From Literary Criticism to Literary Studies: Topic Modeling Argentine Academic Journals (1982–2024)

Argentine literary criticism has been defined since the 1950s by an orientation toward literature's outside – the practice of addressing literature through its social, cultural, and political dimensions. This article examines how that orientation transformed across two transitions: from literary criticism to academic literary studies after 1983, and from print to digital open access between 2008 and 2015. We analyze 1,967 articles from seven Argentine academic journals – transitional publications that experienced both transformations – using BERTopic topic modeling. Following Katherine Bode's performative approach to computational literary studies, we interpret the resulting topic configurations as operative vocabulary: naming practices through which Argentine literary studies has approached its object. The analysis traces a shift in this vocabulary after 2015 – from culture and politics to gender, body, and violence.