| My dissertation explores prostitution as a destabilizing force in twentieth-century Argentine literature. Prostitution shuttles other discourses into the fabric of literary texts where they come to appear as knots; but close readings in dialogue with the work of Foucault and Deleuze and Guattari show how to disentangle some of these fixed modes of thinking about prostitution, generating instead new ways of thinking law, economics and history.; Through readings of naturalist novels (1890-1920) and Roberto Bolano's "Putas asesinas," Chapter 1 examines literature's complicity in the process of identity-formation as well as the ways in which prostitution flows beyond the identities established---and still operative today---through its literary or legal reductions, spurring these forms of thought into the production of contradictory dualisms.; Chapter 2 takes us through economic thought in its struggle to define coin, capital and money while prostitution tunnels through and undermines what we imagine to be the solid ground of both Marxist and Gesellian presuppositions. As the prostitute is literarized in the form of "living coin" in Federico Gamboa's Santa (1902) and Roberto Arlt's Los siete locos (1929) and Los lanzallamas (1931), prostitution traces lines of flight from every node of economic thought.; Chapter 3 analyzes the proliferation of versions of the Jewish "white slave" of the 1920s in contemporary historical novels including Myrtha Schalom's La polaca and Elsa Drucaroff's El Infierno Prometido, some of which portray the genesis of national identity as a good-faith collaboration between diverse ethnic groups. My analysis suggests that in fact they reinscribe a politically reactionary view of history that seeks to capture and absorb the marginalized content it purports to "liberate."; Chapter 4 picks up from where Chapter 3 left off, exploring literature's radical potentiality to disrupt the present with the past, upending Jewish "identity" at every turn. Cozarinsky's rhizomatic novel, El rufian moldavo follows prostitution on a diaspora through which we are brought to see Jewishness as a turning-away from itself and history as a creative unfolding of affect for the past. |
