El cuerpo fantasmal de la literatura argentina: la transformación del público en la crítica de los ’50

Abstract

In the 1950s, a diverse array of observers noted with perplexity that the Argentine reading public and the figure of the reader had become something of a mystery. What these texts suggest, rather than the obsolescence of a hitherto known fact, is the decline of a previously assumed transparency: that of the nature of the readership and the motivations behind the act of reading. Protected from their own heterogeneity by the hegemony of humanistic discourse, these came to the foreground in the process of the omnivorous expansion of the cultural industry, and the social transformations that characterized the decade of Peronism (1946-55). Drawing on the analysis of the Sociología del público argentino by Adolfo Prieto (1956), this article illustrates the way in which inquiry into the nature of the public attempted to render intelligible the increasingly undifferentiated literary sphere, especially to a new generation of intellectuals who were attempting to redefine the political dimensions of literature.