National Dreams, Worldly Visions

Abstract

This essay explores the intertwined trajectories of a cluster of Argentine magazines, leftist and avant-garde: Proa, Martín Fierro, Insurrexit, and Revista de Oriente which, in their own peculiar ways, rocked and transformed the Buenos Aires cultural scene. It charts the magazines’ fleeting – though momentous – life-spans and existences at a time of revolution, when small collectives of writers and students spread radical and reformist ideas, formal experimentation, and a vernacular revival. While the nagging question of national identity underpinned the magazines’ literary aesthetics, the essay shows that, from the start, those at the editorial helm increasingly steered them towards the wider waters of world literature. Inasmuch as they realised that the conundrum of how to invent a modern Argentine literature could only be resolved dialectically, facing both inwards and outwards, nationally and transnationally, through the relationship between Argentina, Latin America, and the world at large.