Criticism and Nonfiction: Poetics and Politics Around a Genre in Los Libros Magazine (1969–1976)

Abstract

The operation of re-foundation of Argentine literary criticism promoted by Los Libros journal (1969-1976) took place simultaneously with a series of interventions that also aimed at re-founding in the literary field: those that had the purpose of giving legitimacy to a genre, nonfiction. In this sense, our article considers the way in which the literary irruption of nonfiction was approached from Los Libros. The starting point is the paradoxical place that these narratives occupied in the eyes of the journal's critics: on the one hand, they could lend themselves to the reductions of “naive realism” that they denounced; on the other hand, they opened a questioning of the dominant parameters of literary legitimization that was akin to their project. We will examine the corollaries of this paradox in an analysis of different aspects of the journal: the lists of books published in each issue, the reviews and articles, and the documentary zones of critical discourse. We propose that non-fiction poses a fundamental problem for Los Libros: that of the distance required for critical practice to be constituted as such, sustaining its specificity in the face of sociological reduction and mimicry with political action.