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.

This chapter argues that contemporary openings to utopian thinking are confronted by an array of different temporal frameworks that afford radically different possibilities for human agency and cohere with radically different political and ethical demands. These include, on the one hand, the geologic time scale of the Anthropocene, the long historical time informing social activism and social justice movements (e.g., the perspectives afforded by the histories of slavery, genocide, and colonialism), and the utopian perspective of hope or what Ernst Bloch calls anticipatory illumination. These must confront, on the other hand, the cyclical time of economic growth and recession, the exigent time of electoral cycles, and the frozen time of “capitalist realism.” This chapter explores conceptual and fictional responses to this matrix of possibilities, especially in narratives by Cormac McCarthy, Donna Haraway, Nisi Shawl, and Kim Stanley Robinson.

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.