges is an Argentine writer whose work has deserved extensive and brilliant critical analyses. Reviewing the canonical interpretations (Ricardo Piglia, Sylvia Molloy, Daniel Balderston, Beatriz Sarlo, among others), this chapter seeks to rethink Borges’ work in the twenty-first century usiing two main approaches. The first will review the idea of “work” in Borges. As Annick Louis has studied, the unstable nature of his work demands a reconceptualization of the processes of construction of literature that expands the limits of the book, the author, and the text, and that circulates in different media (books, magazines, lectures, interviews, chats). A second way is to expand the dialogues and conversations that his textuality offers. Focused on the obvious literary bonds, most of his critics have read his work emphasizing the different forms of intertextuality. But Borges’ universe includes much more aesthetics and cultural practices, as Alan Pauls has shown. If Borges strongly questioned the ideas of the author and work, he also questioned the ideas of literature, art, culture, and media. The chapter also analyzes the place of Borges in the context of national culture and its relationship with world literature.

The year 1963 is special for Julio Cortázar: he publishes Rayuela (Hopscotch) and visits revolutionary Cuba. The year before one of his stories was adapted into a film (La cifra impar [Odd Number]) and, as Ángel Rama points out in his essay “El boom en perspectiva” (included in the volume Más allá del boom: literatura y mercado) the sales of his books start to increase steadily: 10,500 in 1964, 49,000 en 1967, almost 80,000 in 1969. The Rayuela phenomenon is but one in a myriad transformations that were taking place in the cultural and literary fields: the end of the chasm that had separated mass audiences from Argentinean literature, the Latin-Americanization of the intellectual and artistic fields, the transformation of the publishing industry with the rise of Editorial Sudamericana, among others (in 1962 Eudeba’s edition of Martín Fierro had become a bestseller). Starting with Rayuela and other works published those years (such as Manuel Mujica Lainez’s Bomarzo, which shared the Kennedy prize with Cortázar’s novel), this chapter questions the relationship between fiction and politics in a very troubled period of Latin American history.

The celebration of the 100th anniversary of Argentina’s emancipation from Spain (the Centenario, or Centenary) was a cultural milestone. Social and cultural organizations as well as individuals joined the state in its efforts to commemorate the event by planning public festivities, inviting foreign dignitaries and intellectuals, as well as commissioning projects of urban reform, artworks, and book collections. This chapter examines how occasional literature addressed this pivotal moment in Argentina’s history as established and emerging writers discussed the country’s past and future. It discusses how Leopoldo Lugones’ Odas seculares, Alberto Gerchunoff’s The Jewish Gauchos, Ada María Elflein’s Del Pasado as well as nationalist book collections discussed the country’s cultural traditions vis-à-vis the arrival of millions of immigrants, the introduction of electoral reforms, and the emergence of a dissident form of political, social and cultural engagement. While the occasional literature produced in the year 1910 conveys a sense of optimism about Argentina’s historical ascent as a one of the world’s wealthiest nations, the political and cultural challenges resulting from the continuous flow of foreigners and the expansion of democratic participation after 1910 contributed to darken the triumphant mood that permeated the anniversary.

In contraposition to notions such as “transgression” or “marginality”, the idea of “dissidence” points towards the dismantling of binary figures and concepts that shape canonical readings of Argentinean literature. Literary writings on gender and sexual dissidence—especially after the second half of the 20th century and the first decades of 21st century—not only decenter heteronormative models  (masculine/feminine; hetero/homosexual; transgender/cisgender) but also drag with them a number of constitutive configurations of Argentinean cultural imagination, such as nationalism/cosmopolitanism, Peronism/antiperonism, lettered/non—lettered, etc. This essay analyzes a series of literary texts (from Manuel Puig´s El beso de la mujer araña to Gabriela Cabezón Cámara’s Las aventuras de la China Iron) in which sexual and gender opacity interrupts and displaces normative binarisms—at the same time bodily and cultural—showing the way in which the languages of dissidence set the ground for other cultural, as well as political, imaginaries.

The Argentine crisis of 2001 saw economic collapse, social unrest, and police repression. But if it caused a political and economic fracture with apocalyptic overtones, in literature – and in prose fiction, specifically – it did not mean a complete break with the past nor an eruption of the new, but instead the return or reformulation of the old. Despite everything, the 2000s was a period of productivity and global acclaim for Argentina’s writers. Certain activist uses of literature and its insertion in other areas of social praxis coexisted with a search for a personal voice, namely autofictions, writings of the self, and stories of everyday life. This chapter structures a reading of the literature of the 2000s around three key topics that emerge from this conjuncture: an aesthetic of recycling; an aesthetic of haunting; and the presence of a reinvigorated feminist gaze. After a period of scepticism about the role of literature in social change, these trends sparked a renewal of interest in the activist uses of fiction. At the same time, other writers made abject characters the protagonists of their stories and agitated for a literature that strives to be both autonomous and political at the same time.

Scholars have long understood Manuel Puig’s work as embedded in media history, as he reinvented the novel by adapting techniques from film, radio-novelas, and soap operas. Critics like Alan Pauls linked gossip to the media circuitry of Puig’s first novel, while Josefina Ludmer wrote of how radio-novelas pertain to the “justice of the kitchen knife” in Boquitas Pintadas, and Francine Masiello discussed the relationship between invertido and inversión that Puig plots in entangling sexuality, media, and neoliberal capital. This chapter deepens Puig’s media history with special attention to sound across Puig’s novels, but with a particular focus on El beso de la mujer araña (1976). That novel has been hailed for its cinematic flair, but critics have tended to ignore the importance of listening in the book: from Puig’s own tape-recorded interviews in preparing the manuscript to Molina’s listening as an agent of the state to the shared listening that brings the characters together. Drawing from work on “aurality” by Ana María Ochoa Gautier, Jonathan Sterne, and others, this chapter explains and analyzes how listening became Puig’s queer response to authoritarian power and the media technologies of his day.