Controversies over allegory in the literature of Juan José Saer

Abstract

The academic reception of Juan José Saer's literature converged in the late 1970s with critical diagnosis of the allegorical turn in Argentine literature, as Nadie nada nunca was interpreted to be a dictatorship novel. The role of Beatriz Sarlo's contributions in this process has been widely highlighted. The purpose of this article is to analyse the set of critical interventions that underlie the notion of allegory at play in these works, which inaugurate the allegorical reading of Saer's literature. We seek to show that there are heterogeneous and at times contradictory conceptions coexisting in it, and that the traces of this tension