LA SÁTIRA EN LA LITERATURA ARGENTINA: IRONÍA Y HUMOR

Abstract

This project, which is a continuation of the previous one, consisted in looking into philosophical and literary irony and in how it relates to humour in Argentinian literature. We have studied four authors: Jorge Luis Borges and Adolfo Bioy Casares (both individually and in collaboration), Roberto J. Payró in The marriage of Laucha(1905), Little Pago (1908) and The Amusing Adventures of the Grandson of Juan Moreira (1911) and Ezequiel Martínez Estrada, specially his less researched narrative: «The cough» and other amusements (1957) as well as his essays —Portrait of the Pampas-dweller (1956), Exhortations (1957), Goliath's Head (1940) and The 40 (1957). Satire uses irony in order to achieve its goals and we have even defined humour as a specialization of menippean satire. The ludic aspect of the works written by Borges and Bioy in collaboration, as we can see in Heaven and Hell (1960), seems to extend to their individual writing, specially their later work, like in Shakespeare’s Memory (1983) and Atlas (1984), and to Diary of the War of the Pig (1969) and Asleep in the Sun (1973) in the case of Bioy Casares, though then they do not express themselves through cruel satire as in their work in collaboration —which we continue to study at the same time— but under the elusive resources of irony and humour, even in the development of the dystopia in the works written by Bioy Casares.