“Although mine is history…” Naturalism and photographic imaginaries in argentinean literature of the eighties

Abstract

The present work researches a series of literary works from the Argentinean 1880’s generation to explore the links between art, photography and science underlying the controversies about the Naturalist aesthetics in Argentina. As I will try to demonstrate, in the art–vs.–science dichotomy displayed in those debates photography was a recurrent metaphor of the harsh, radically scientist and lacking of any aesthetic distance realism commonly associated with the Naturalist literary language by its defenders and detractors. The discursive products of this process constitute nowadays an inestimable historical corpus of double entry documents; for they reveal, not only many aspects of a particular moment in the development of a modern Argentine literature, but also the status of photographic device in the aesthetic and scientific culture of the time.