ABSTRACT:
This volume explores childhood as theme and perspective in the cuentista and poet Silvina Ocampo (1903-1993) and the poet Alejandra Pizarnik (1936-1972). It draws revealing comparisons between these key Argentine writers through their shared obsession with childhood, arguing that an understanding of their attitudes to childhood is fundamental to appreciating fully their work. The study looks at childhood not only in relation to their literary texts but also in the writers’ construction of self-identity within their socio-literary context. The role played by visual art in their aesthetics and their broad mutual literary and thematic affinities are examined. Close reading of various Ocampo texts, including some for children, allows for an exploration of her vision of childhood through nostalgia, adult-child power relationships, aging and rejuvenation, and moments of initiation or imitation. Pizarnik is considered in relation to the myth of the child-poet and her child personae are analysed through Breton’s Surrealism, Cocteau and Paz, through her borrowings from Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland and Breton’s Nadja, and through her obsession with madness, death, orphanhood, violation and transgression. In the final analysis, Ocampo’s works achieve equilibrium between childhood and age, whereas Pizarnik’s much-discussed poetic crisis of exile from language itself parallels her deep sense of anxiety at being exiled from the world of childhood.
