Literary critic can be, also, the way of thinking the different paths to the institutional and social
conformation of a country
that, at the end of the 19th century, was wondering about its identity and its project, it was seeking for referents and it was seeing in the
Literature a strategic and publicitary space. The fifth volume of "Critic History of Argentine Literature", collection directed by Noé Jitrik, shows us the passage from the 19th century to the 20th one from a series of structural problems, and not of categorical conclusions, nor finished ideas exposed as a way of rediscovery. We see that exact process: the construction of a literature and a country where there are many strains. Under the title "La crisis de las formas" (The crisis of forms), his director, Alfredo Rubiones, chooses certain organizing axis which go through numerous rehearsals of a varied gamut of authors. Like this, language is thought as a key element in the
conformation of the Liberal State that inscribes itself into the institutionalization of Spanish at schools. The one from "gauchos" implies the literary use of orality, while the non-Spanish immigrant language finds its place in the irony and the grotesque. Literature, in the conformation of genres, signalizes a social hierarchy and marks placements and combats. In the book, the conception of Modernism is discussed as an aesthetic linked to the evasion and the ivory tower to think it as a dionisiac critic to the merchandise of the world. Rubén Darío arrives to Argentina in 1893, decided to become the "La Nación" newspaper redactor. Journalism is seen as a labor possibility for writers, as well as a strategic recourse for the creation of the public that this new literature requires. Modernism confronts itself to the 80''s Generation which sees literature as an accesory activity to politics, free time occupation and not as means of subsistence. The writer professionalization puts into crisis the idea of "bohemia" that seemed to be the life key of modernists. The bohemia is identified, in many texts, as the enemy of the possibility of building a literary project, however the fact that this epoch was not prepared for the severity that, in many cases, was announcing itself, was always distinguished. Naturalism links itself to the urbanization processes. The new issues that this change was bringing: water contamination, epidemic, was placing the doctor as an ideal figure for its resolution above the politician one. In this way, the novel is thought as a normal and pathologic anatomy of social life. The idea of a moral body considered sick, goes through the texts of Eugenio Cambaceres and Antonio Argerich. On the other side, doctors were looking for a way of legitimation and the spreading of ideas in literature. In the Carriego and Baldomero Fernández Moreno "Sencillismo" (Simplicity) we observe a discussion with the modernist formalism and the construction of the urban more as a discourse invention than as a photographic view. The suburb as an interior space, the sonorities that Borges discovers in Carriego''s writing locate these authors in a hinge place, it would be hard to think in a novel as Leopoldo Marechal’s "Adán Buenos Aires" without the existence of these two poets. The city appears problematized because it is no longer the rational plan of an urban project, but the wander of a flâneur or the albatros'' look. There is a pendular movement in this book writing that allows to show the unsolved conflicts in the literary conformation of Argentina at the very end of the 19th century. This makes the authors’ look on the object to portray more complex. Literature is not only understood as the written text but also as the group of voices that compose an aesthetic facts’ delimitation, such as the cases ofpayada" and "tango." The uses of language and the modes of building a fiction do not work as the reflection or the expeesult of social reality. History here is not read as a way of erasing the literary specificity. The social and political changes invade literature and this one shows itself as permeable to the narrations that discovers in the field of the real.