Inflections of the memorial turn in the Argentine literary field: theoretical debates and literary designs

Abstract

We propose to interrogate the extent to which the experience of state terrorism in Argentina provoked transformations in the cultural, artistic, and literary field. We begin by considering the change in the political-cultural context of Argentina and the Southern Cone in the 1980s, given by the defeat of the revolutionary left, the beginning of democracies and the emergence of memory politics, which implies a shift from the revolutionary matrix to the human rights agenda. 

So, what were the challenges –movements, transformations, shifts, innovations– that arose, and what responses did literature (in aesthetics, literary genres, in the canon, in representations, and imaginaries) and the new inquiries of literary criticism attempt to address? The formation of an area of ​​literature and memory studies, of an interdisciplinary nature, was established to try to account for these significant changes that intervened in a certain order and knowledge of the literary field. This area is characterized by establishing a series of debates that are specific, especially those referring to the representation of radical evil, by organizing a specific textual corpus focused on testimony as well as new logics in the production circuit (writer, institutions, market, reception), by the preeminence of some particular aesthetic tendencies in relation to literary genres, writings, tropes, imaginaries and languages, by recovering certain literary traditions and genealogies that now not only refer to the national or Latin American canon, but also to the literatures that emerged around the Shoah, for the new links with social movements and activisms that redefine the autonomous status of art, for working on many occasions with intermediary artistic expressions that combine diverse forms of art demanding the need to consider an artistic field and not just literary.