Lugares en conflicto: la crítica y el ensayo como escrituras de la lectura

Abstract

The situation of the literary critical essay in Argentina in the last decades of the 20th century is approached from the analysis of two texts referred to this subject: “La crítica: entre la literatura y el público” (1984) by Beatriz Sarlo and “Entredichos sobre la decadencia del ensayo argentino”(1985) by Eduardo Grüner, the last one published in Sitio magazine. Both texts, published in the context of the so-called “democratic transition”, present respective diagnoses regarding the decline and crisis of the essay not as a genre, but as a form of critical intervention. At the intersection of these two different perspectives, some guidelines can be drawn in connection with the tensions between criticism and essay, since the writings of Grüner and Sarlo not only assume different ways of adapting or resisting historical processes that go through the intellectual experience of the last decades (the professionalization of discourses, the compartmentalization of disciplines, changes in the social place of criticism, the autonomization of the intellectual field), but also they suppose antagonistic ways of imagining the relationship between writing, reading and power.