Revista del Centro de Investigaciones Teórico-literarias de la Facultad de Humanidades y Ciencias. Se trata de una revista científica, exclusivamente electrónica y de frecuencia semestral (mayo y noviembre). Se aceptan sólo artículos originales e inéditos en español y portugués que presenten resultados de investigaciones en el campo de los estudios literarios y que no estén siendo evaluados simultáneamente por otra publicación. También recibe reseñas bibliográficas. El objetivo de la revista es difundir resultados de investigaciones científicas en el campo de la teoría y la crítica literarias.
Sobre: El hombre que vio al oso, de Nora Avaro. Rosario/Santiago de Chile: Nube Negra/Bulk editores, 2024.
Little Class: Aporophobia and Class Ascension in 21st‒Century Literature (Presentation)
This article introduces the dossier for this issue of the journal, in which we aim to address the problem of social class in contemporary literatures through two key axes: class ascension and aporophobia. The former, also conceptualized as «class defection» highlights the persistence of symbolic inequalities beyond processes of social mobility and upward movement and reveals the reconfiguration of intellectual fields and the role of cognitive work within the neoliberal machinery. The latter examines the forms of systemic violence enacted through political imaginaries that project and institutionalize hatred or violence against various contemporary manifestations of material poverty —often produced by these very systems themselves.
Writings of unwork: on negativity, action and work
In this article I propose to examine a field of thought where different styles of the critique of work (noun and verb) converge, which I suggest to call the space of unwork. Georges Bataille, Maurice Blanchot and Jean-Luc Nancy are some of the most prominent representatives of this space and are also the creators of two fundamental figures of contemporary philosophy that the article submits to a historical and conceptual interpretation: «negativity without employment» and «unworking». To conclude, I recapitulate the participation of each of them in the aesthetic, political and ontological critique of the idea of work, with a view to assessing the relevance of their contributions to current debates on negativity, action and work.
Sobre: Semiótica en Chile: cartografía de las investigaciones entre 1990‒2015, de Elizabeth Parra Ortiz, Sandra Meza Fernández y Gabriel Guajardo Soto. Ciudad Autónoma de Buenos Aires: Sb, 2023
The «Exile Narrative» of Contemporary Writers in Forced Migration in France and Germany: Between Precariousness and Identity Reinvention
This article examines the autobiographical writings of contemporary exiled writers in France and Germany, focusing on their experience of displacement and the identity contradictions they face. It explores how the conditions of forced migration, such as social precariousness and language acquisition, mark a rupture in the lives of exiles and engender a sense of social decline. It also addresses factors like gender, sexual identity, origins and reasons for exile to understand the variations in their narratives from a sociological perspective. We draw on analytical tools developed in the study of «class defectors» to examine how exile narratives can be read both as accounts of social downgrading and mobility, but also in their specificity: produced within configurations of social marginalization, shaped by the expression of precarization and, in some cases, by traumatic experiences linked to exile. The writers reinvent their identity and storytelling in the context of exile, contributing to the transformation of contemporary narrative forms.
Voices, Archives and Contexts: Some Problems Concerning the Editing of Lectures
Editing professors’lectures is a complex task that requires multiple conceptual and methodological considerations. The heterogeneity of preserved materials —manuscript notes, students’ notebooks, sound recordings, and transcriptions— complicates the relationship between the available sources and the actual production of the lectures, raising questions about how to approach the teaching practice of critic‒professors in Argentine universities and within different historical-institutional contexts. In this sense, the article does not aim to provide conclusive answers or to establish normative criteria applicable to all editorial processes, but rather to critically problematize the possible ways in which the edition of university lectures can be conceived. The central hypothesis argues that editing entails, simultaneously, an operation of interpretation and intervention upon the sources. This involves an unavoidable negotiation between two dimensions: on the one hand, the preservation of the conceptual argumentation developed by the professor; on the other, the inscription of the performative and contextual situation in which the lecture took place. For this reason, editing must be understood as a dialectical practice where the expository‒argumentative and the contextual dimensions intertwine, requiring a critical exercise of selection between what is preserved and what is excluded.
Drawing on interviews and unpublished materials from his personal archive, this article investigates how Argentine writer Leopoldo Brizuela (1963-2019) elaborated his social identity throughout his life and work, reconfiguring his family histories, connecting in diverse ways with heterogeneous cultural spaces and redefining himself in terms of class, race and gender. The son of the «natural son» of a maid who worked for a wealthy family, a student at an elite Catholic school in La Plata, marked by a mandate to social climbing while devoted to anonymous folklore, Brizuela defined himself at the end of his life, with «pride», as a «negrito fino». This definition points to a different path from the one that Pierre Bourdieu and Didier Eribon postulated for the subjects of «dominated» social groups who succeed in the space of «legitimate culture». Brizuela’s challenge consisted precisely in constituting himself as a sophisticated writer and as a homosexual, and not only not distancing himself but intensifying his relationship to his imaginary place of origin.
Le jeu de Marseille or the arcane becoming. Latin America in surreal encryption
<span class="NormalTextRun BookmarkStart BookmarkEnd SCXW32002260 BCX0" data-ccp-parastyle="Standard" data-ccp-parastyle-defn="{"ObjectId":"3dc782ce-c662-564e-853e-e04bf18a4572|1","ClassId":1073872969,"Properties":[469775450,"Standard",201340122,"2",134233614,"true",469778129,"Standard",335572020,"1",469777841,"Liberation Serif",469777842,"Lohit Devanagari",469777843,"Noto Serif CJK SC",469777844,"Liberation Serif",469769226,"Liberation Serif,Lohit Devanagari,Noto Serif CJK SC",268442635,"24"]}">n the centenary of surrealism, wondering about its survival, it is worth looking at Le jeu de Marseille (1941), a surrealist tarot in which a clear path for the rebellious imagination is projected. The project resonates with Breton's exhortation to guide surrealism towards a «deep concealment», which prevents its appropriation by the public, the new social subjectivity generated by the media, convergent with contemporary fascisms. This deck, a surreal synthesis of the French deck with the Marseille tarot, offers, like the manifestos, a coordinate system for the recreational use of the collective. Each arcane encrypts a library that Nazism consigns to the fire. With its multiple combinations, the deck is presented as a route to the unexplored «logical zones» of modernity. The cards are also the access route of the Latin American imagination to the Tarot of Marseille. Latin America resonates in the cards of the Montevideo native Lautréamont and that of Alicia, by Wifredo Lam, as well as in the arcane Pancho Villa, by Max Ernst. Through this Mexican route, Alejandro Jodorowsky projects a surreal experience in the cult cinema of the 70s and, years later, embarks on the of the Tarot of Marseille.
Sobre: Castillos en el aula. Reflexiones y propuestas didácticas para aprender y disfrutar con el medievalismo, de Lidia Raquel Miranda y Gerardo Fabián Rodríguez, (Eds.) Santa Rosa: Editorial Universidad Nacional de La Pampa 2024
Sobre: El Quijote de 1605 capítulo a capítulo. Un manual, de Juan Diego Vila. Buenos Aires: Eudeba, 2024.
Those wretched lives: figurations of precarity in the short stories of Mariana Enriquez
Argentine literature captures the political, economic, social, spatial, and cultural transformations brought about by the full implementation of neoliberalism during the 1990s and early 21st century through configurations of experience and the redistribution of the visible. This paper proposes the emergence of affective and perceptual fictions of precarity that accommodate social subjects affected by poverty or in the process of impoverishment, as well as lives marked by misery, instability, fragility, and lack of protection. These are perceptual fictions, as they manage to fracture the normative frameworks of recognition, making the emergence of precarious subjects possible; they are also affective fictions, as this phenomenon impacts subjectivities, altering the realm of perception and the disposition of emotions. Additionally, the paper examines the configuration of precarity in Mariana Enriquez’s short stories «El carrito» and «El chico sucio», analyzing the characterization of impoverished subjects through figures, topics, and images that reactivate cultural grammars around poverty while also transgressing them; it also explores the construction of the poor as a threatening alterity, a «poor-monster» that can provoke sensations of danger as well as stubborn fascination.
«Highest intensity on publishing seminars, journals and books». UNR Literature Degree and Rosario’s Publishing Field (1955‒1980)
This paper proposes a contextualized survey of some of the publishing projects in which students, graduates and professors of the Literature Department of the Universidad Nacional de Rosario participated between the end of the 1950s and the beginning of the 1980s: the periodicals Pausa (1957‒1961), Boletín de Literaturas Hispánicas (1959‒1966), El arremangado brazo (1963‒1964) and Setecientomonos (1964‒1967), the series Cuadernos del Instituto de Letras (1964-1965) and the publishing houses Editorial Biblioteca (1965‒1977) and La Cachimba (1972‒2001). By studying these particular initiatives, the objective is to describe and analyze some of the most relevant general phenomena in the history of literature and literary criticism publishing in the city of Rosario, and to evaluate the incidence of the agents associated with the Literature Department in the publishing field of Rosario. Thus, this paper intends to show that the links between Argentine public universities and the development of publishing initiatives in the provinces are not limited to the creation and management of university presses.
Class Ascension, «Barrio» Literature and the Right to Resentment: a Conversation with Alberto Santamaría and Valentín Roma
In this interview, Alberto Santamaría and Valentín Roma reflect on the literature of social ascension, working-class memory, and class identity. In their works, both authors narrate their transition from peripheral and industrial neighborhoods to the intellectual sphere, exploring the tension between their attachment to working‒class culture and the necessity of escape. Drawing on the role of the factory as both a center of life and a source of conflict, as well as the influence of culture in their process of emancipation, they critically examine issues such as the romanticization of the proletariat and the autofiction genre, masculinity in working‒class environments, normative codes of sensibility, and various forms of symbolic violence. Additionally, they assert the right to resentment and critical memory as essential elements of their narratives.
Poitiers, winter 2000. A conversation among scholars about the characteristic stanza of Martín Fierro suddenly turns into a performance. A leading critic of José Hernández's work begins to sing the first verses of the poem following the melodic and rhythmic conventions of canto por cifra. The scene conjures vital theoretical and poetic issues: the relationships between orality and writing, authorship and performance, composition and improvisation, phonocentrism and graphocentrism. All these questions hint at another one that belongs to what we might call the poetics of criticism: can the critic sing?
Sobre: La ciudad Letrada. Un ensayo, de Ángel Rama. Edición al cuidado de Nora Catelli y Edgardo Dobry. Barcelona: Trampa, 2024
Critical figures on the otherness of the áporos. An interregional study on contemporary Argentine dramaturgy
Through their contributions to a regional and decentralizing historiography of art and literature, Argentine dramaturgies from the Patagonia and Northwest regions allow us to recognize and study different representations of «historical alterities». Therefore, in this article we will analyze critical figurations of otherness read in terms of aporophobia. To carry out this inquiry, we organized a specific observational map, based on scenic «nodes» designed by plays from the northern and southern regions, in the period 1983‒2002. This dramaturgical cartography will provide different conceptual topics, historical images, stylistic procedures and aesthetic notions about the poetic corrosion of the aporophobic organized from these textualities.
Poetics of the proper name in three female authors of the Southern Cone: Somers, Eltit y Meruane
The magical disposition of the proper name has been based throughout history on the belief in the essential link between name and referent. It is no coincidence that the plautine phrase popularized as nomen est omen: «Name is destiny», acquires fame in the Latin literary tradition. Although this essential and mythical power of the proper name weakened and diminished over the centuries, it did not disappear completely. After exploring the magical disposition of the name based on the Greco-Latin tradition, the customs of certain native peoples, and certain religious discourses, this article aims to address the contemporary modulation of magic in the nominal poetics of some texts by writers from the Southern Cone: Armonía Somers, Diamela Eltit and Lina Meruane. The hypothesis is that this contemporary magical tenor promotes specific performances of the name or nominal supplement that reactivate the augural-ominal aspects. These are organized within the sphere of nominal aesthetics, under the modulations of paradox, and parody, which without canceling the magical component, add complexity to it.
Piety and crime. Reflections on religion in the Argentine crime fiction
Since its beginnings, it´s possible to find links between the crime fiction narrative and religion. These connections are expressed both in literature —the work of Gilbert K. Chesterton with his father Brown is a clear example— and, sporadically, in criticism. In this article, we propose to explore some of these meeting points in Argentine crime fiction based on the analysis of stories by classic authors such as Leonardo Castellani and Rodolfo Walsh to the productions of Leonardo Oyola and Gabriela Cabezón Cámara. We understand that in Argentine literature the links between religion and crime fiction have been, on the one hand, a constant that deserves to be attended to and systematized; On the other hand, these links are particularly unstable because they redefine and explore alternative dimensions of religion.