Abstract:

A Literature for the Desert. Territorial Fictions in Argentine Literature is the construction and theorization of multi-discursive corpus of nineteenth and twentieth century texts that range from literary fictions, travel books, scientific treaties, geopolitical essays, political discourses that coalesce around a very specific aesthetic, political, and scientific category that emerges in early nineteenth century Argentina: the desert . By analyzing texts from different disciplines, this dissertation uses literary-critical methods to trace a path across an intricate network of disparate texts and authors that juxtapose, quote, translate, and contradict each other.

The first part follows the traces of naturalist and commercial European travelers through South-American plains (Part I: "An introduction to the space''). The second part explores nineteenth century Argentina's territorial politics---a battlefield where statesmen, military men, landlords, journalists, writers, gauchos, Indians, and European immigrants fought for the meaning of the desert (Part II: "A desert for the nation").

Our goal has been to write a spatial history by assembling these loose pieces of a long and dispersed territorial narration which enable us to give a visibility to a concrete production of space concealed or presupposed for the literary and the political theories of post Independence Argentina in particular, and of Western Modernity at large. Using Deleuzian and Foucaultian categories as a compass for reading South-American plains and plateaus, what this dissertation explores is a map of forces filling spaces and fighting for the control of the land and its nomadic bodies---a tension between civilization and its discontents, between civilized politics of the space, and less explored forces rejecting the national State and its forms of organization, transgressing limits, avoiding classifications, creating new political and aesthetic values.