For a literary historiography of gossip

Abstract

The aim of this article is to problematize the relations between gossip, literary criticism and canon. First of all, I try to think about the relations between literature and gossip, taking as a starting point the essay «El relato indefendible» (1973) by Edgardo Cozarinsky; from this essay, I aim to think about gossip in literature, but also literature as gossip, that is to say, as narrative material and, at the same time, a narrative strategy. Secondly, I reflect on the possible relations between gossip and literary criticism, I think about how gossip can be incorporated by criticism and, in this way, destabilize any totalizing and homogenizing intention of knowledge, whether about a particular piece of writing or a specific set of texts. The fundamental text for this second stage is Borges a contraluz (1989) by Estela Canto, a book that contemplates the double operation of gossip that I aim to study here, that is to say, as a narrative and critical procedure. Finally, the last step of this work consists of considering the implications of such reflections for the idea of a literary canon. In this context, criticism, instead of legislating, must show the messianic condition of the archive as a destabilizing power of readings and of the constituted archive itself.