El lenguaje de la amistad. Las redes intelectuales, el campo literario y el grupo Shanghai

Resumen

The following dissertation addresses the Argentine Shanghai group careers, drawing on the intellectual networks approach and its interaction with national and international literary fields. The corpus analyzed comprises the twenty-two issues of Babel. Revista de Libros magazine; a collection of articles, interviews, memoirs, and testimonies which demonstrate the sustained maintenance of the group; as well as a wide set of self-referential narrative –scarcely studied to date–, in addition to anthologies and other manifestations of collective creation –also overlooked by critics. Its main hypothesis is that networks play a key role in literary systems, not only in the formation of original literary expressions but also in the insertion of emerging writers in established artistic systems. Conceptually, the thesis relies on a wide range of disciplines, from sociology, history, philosophy, anthropology to digital humanities, literary theory, and cultural criticism. It begins by critically reviewing the conceptual history of intellectual network notion, which is then linked to sociology of culture approaches engaged with recent studies in world literature, also considering the political, economic, and cultural context of Argentina in the late twentieth century. The second part of this study uncovers the everchanging aesthetic ethos and the relationships patterns of the Shanghai network, in order to shed light on its beginning as well as its consolidation as an established social structure. Reading the self-referential novels written by the authors group side by side with the textual and paratextual documents which prove their association over time, reveals the narrow connection among these narratives, their subjects of enunciation, and their position in the network. These correspondences lead to proposing a cross-cutting reading of the critical and commercial reception of these writers’ work in the first decade of the 21st century, in terms of the local and global circulation of Latin American literature and the role played by agents, institutions and regional constraints from the Global South