The article proposes to interpret La cabeza de Goliat. Microscopía sobre Buenos Aires, an essay by Ezequiel Martínez Estrada from 1940, as a reservoir of extremely diverse currents in the literature on Buenos Aires, containing many different figurations of the city. It also seeks to comprehend how the representations of the city were formed and from where they originated, as well as the ways in which the battles of the 'third culture' - in Wolf Lepenies's definition of sociological thought, forever wavering in the attraction/opposition between science and literature - were manifested in the context of urban Argentina. As a subgenre, the "inquiry into the metropolis" foregrounds the affinities between a mode of figural thought, like that provided by the essay, and a material reality, like the city with its plethora of symbolic configurations through which it is possible to examine social facts.
Essay; Urban studies; Ezequiel Martínez Estrada; Buenos Aires