“Are they sons or stepchildren?” An approach to the question of the aesthetic-political of children’s literatura: between narrative and poetry, between the legacy of the 90s and post 2001

Abstract

In this essay we raise the question about the political-aesthetics of what in Argentina is known as “children’s literature”, plotted between two decades that are usually presented as antagonistic: the 90s and 2000s, the neoliberal narrative of Menemism and the national-popular narrative of Kirchnerism. respectively, an element that supposes an articulation between these literary productions and the broader social space. From the sociology of literature, we reveal a series of interventions carried out by recognized agents of the cultural field, such as Tamara Kamenszain’s analysis of the Diary of a Montonera Princess. 110% Truth by Mariana Eva Perez, and the testimony of the filmmaker Nicolás Prividera, whose well-known categorization of the artistic productions of children of the disappeared –replicants, Frankensteinians or mutants – on the occasion of the presentation of Los topos by Félix Bruzzone, would be updated in the question that we borrow from him for our title: the dilemma between a critical literature of the 90s and a conformist one. Thus, we demonstrate the open and dynamic nature of the meanings around these “children’s” literatures, inevitably read in relation to the broader socio-political context, and the place that the poetic genre comes to asume –especially in the La Plata group Los Detectives Salvajes– facing a possible narrative commodification movement.