The Author in the Office

Office-based writers from both sides of the River Plate chronicle the twentieth century. Martel's La bolsa (1891) initiates, and Dorfman's Reader (1995) concludes, a study of the white-collar citizens of Buenos Aires and Montevideo in their daytime habitat: the office. The literary background is the European literature of bureaucracy: Balzac, Galdós, Gogol, Dickens, Dostoyevsky, Kafka; the theoretical approach is through the sociologists Max Weber and C. Wright Mills; the historical context is t