Essays in (Transatlantic) Transition: The Argentine Journal Sitio (1981–1987) and Alberto Cardín's Como si nada (1981)

This article undertakes a comparative study between the Argentine journal Sitio (1981–1987) and Alberto Cardín’s book Como si nada (1981). Both Sitio and Cardín exercise and redefine the essay form when questioning and confronting the intellectual’s position in the face of the Argentine and Spanish democratic transitions. By adopting a polemical standpoint, they extrapolate their considerations about essayists’ status into a redefinition of the intellectual subject per se. Sitio and Cardín turn the essay form into the means of settling what intellectual role model should accompany the renewed democratic regimes.