Images of Julio Cortázar: An Approach to the Critical Reception of His Work

Apstrakt

Julio Cortázar's work is generally understood as a turn from an autonomous to a politically engaged literature. This change affected the reception of his work, critics distinguishing between a first apolitical Cortázar, and a second, highly politicized. This article traces the Argentinian critical reception of Cortázar's work in order to reconstruct the local history of polemical debates and negotiations of meaning his writings gave rise to. This led to a productive tension between a recurrent mythologised image of Cortázar as a committed writer and intellectual, and a series of recent critical and methodological approaches that distance themselves from the former by investigating unexplored aspects of his work and make possible new ways of reading for the current century.