A litte roof set up in the desert or the literary criticism of Tamara Kamenszain

Abstract

This article proposes how the construction of a space for women writers in literary criticism takes place. To this end, we will follow Tamara Kamenszain, an Argentine poet and essayist, who questions in her book Chicas en tiempos suspendidos (2022) – which we will read as a hybrid of poetry and feminist criticism – the difference that guarantees bards a secure and comfortable place in the canon. Based on what Tamara shares in her writings about the paths of her first publication as a critic, with the book El texto silencioso (1983), as well as her relationship with this textual genre that comes to her under the weight of laws and judgment, we will develop the foundation of a new place, the precarious little roof set up in the desert that she will propose in the book Solos y solas (2005). This roof has the particularity of being unstable, as it is located not only in the desert, but also inside an outside, producing a radical exteriority in the field of literary thought. But this exteriority has the ethic of bringing together the difference, the dissidents, a gesture that Tamara is committed to as she opens up her writing to the field of the other, ensuring they have the possibility of saying something.