1 - Silvina Ocampo for the Twenty-first Century: A Review of Recent Criticism

Summary

A modest surge in scholarly interest, especially in the past decade, has meant that in some quarters Silvina Ocampo is now considered a canonical writer, while in others she remains virtually unknown. This uneven knowledge even among specialists in Latin American literature inspires the present review of publications whose purpose is to provide a history of recent criticism on the author which will bring this volume's reader up to date. The need for such a review reflects the multiple languages in which the literary analyses were written and the obscurity of the publication outlets, often small presses with low distribution, proceedings of conferences, local university operations, etc. This chapter begins with a discussion of five books that appeared nearly simultaneously in the late 1990s, the first book-length studies of Ocampo's work. A second section considers articles of the same period; the final section includes books and articles that have appeared in the last decade, beginning in 2003. The summaries are arranged in roughly chronological order for the purpose of providing a sense of the evolution of thought through the last two decades. The selection of the specific essays for detailed commentary necessarily reflects my own interests and bias, but the bibliography included at the end should assist further reflection or independent investigation.

Books at the End of the 1990s

At the end of the 1990s the first book-length studies of Silvina Ocampo's short stories began to appear nearly simultaneously. Noemí Ulla's Invenciones a dos voces (1992) was followed by two dissertations later published in France, an Argentine dissertation, and my book in English. A consideration of their coincidences and variances begins this review of the critical literature. Ulla's 1992 collection of essays discusses both Ocampo's prose and poetic creations, comparing them to those of her contemporaries, Borges, Bioy, and Cortázar in prose and Neruda and Paz in poetry. She describes the use of documents, especially letters, as structural elements of the stories, and oxymoron and enumeration as rhetorical devices of both the prose and poetry. Most importantly, Ulla proposes what she calls the extensive redefinition of courtly love which underlies Ocampo's works in both genres. In offering a close reading of the sonnet “Amor” with the story “Amada en el amado,” Ulla addresses issues of gender and desire which would initiate a lengthy re-evaluation of Ocampo for the twenty-first century.