Dissertation
I’m writing a dissertation at UC Berkeley. My dissertation, The Literary Origins of the Middle Class in Argentina (1885-1946), is a study of the category known as la clase media or the middle class, its emergence in literary culture, and its remarkable prevalence in political discourse. My aim in the dissertation is twofold: to understand how dynamics of class composition find their way into the content and form of important literary texts, and to show how these literary texts contribute to dynamics of class composition. The period in question, from the Conquest of the Desert to Juan Perón’s first electoral victory, is contested territory in scholarly accounts of the Argentine middle class, with social scientists and historians struggling to agree on when and how this class fraction achieves political self-consciousness. I argue that the poetry of Almafuerte (Pedro Bonifacio Palacios), the novels of Roberto Arlt, and the short stories of Jorge Luis Borges allow us to observe the gradual coming into being of the middle class as an analytic category and a political identity.
My dissertation offers a novel way to connect class with affect theory; establishes historical continuity where historians and social scientists have emphasized rupture; and demonstrates that analyzing ideology and class struggle entails reckoning with an expansive array of social categories. These include, inter alia, racializing paradigms, the experience of time and space, questions of gender hierarchy, and the status of religious discourse in a given historical period.
An article drawn from my second chapter, on Roberto Arlt, is forthcoming in Hispanic Review.
My dissertation offers a novel way to connect class with affect theory; establishes historical continuity where historians and social scientists have emphasized rupture; and demonstrates that analyzing ideology and class struggle entails reckoning with an expansive array of social categories. These include, inter alia, racializing paradigms, the experience of time and space, questions of gender hierarchy, and the status of religious discourse in a given historical period.
An article drawn from my second chapter, on Roberto Arlt, is forthcoming in Hispanic Review.