Tales from the Pampas: Reading Argentine Literature

This course provides an overview of the development of Argentine literature from the 1800s to the present. One of the most important argentine writers today, César Aira, in his novel Ghosts (Los fantasmas), writes the following digression on the nature of art and literature: "And yet it is possible to imagine an art in which the limitations of reality would be minimized, in which the made and the unmade would be indistinct, an art that would be instantaneously real, without ghosts. And perhaps that art exists, under the name of literature." There are many ways in which literature can be conceived. That is a commonplace that speaks in a million tongues about the richness and vastness of literature. One possible way of conceiving it, according to Raymond Williams, is that "Literature" is something studied at school and at university in an intensely selective way, and the selection reveals a political bias. In a way, Williams believed that there was no such thing as abstracted "Literature": what is written is the product of a complex, internally warring society, and in order to understand writing we must understand how society works.

Having this in mind, this "Argentine" literature course will function as tool of revealing that same process of understanding how we live, why we do what we do and how things can be different from what they are. In other words, to understand not only literature as a product of a "complex, internally warring society," but also as a vast and powerful subject that wholly transcends its ground of interest. As a truly universal subject, literature is a never ending process by which the world keeps on going. After all, no wonder literature is often referred as the very "salt of the earth." By studying the most important argentine writers from 1800s to the present this course aims to define what makes literature such an important aspect of Argentine's cultural traditions.