Curious inhabitants. The work of Bustos Domecq and B. Suárez Lynch as an aesthetic and cultural discussion

Authors

María del Carmen Marengo

Keywords:

literary studies, aesthetic and cultural analysis, parody, satire, irony, literature, argentine culture, Bustos Domecq, Honorio, Suarez Lynch, B., pseudonyms, modernity, tradition, cultural criticism, Borges, Jorge Luis, 1899-1986, Bioy Casares, Adolfo, 1914-1999, 20th century

Synopsis

This work analyzes how the collaborative work written by Jorge Luis Borges and Adolfo Bioy Casares, published under the names H. Bustos Domecq and B. Suárez Lynch, articulates a discussion about Argentine literature and culture in the early decades of the 20th century. This highlights the authors' efforts to carry out an aesthetic renewal as well as to achieve a different configuration of the intellectual field. Among the multiple trends present in Argentine culture during those years (modernism, realism, avant-garde), regionalist realism takes on special importance in these texts as a target of parody. Likewise, a recurring theme throughout the corpus is nationalism in its different forms and historical mutations. The ideological position taken by the work of Borges and Bioy can be identified, in principle, with that of the magazine Sur; however, it goes further and acquires the anarchic characteristics of carnival, in the Bakhtinian sense, where everything is mocked, even themselves. From the marginal space in which this work is located, an attempt is being made to develop new aesthetic parameters, an operation that coincides with the crisis of realism that took place in Latin America beginning in the 1940s.

Author Biography

María del Carmen Marengo

PhD in Latin American Literature from the University of Maryland at College Park and Master's Degree in Sociosemiotics from the National University of Córdoba. She is an assistant professor in the Argentine Literature III department of the School of Letters at the National University of Córdoba. She co-directs the research team “Re/presentations of otherness, aesthetic experimentation, and changes in the contemporary Argentine literary system (from 1940 to the present).”
She published the book Geographies of Poetry. Representación del espacio y formación del campo de la poesía argentina en la década del cincuenta (Geographies of Poetry: Representation of Space and Formation of the Field of Argentine Poetry in the 1950s) (2006), for which she won the Luis de Tejeda Prize in 2005.
She received a doctoral scholarship (2000-2002) and a postdoctoral scholarship (2003-2005) from the Antorchas Foundation. She has participated in numerous scientific events and contributed to specialized publications both nationally and internationally. She is the author of the poetry books El fuego invisible (The Invisible Fire, 2001), El camino de los ángeles (The Way of the Angels, 2003), and El libro de los jardines y los abismos (The Book of Gardens and Abysses, 2007), as well as the novella El legado (The Legacy, 2010).

Downloads

Published

August 1, 2014

Details about this monograph

ISBN-13 (15)

978-950-33-1114-1