Beatriz Sarlo


Beatriz Sarlo was an Argentine literary and cultural critic. She was a founding editor of the cultural journal Punto de Vista. She became an Order of Cultural Merit laureate in 2009.

Biography

Beatriz Sarlo was born on 29 March 1942. She studied literature at the undergraduate and graduate levels at the University of Buenos Aires. The writer, critic, and dramatist David Viñas was an early mentor and influence. In 1978, she co-founded Punto de Vista which was one of the major dissident voices during the military regime which ended in 1983. Because of the authoritarian nature of the regime, Sarlo and her fellow contributors had to use pseudonyms, and subordinate political questions to aesthetic ones. Paradoxically, this entailed a rethinking of the political which moved Sarlo's thought away from an earlier tendency to Marxism and other forms of radicalism. She has continued to maintain a moderate-left political stance that refrains from promoting euphorias of free-market thought or populist solidarity.
Sarlo was a highly laurelled academic who also operated as a public intellectual. She has written both on traditional literary topics—her book on Jorge Luis Borges, published in 1993, is one of the seminal works on the great Argentine fabulist—but she has also worked in more cultural areas, such as feminism, the emergence of the modern Argentine city, and Argentina's divided sense of its place in Latin America. These various interests are linked by an overall concern with the intellectual and how the idea of the intellectual functions in contemporary discursive contexts. Sarlo was not a parochial or regional thinker, but participated in global debates occasioned by critical theory, postmodernity, and the destabilization of set political ideologies after the Revolutions of 1989. She has warned, though, against the naive transnationalism seen in an earlier Argentine intellectual, Victoria Ocampo. In some ways, Sarlo's project is analogous to the work of thinkers of the previous generation such as Ángel Rama in its ability to traverse disciplinary and discursive boundaries, though Rama specifically has not been a huge influence on Sarlo.
Sarlo has worked with other major contemporary Argentine thinkers such as and Ricardo Piglia. She held the Chair of Contemporary Literature at the Faculty of Arts and Letters at the University of Buenos Aires. In 2001, she was denied a position as the equivalent of distinguished professor, in controversial circumstances. She has also taught at several US universities, held the Simón Bolívar chair at the University of Cambridge, and been a visiting fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin. She also wrote regularly for Argentine newspapers such as La Nación, Clarín, and Página 12.
Sarlo died on 17 December 2024 in Buenos Aires, three weeks after suffering a stroke.

Falkland Islands remarks

In August 2021, Sarlo said during an interview that the Falkland Islands are British territory, sparking condemnation from veterans and government officials. Parts of the opposition defended her stance, as she said that she "cared very little" about criticism of her remarks. Sarlo said that the Falklands are like the south of Scotland and that the Argentine claim was made before Argentina was fully formed as a nation. She also stated that the 1982 invasion was a "national psychotic act".

Publications

Literatura-sociedad. Ensayos argentinos: de Sarmiento a la Vanguardia. El imperio de los sentimientos: Narraciones de circulación periódica en la Argentina, 1917-1927. Una modernidad periférica: Buenos Aires, 1920 y 1930. Conceptos de sociología literaria.La imaginación técnica: Sueños modernos de la cultura argentina.Borges, un escritor en las orillas. Escenas de la vida posmoderna: Intelectuales, arte y videocultura en la Argentina. Martín Fierro y su crítica: Antología. Instantáneas: Medios, ciudad y costumbres en el fin de siglo. La máquina cultural: Maestras, traductores y vanguardistas. Siete ensayos sobre Walter Benjamin. La batalla de las ideas, 1943-1973. Tiempo presente. La pasión y la excepción. Tiempo pasado: Cultura de la memoria y giro subjetivo. Escritos sobre literatura argentina. La ciudad vista: Mercancías y cultura urbana. La audacia y el cálculo: Kirchner 2003-2010. Signos de Pasión: Claves de la novela sentimental del Siglo de las Luces a nuestros días. Ficciones Argentinas: 33 Ensayos. Viajes: De la Amazonia a Malvinas. Zona Saer.

English translations

Borges: A Writer on the Edge Scenes from Postmodern Life
  • ''The Technical Imagination: Argentina's Modern Dreams''