Between Experience and Knowledge. Viajes de Beatriz Sarlo

Abstract

This paper develops a critical reading of Viajes. De la Amazonia a las Malvinas which focuses on the evaluation of Beatriz Sarlo’s autobiographical rhetoric, the ways in which her testimonial writing articulates narration and essay, personal experience and knowledge. On the one hand, it reconstructs the strategies of self-figuration that aim to sustain the image of the author as a moralist who exercises criticism of contemporary customs (those of tourism as a practice of mass culture, in general, and those of “ideological tourism” that young Latin Americans practiced towards the end of the 1960s and beginning of the 1970s, in specific). On the other hand, it evaluates the success of the means by which Sarlo is able to transcend the narcissism typical of autobiographical remembrance: the theoretical framework (centered on the concept-value of “programme leap”), the essayistic experimentation with the styles of presentation (those of travel narratives and those of ideological criticism) and the search for a nuanced tone, able to transmit the coexistence of heterogeneous affections without inhibiting the possibility of a return to the past in the present as a process still in progress.