Literature and Politics: Cultural Dilemmas in "Radiografía de la Pampa" by Ezequiel Martínez Estrada

Abstract

Even though it is well known that in the 30s in Argentina the process of professionalization of the writer gets consolidated due to the difference in their practices and the view of their legitimate figure in the cultural sphere of the country, the essayist Ezequiel Martínez Estrada presents an image of himself and the intellectuals of his time that disagrees with the hegemonic stance and establishes an ideological and aesthetic project that, divested of uncertainty, questions and causes problems to the strategies of the public power, in which concentrates the complete intensity of his denouncing speech. Intellectuals and politics are built in a biunivocous and homogeneous counterpoint, since they are not scissionable and condemnable. Struggle with the cultural system, which arouses due to such bonds, destabilizes the standardized public image, as regards the relative but growing act of becoming autonomous of our national culture. In this sense, the job will consist on straining these positions to show the controversial circumstances that the essayist designs according to its changeable location in the local cultural field.