Committed literature in circulation: Realidad and the European little magazines

Abstract

It is well known that the genesis of the concept of Committed Literature is closely associated with the parisian little magazine Les Temps Modernes. It is equally well known that Jean-Paul Sartre coined a term which, on the one hand, constitutes an interpretative foil to the political use and utility of literature in the second half of the twentieth century and, on the other, was severely criticized by autonomist and poststructuralist literary theorists in the years that followed. The article analyzes the first transnational transfers of the Sartrean concept in the cultural magazines of the early postwar period and hypothesizes that the status of the concept represents a seismographic function for the cultural-political agenda of the magazines and a prehistory of later critiques. After a brief and panoramic reconstruction of the global circulation of this theoretical device in postwar cultural history I focus on a case study of Realidad, a magazine founded in Buenos Aires by Argentine intellectuals and Spanish anti-fascist exiles. In this Revista de Ideas that cultural transmission follows the imperative of depoliticizing the original text through a careful selection of translated fragments, paratextual elements and direct comments that keep distance from the French author. But it also shows that this concept is integrated into the intertextual structure of a little magazine that tries to situate the medium of literature not only as a symptom but also as a possible way of overcoming a crisis of social coexistence.