Everyday negotiations of money in contemporary Argentine literature and film

Abstract

This thesis examines how money appears as an unpredictable, provocative force in contemporary Argentine literary and filmic texts (1992-2016). Taking form in a plethora of fragile, volatile objects ranging from burning banknotes to bulky glass bottles, money in these texts unleash affective charges which time and again reshape the behaviour and beliefs of the humans handling it. Rather than serving as a pliant tool for acts of exchange, cash demands to be physically confronted and negotiated, questioning the autonomy of Argentine middle-class consumers in an era characterised by the growing hegemony of neoliberal, free market logic. These human-money negotiations occur against the backdrop of recurring economic crises, among them the hyperinflation of 1989 and the national IMF debt default in 2001, and money as a stubborn, tangible presence both questions the symbolic elements of the faith in monetary stability under attack and demonstrates how this faith is underpinned by everyday material encounters with cash. Building on strands of new materialist and affect thinking, I argue that money frequently interrogates, suspends and disarticulates a complex of fictions, among them the promise of prosperous futures, the persistence of masculinities derived from popular tropes and the continuing economic sovereignty of the Argentine nation. These moments of disarticulation manifest themselves in the form of dissonant feedback, revealing the shaky nature of the trust in stable monetary flows which ground such fictions. However, as well as arguing that the texts in my corpus depict this provocative potential in money, I contend that they display a deep self-awareness of their own inextricable entanglement with money in their production, reception and circulation. Negotiating the transnational nature of literary markets and film funding circuits, the texts in this thesis grapple with money as much as an obstacle to be overcome as it is raw material for their narratives.

Date of Award	13 May 2025
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	University of Bristol
Supervisor	Paul Merchant (Supervisor) & Jo E Crow (Supervisor)