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Dystopian Buenos Aires
Author(s) -
RIERA MONICA
Publication year - 2009
Publication title -
bulletin of latin american research
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.24
H-Index - 33
eISSN - 1470-9856
pISSN - 0261-3050
DOI - 10.1111/j.1470-9856.2008.00296.x
Subject(s) - dystopia , narrative , character (mathematics) , modernity , art , identity (music) , metropolitan area , humanities , art history , history , literature , philosophy , aesthetics , archaeology , geometry , mathematics , epistemology
This article explores the dystopian presence of Buenos Aires in Roberto Arlt’s Los siete locos (The seven madmen) and its companion novel, Los lanzallamas (The flamethrowers). Both belong to a tradition of metropolitan narrative represented in Europe by authors such as Robert Musil, Alfred Döblin and James Joyce. Arlt’s work, however, has a distinctive character, since it connects the expectations and anxieties unleashed by modernity with a dystopian imagination which has origins in nineteenth‐century Argentina with its raison d’être being profoundly linked to the formation of an Argentine national identity.