In Genres of Listening Xochitl Marsilli-Vargas explores a unique culture of listening and communicating in Buenos Aires. She traces how psychoanalytic listening circulates beyond the clinical setting to become a central element of social interaction and cultural production in the city that has the highest number of practicing psychologists and psychoanalysts in the world. Marsilli-Vargas develops the concept of genres of listening to demonstrate that hearers listen differently, depending on where, how, and to whom they are listening. In particular, she focuses on psychoanalytic listening as a specific genre. Porteños (citizens of Buenos Aires) have developed a “psychoanalytic ear” that emerges during conversational encounters in everyday interactions in which participants offer different interpretations of the hidden meaning the words carry. Marsilli-Vargas does not analyze these interpretations as impositions or interruptions but as productive exchanges. By outlining how psychoanalytic listening operates as a genre, Marsilli-Vargas opens up ways to imagine other modes of listening and forms of social interaction.

Xochitl Marsilli-Vargas is Assistant Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Emory University.

-- Chris Batterman Cháirez Sound Studies

Author’s Note  viii
Acknowledgments  ix
Introduction: A City of Listeners  1
1. For a Theory of Genres of Listening  25
2. The Music in the Words  48
3. “What You Really Mean Is . . .”: Listening to “That Which Is Not Said”  80
4. The Psychoanalytic Field in Buenos Aires  106
5. The Mass Mediation of Psychoanalytic Listening  137
Conclusion: Final Resonances  174
Notes  185
References  203
Index  223