L’immagine letteraria della prostituta a Buenos Aires: dalla denuncia alla nostalgia

My doctoral thesis focused on the literary representation of prostitute in Buenos Aires, with regard to the Argentinean narrative output throughout the time between 20’s and 80’s of the last century. The aim of the research was analysing the transformations in perceiving such a marginal social figure, the prostitute, who played a primary role in the porteño scenario – between the 19t h and 20th century Buenos Aires was a world reference capital for prostitution as a consequence of the several brothels uprisen to face the needs of a mostly male migratory mass – and became also a recurrent character in the Argentinean literary survey. In the first place my study focused on the naturalistic and avant-garde output for the 20’s and 30’s in which the prostitute is used as a vehicle to report social injustice and the damages caused by the relentless modernization, as well as an instrument to acquire new literary topics and to draw the narrative potential hold in marginal characters. After that, the research moved to 60’s literature where the attention is turned from the city and its mala vida areas to the individual patterns of the prostitute, and at the same time the middle-class hypocrisy is criticised. In the end the thesis fixed on the literary output of the second half of the last century where the prostitute is inserted in the frame of crime novels or novela a enigma, in the scope of plots using the character and the policial setting to carry out metaliterary experiments, to suggest the reader reflections on the great existential subjects or to evoke nostalgically the past of the writers and of nation Argentina itself. In this dissertation, whose aim is not a textual analyses strictly in chronological terms, a reflection on the literary relationships with tango and the myth is carried on. Particular attention is directed to the way authors, through the representation of the fascinating prostitute, a sort of direct gateway to the premises of the arrabal, the suburb, restore issues and characters, concealed by the official rhetoric, thus structuring a counter-narrative of the national history and making visible the contradictions of a society trying to assert itself in the international scenario. In addition, my focus is addressed on the textual-shaped image of Buenos Aires, its suburbs, its brothels and the transformations that led the Capital of a young Argentina to become, through the years, a frenzied metropolis. Accordingly, the ever-changing notion of the Border, which has been constantly dealt within the national historical and literary discourse, has also been tackled in most of the analyzed texts. [edited by Author]