CUENTOS PLAYEROS: CIUDADES BALNEARIAS EN LA LITERATURA ARGENTINA

Abstract

Sea coasts are not frequently found in Argentinian literature. Having defined itself around the region of the «pampas»,which left aside the so called «regionalism», our national literature tends to alternate between, and often to oppose, urban scenarios and the economically productive countryside. Sea coasts, however, are a liminar space between the city by the sea and the beach as a utopia of nature and leisure. This landscape, although outside the canon, appears in a variety of texts that don’t come together in a category of their own but share their confrontation with the social topic of the idyllic space of leisure, opposed both to the country and the city as spaces of labor and production. This paper aims at tracing an itinerary through a reduced number of short stories by Amelia Jamilis, Guillermo Saccomano, Juan Bautista Duizeide and Martín Andrés Hain that take place on the beach or the cities that surround it. It’s not intended to fully analyze the subject but to explore some ideas around the way in which literature takes on this marginal space.