Sistema Regional de Información
en línea para Revistas Científicas de América Latina,
el Caribe, España y Portugal

This paper aims to analyze how children's memory linked to the last Argentine dictatorship is constructed in Raquel Robles' novel Pequeños combatientes (2013), and also how the identity of parents linked to militancy is taken up by the narrator through play. The configuration of a guerrilla performance without weapons runs throughout the autofiction and allows us to explore the link between the language of militancy and the language of children. This experience of loss defines the subjectivity of this child and it is from the condition of vulnerability that she “fights” the pain of her parents' absence. To explore this, we will make use of the category “narratives of memory” by Leonor Arfuch (2018) and “materialities of memory” by Elizabeth Jelin (2017), as well as more recent works such as those of Fira Chmiel (2023) and Victoria Daona (2020), among others. Likewise, we postulate that in this novel, childhood memory is reconstructed from certain everyday objects and knowledge that circulate in the family environment and populate the world of childhood.

This article presents an exploration of Los mocos de la furia by Liliana Bodoc, illustrated by María Wernicke. Siglo XXI, with Laura Leibiker as editor, published the book in March 2024. The text originates from the speech with which Liliana Bodoc inaugurated FILBA (Buenos Aires International Literature Festival) in 2017. Our analysis employs themes of vulnerability as the primary category of literary inquiry. To this end, we will first define the concept of vulnerability that we aim to discern within the work in question and examine how this concept undergoes transformation when expressed through the symbolic language of literary creation. Finally, we will present the proposed analysis. This study is framed within the research conducted under PROICO 04-1223, Poetics of Vulnerability in Contemporary Literature, which seeks to address vulnerability –considering its conceptual complexity– as a generator of unique representations and poetics, from which children's literature is not exempt.

In the rhapsodic potpourri that constitutes Macunaíma, we can observe a singular assimilation of satire –one that parasitizes and recreates, irreverently, the conventions of modern literature and psychosocial theory–. This “brinquedo”, as Mário de Andrade calls it in the first unpublished preface, is less a reformist critique denouncing the “characterless” and more a playful portrait of Brazil –at times raw, yet also compassionate and condescending– that accentuates, in the “hero of our people”, a national culture that is complex, boundless, and elusive, resisting modern imperatives of characterization. This interpretation becomes evident when examining the counterpoint between the rhapsody and academic debates on national culture, as well as the dialogues the work engages in with productions aimed at the general public in newspapers and magazines contemporary to its time. We also question the association of Macunaíma with popular rhapsodism and “rhapsodic literatures”. Ultimately, Macunaíma emerges as both a medium for investigation and a sensitive meeting point for Mário de Andrade’s exploration of Brazilian popular culture.

One of the nominal poetics or name-performances in fictional characters from Southern Cone literature during the last two decades of the twentieth century and the first two of the twenty-first is what we have termed nominal supplementarity. This operates through the displacement, substitution, or distortion of characters’ proper names by others, within literary discourses shaped by the cultural framework of post-industrial capitalism and globalized subjectivities. In the texts El cuarto mundo by Diamela Eltit (1988), Keres cojer? = guan tu fak by Alejandro López (2005), and “La travesti y el cuervo” by Copi (1984), this mechanism is organized around trans becomings. Our working hypothesis is that these becomings, grounded in the name, even more than presenting a properly trans-affirmative or subjectivating character (in López and partially in Copi), make visible and deconstruct broader structures. They introduce a rupture in the narrative as catalysts or turning points, either to condense an allegory (Eltit) or a parody (Copi, López) of large-scale social and political structures: imperialism in Third World nations, gore and transnational capitalism (Valencia, 2010), and the incursion of the internet into subjectivity and labor. These allegorical or parodic modulations are linked, in the case of Eltit and Copi, to the construction of “delirious subjectivities” (Guattari and Rolnik, 2006); while in the case of López, they concentrate on ways of incorporating digitality into perceived subjectivity.

Since 1898, the Buenos Aires magazine Caras y Caretas was a pioneering publication in making available a wide variety of printed texts and images, offering a varied assortment of articles to a wide, heterogeneous and fundamentally urban readership. Between December 1924 and October 1925, Horacio Quiroga created for Caras y Caretas a collection of texts about animals of the Guaranític area of ​​the Paraná River where the writer lived for a decade. Two factors come together in the way in which Nature is presented there to the readers' gaze: the magazine as a great storehouse of texts and images and the expertise of a writer whose knowledge of the journalistic medium and his skill in the techniques of the trade guided his production between its principles of artistic autonomy and the demands of the market. The following year, the publishing house which had begun to publish Quiroga's books, organized a promotional campaign for his work that included a note in Caras y Caretas about the writer's life in the jungle. The area that these pages invited us to explore was a great quarry of resources, rich in rare and colorful specimens that renewed the illustrated weekly’s stock for the consumption and pleasure of its readers, at the same time configuring specific ways of seeing and reading literature.

With an insistence that is evident in the testimonies of his contemporaries, but mainly in a set of interventions in the press written by the author, Fogwill strove to open a place for himself in the Argentine literary field of the 1980s. It was not just any place but rather a specific and clearly demarcated one through a series of operations that included the early explanation of certain affiliations, the editorial dimension (the creation of the Tierra Baldía press together with Osvaldo Lamborghini and Oscar Steimberg), the controversies he held with other writers and the deliberate attempt to install new readings. In terms of the distribution of cultural formations in the context of the 70s and 80s in Argentina, the place in which Fogwill worries about inserting himself to develop his literary project from there is the one that could be located at the point of convergence between Literal and Babel. We maintain that the set of actions carried out by Fogwill to position his literary work was guided by an ethics of writing, which was based, in turn, on a certain autonomist ideal of literature.

The present article examines the fundamental lines of discussion in the critiques by Milena Rodríguez Gutiérrez (2009, 2010, 2015, 2021, and 2023) and Laura Maccioni (2017 and 2018) as background for an analysis of the politics of literature and the female condition in the poetic work of Fina García Marruz. The study presents the approaches and evaluations that intersect the politics of literature and the female condition, highlighting the recurring associations with the concepts of commitment and dissent in relation to the state order and literary production. The findings are discussed in light of the thought of French philosopher Jacques Rancière, particularly regarding the relationship between the politics of literature and regimes of democratic expression. The article concludes that, although the critical texts do not explicitly use Rancierian terminology, they argue for the configuration of the politics of literature in relation to the female condition—an aspect that had not been previously considered in this type of analysis.

Hadas, brujas y señoritas (1997) by Aurora Venturini gathers a compendium of stories whose narrative voices, tones, and characters are mediated and configured by the coexistence of feelings of fascination and repulsion. These feelings materialize the strangeness and negativity of the objects/subjects of contemplation, as well as the narrative voice, which, as it participates in the intimate or close space of the main character, exposes the sinister and abject places. The affective orientation of the voice morbidly exposes intimate dynamics, violent and oppressive practices, incest, and abuse, through qualities linked to Gothic aesthetics. Specifically, the work aims to analyze the stories in Fairies, Witches, and Ladies through the way affections participate in the intermediate space between bodies. Rather than seeking to represent themes of horror, it is about investigating, from the perspective of the affective turn, their function in the intermediate space between voices and objects/subjects of interest as it allows for an expanded perspective on the real and social issues within the family context, outside pre-established codes.

Impureza, by Marcelo Cohen, imagines a peripheral territory where the lives of the popular sectors unfold, especially focusing on the educational trajectories of young people cast into precarity, deprivation and permanent violence. This article analyzes the construction of the protagonists’ subjectivities, with their moments of rupture and transformation; and their relationships with the desires, aspirations, sensibilities and capitalist-produced models of happiness. It also explores conceptions of language, from the idea of verbal virus, which reproduces hegemonic forms of symbolic order, to the possibilities of subversion and poetic deviation. Furthermore, it examines the alternative modes of memory construction, contrasting a uniform, media-driven, and technological memory, which becomes either spectacle or religious cult, with an intimate memory, composed as a material and sensory event of strong impact. Finally, the workings of meaning are observed —between controlled containment and dissemination— through the analysis of the grammars that organize the characters’ behaviors, the compositional level of the novel and the instance of enunciation, exploring the links between language and experience, between noise and silence, between the suspension of the word and the prodigy of narration. 

This article proposes an analysis of the construction of literary space in the texts of Argentinian journalist Leila Guerriero—Los suicidas del fin del mundo (2006), El rastro en los huesos (2008), Una historia sencilla (2013), Opus Gelber (2019), La otra guerra (2021), and La llamada (2024)—through the lens of what Foucault (2010) termed heterotopy. A documentary bibliographic review and qualitative content analysis are used to establish parallels between the configuration of literary space and those real places outside of all places that serve as the setting for the stories. Descriptions are examined as a resource for characterizing these spaces, and the analysis explores how the construction of metaphor gives depth and connects the spatial framework to the protagonist characters.