(Paper for Contemporary Argentina: Reading the Last Decade, The University of Edinburgh, 26th March 2010). Original title: Mitología y cliché en las discusiones literarias.
Translation by J. C. Kelly (all rights reserved)
Instead of making a list of writers and tracing unlikely maps of generations and affinities from recent Argentinean literature, I’d rather expose some of the ideas that have dominated cultural criticism for at least the last thirty years and have determined the success or downfall of many writers or literary projects. Many of these ideas have become clichés in literary discussions: they are repeated mechanically; they circulate like received wisdom in culture supplements and magazines; they are never criticized or examined up close, but instead are accepted and adopted with suspicious unanimity, like the new common sense of the era, or the codeword of members-only access to certain aesthetic groups.