Bianco, José (1908–1986)

José Bianco (b. 21 November 1908; d. 24 April 1986), Argentine writer, editor, and literary critic. Born in Buenos Aires, Bianco served from 1938 to 1961 as editorial director of Victoria Ocampo's influential literary and intellectual review Sur. After he broke with Ocampo over a visit he made to Cuba (the Cuban Revolution occasioned many partings in Argentine cultural life in the 1960s), Bianco played a major role in the development of the University of Buenos Aires Press, one of the significant axes of cultural development in Argentina until the university was taken over by the military regime in 1966. Throughout his life, Bianco published his critical essays in an impressively diverse array of forums, from the oligarchic daily La Nación to the Cuban revolutionary journal Casa de las Américas. Ficción y reflexión (1988) is an anthology of Bianco's literary criticism.

Bianco's creative literature is most identified with early texts: Sombras suele vestir (1941), a novel that anticipates the formal experimentation of works twenty years later in its utilization of a fragmented point of view and the counterpoint between narrative shifts and the cruel human drama it chronicles; and Las ratas (1943), where a plot turning on murder-suicide displaces the traditional omniscience of the mystery story with the relativization of narrative knowledge. Las ratas was enthusiastically acclaimed by Jorge Luis Borges at a time when the latter was particularly interested in detective fiction, a genre with a long record of influence in Argentine literature.

See alsoLiterature: Spanish America .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Antonio Prieto Taboada, "El poder y la ambigüedad en Sombras suele vestir, de José Bianco," in Revista Iberoamericana 49, no. 125 (1983): 717-730; "Ficción y realidad de José Bianco, 1908–1986," in Revista Iberoamericana 52, no. 137 (1986): 957-962; "Entrevista: José Bianco," in Hispamérica 17, no. 50 (1988): 73-86.

Hugo Beccacece, "Estudio preliminar," in José Bianco, Páginas de José Bianco (1984), pp. 11-31.

                                 David William Foster