CONICET | Buscador de Institutos y Recursos Humanos

The present research is in line with the steady emergence of many essays, articles, and discussions in the Spanish-language context during the last two decades regarding the status of literature, particularly those related to the issue of post-autonomous literatures, a category proposed by Josefina Ludmer. Conceived as an attack to the by-now-traditional concept of literary autonomy, the term postautonomous literature is an attempt to reverse the paradigms that defined the value of literature: literature becomes an economic matter, economic matters become literary, and reality and fiction are no longer two distinct territories, they intertwine, they become the same, they merge into reality-fiction. The aim of this research is to explore and analyze the scope of this critical discussion in an actual text corpus comprising the many new voices of Argentine literature. The main source for this research are the works of the controversial author Washington Cucurto (1973), but it also includes the literary works of other authors who have made a big impact in the last two decades: Ariel Magnus, Cecilia Pavón, Dalia Rosetti, Juan Terranova, Leonardo Oyola, Pedro Mairal, Sergio Di Nucci. A contrastive analysis of the works of Cucurto and these other authors, as well as their public appearances, presents at least three subjects where postautonomous literatures severely attack significant areas of literature as an autonomous art: author, themes and language(s), and books. The so-far scarcely analyzed works of Washington Cucurto are representative of this literary heteronomy, which can be seen in a new configuration of the author?s figure, in the reality-fiction adjacency of themes along with a language that puts an end to a univocal determination between real and fictional experience, and in the production of books that, as objects, signal the economic course of literature.