La representación literaria y la construcción espacial de la pampa argentina – un análisis de textos desde el siglo XIX hasta el XXI
This paper analyzes the spacialization of the pampa in Argentine literature, both
canonical works and contemporary ones. How is rurality and the Argentine countryside
represented in these works? How do they expand upon or challenge each other? The immensity
of the pampa and its vast plains has served as a focal point of fascination for various authors and
Argentine political leaders, intimately related to ideas of frontier and progress. It has served as a
site for various political dreams and agendas throughout history and presidential administrations,
even to propel its own extermination project to assert dominion over the pampa and assassinate
its own Indigenous people. The various conceptualizations of the pampa and the people who
inhabit and care for the land—the gauchos and indigenous communities—demonstrate a larger
dichotomy of the city and the urban versus the countryside and the rural, or as Sarmiento puts
it—civilization and barbarie. The effort to tame the ‘wild’ pampa produces the immense projects
of agricultural development that we see today, degrading the land and poisoning the bodies of
rural people. More contemporarily, the spacialization of the city and the country in contemporary
Argentine literature begins to subvert and defy the traditional binary thinking of the two spaces. I
analyze Argentine literature from the 19th century to the 21st century to show how the locus of
the pampa and other rural spaces has changed over time, showing the reconfiguration of the
country’s landscape in literature.
canonical works and contemporary ones. How is rurality and the Argentine countryside
represented in these works? How do they expand upon or challenge each other? The immensity
of the pampa and its vast plains has served as a focal point of fascination for various authors and
Argentine political leaders, intimately related to ideas of frontier and progress. It has served as a
site for various political dreams and agendas throughout history and presidential administrations,
even to propel its own extermination project to assert dominion over the pampa and assassinate
its own Indigenous people. The various conceptualizations of the pampa and the people who
inhabit and care for the land—the gauchos and indigenous communities—demonstrate a larger
dichotomy of the city and the urban versus the countryside and the rural, or as Sarmiento puts
it—civilization and barbarie. The effort to tame the ‘wild’ pampa produces the immense projects
of agricultural development that we see today, degrading the land and poisoning the bodies of
rural people. More contemporarily, the spacialization of the city and the country in contemporary
Argentine literature begins to subvert and defy the traditional binary thinking of the two spaces. I
analyze Argentine literature from the 19th century to the 21st century to show how the locus of
the pampa and other rural spaces has changed over time, showing the reconfiguration of the
country’s landscape in literature.
