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FOOTBALL IS DEAD! LONG LIVE FOOTBALL! ARGENTINE FOOTBALL LITERATURE BETWEEN TRADITION AND RESISTANCE By CARLOS ANDRES BERTOGLIO A DISSERTATION PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA 2016 © 2016 Carlos Andrés Bertoglio To myself, for all the hard work. To the universe, for being there. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS All my gratitude goes to my family for supporting me through the duration of this project. Only they know how hard it was. To every one of my professors at UF for guiding me in spite of my own stubbornness. To Dr. Gillian Lord for all your experience and kindness. To Martín, my dissertation chair, for teaching me more than he can begin to imagine. To my parents and brothers, who were always with me, despite being thousands of miles away. To my dad, for creating light out of the darkness and giving me the gift of reading. To my mom, for teaching me about the unbreakable power of dreams. To my dear aunt Mecha for introducing me to literature at a very young age. To Argentina’s free public education system without which I would not be who I am. To Antonio Sajid, Carlos Ayerdi Castillo, Whitman Suarez, Diana Pedraza, Andrea Villa, Iván Yerkovich, Eliana Guise, Mariela Ferreyra and the rest of the few but valuable friends who make our lives much better. Finally, to Yanina for her immense love and perseverance and little Giovanni for making me realize I still have so much to learn. 4 TABLE OF CONTENTS page ACKNOWLEDGMENTS .................................................................................................. 4 ABSTRACT ..................................................................................................................... 7 CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION ...................................................................................................... 8 A subgenre in search of its name and definition ..................................................... 10 Football literature in Argentina: a case for its study ................................................ 12 A summary of this study’s main goals ..................................................................... 14 Theoretical approach .............................................................................................. 16 Football and academia in Argentina ....................................................................... 29 Conclusion and summary of this works’ chapters ................................................... 35 Notes ...................................................................................................................... 43 2 LITERARY REPRESENTATIONS OF FOOTBALL IN AGENTINA: CONTEXTUALIZATION, CHRONOLOGY AND BRIEF SUMMARY ...................... 46 Origins, early history and modern development of association football .................. 47 The beginnings of Association football in Argentina ............................................... 52 Argentine (criollo) football: the creation of a narrative and the dual foundation’s theory................................................................................................................... 53 Literary representation (s) of football in Argentina: an initial outline ........................ 61 Football: stupidity, chaos, barbarism and an alarming popularity ..................... 63 Benedetti’s Puntero izquierdo: Football literature’s foundation stone ............... 71 Football literature and its first naming: Santoro’s Literatura de la pelota. ......... 81 Soriano, Fontanarrosa, Sasturain: creation and consolidation of a style .......... 84 Latest period of growth and development of Argentine football literature (1995-2016) ................................................................................................... 94 Notes .................................................................................................................... 101 3 FOOTBALL AND TRADITION IN THE CONTEXT OF ARGENTINE FOOTBALL LITERATURE ....................................................................................................... 111 An invented tradition for the Argentine desert ....................................................... 111 Gauchos are dead! Long live gauchos! A minor genre at the center of the cannon ............................................................................................................... 116 Football and imperialism in the nineteenth century ............................................... 122 “La nuestra”: a tradition from the margins ............................................................. 125 Gauchesca and football literature: tradition, resistance or traditions of resistance? ........................................................................................................ 144 A voice, a destiny, a weapon .......................................................................... 144 Gauchos and footballers as naturals .............................................................. 154 5 Notes .................................................................................................................... 179 4 OF BIRTHS, DEATHS AND RESURRECTIONS IN NEOLIBERAL ARGENTINA. ARGENTINE FOOTBALL LITERATURE AT THE END OF THE MILLENNIUM. ....................................................................................................... 190 Argentine football in the 1990s: A dream ends, a dream begins ........................... 190 The Maradona factor in football literature ............................................................. 199 A star to guide us through darkness: Maradona in times of dictatorship ........ 206 Christmas Eve in Villa Fiorito or how to resurrect a dream ............................. 213 Spatial considerations .............................................................................. 217 Cultural Panorama ................................................................................... 226 The place of football ................................................................................. 228 Notes .................................................................................................................... 241 5 GOING BACK, GOING FORWARD.ARGENTINE FOOTBALL LITERATURE AS AN EXERCISE IN RESISTANCE ......................................................................... 248 With a little help from my friends: Sacheri and his plan to save our dying football 248 Papeles en el viento: looking for magic in football’s wasteland ...................... 255 Play, games, sports ................................................................................. 267 How to anhilate our deadly football: Convertini’s third way ................................... 279 Nightmare in Villa Luppi or How to feed the pibe’s dream .............................. 281 Looking for football’s last miracle: passion, aguante, failed glory and death .. 297 Notes .................................................................................................................... 320 6 CONCLUSION ...................................................................................................... 329 Football Literature: much more than literature about football ................................ 329 Notes .................................................................................................................... 338 LIST OF REFERENCES ............................................................................................. 339 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH .......................................................................................... 352 6 Abstract of Dissertation Presented to the Graduate School of the University of Florida in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy FOOTBALL IS DEAD! LONG LIVE FOOTBALL! ARGENTINE FOOTBALL LITERATURE BETWEEN TRADITION AND RESISTANCE By Carlos Andrés Bertoglio December 2016 Chair: Martín Sorbille Major: Romance Languages The main goal of this dissertation is to provide the first thorough analysis of the representation of football/soccer as a sport and cultural phenomenon in the context of Argentine literature (including the River Plate area) ranging from the first decades of the 20th century to the present day. In order to do so, it would be vital to contextualize the arrival of this sport to Argentina, in addition to studying the impact of the media in the popularization of this sport as well as in the construction and propagation of a discourse that appropriated football and instituted it as a reservoir of Argentine tradition. The central focus of this study will be on the analysis of the intertextual relationship that this discourse—present in the most relevant works of this literary subgenre of football literature—establishes with the mass-media hegemonic discourses of football tradition and sports capitalism on the one hand and the gauchesca literary tradition on the other. This will, in turn, set the basis for a much more informed approach to the later developments of this subgenre in order to explain its growth in the last two decades and to determine whether or not—and to what extent— it can be read as a counter- hegemonic narrative. 7 INTRODUCTION We would not be revealing anything new or surprising if we said that football (“soccer” in the US) is the world’s most popular sport and, as such, a cultural phenomenon of enormous magnitude and intensity. Nor would we be stating anything unexpected or original