Becoming Menard? Geopolitical Readings and the Authorial Subject in César Aira

This article discusses César Aira’s critical engagement with Jorge Luis Borges’s masterful short story ‘Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote’. While there are few overt references to Borges’s story within Aira’s essayistic output, it will be shown that those that do exist are highly significant. Indeed, it will be argued that Aira’s literary process — developed at length and in detail across his critical work — is heavily indebted to ‘Pierre Menard’. Opening first with a reflection on Borges’s Evaristo Carriego, the article explores the ways in which Aira discusses Borges’s story in relation to the Duchampian ready-made, uncovers its importance within his analysis of exotic literature, and argues that Aira inverts Menard’s labour by shifting his focus from the act of reading to the act of writing in his re-creation of the story. In this way, it will be proposed that Aira advocates an a-personal process which nonetheless affirms a central place for the individual author, while simultaneously producing works of geopolitical significance. Ultimately, it will be shown that the story provides the inspiration for Aira’s conceptualization of the literary work as a temporal event, and the promotion of a formless marginality which undermines colonial taxonomies

Becoming Menard? Geopolitical Readings and the Authorial Subject in Ricardo Piglia

This article discusses Ricardo Piglia’s extensive engagement with ‘Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote’ in his critical and fictional work, examining the ways in which Piglia politicizes Borges’s celebrated story. Building upon Piglia’s well-documented attempt to reconcile Borges with left-wing criticism, the article engages in close dialogue with Robin Fiddian’s Postcolonial Borges: Argument and Artistry (2017) to elaborate the geopolitical significance of Piglia’s novel Respiración artificial (1980) and his wider oeuvre. In order to do so, the article pays particular attention to the narratorial strategies that Piglia deploys in the novel, and the literary alter-ego he creates to carry the authorial subject into the work, analysing the unique position Piglia assigns to Borges’s story within the Argentine canon. Thus it will be proposed that Piglia effectively re-orders Argentine literary history from the perspective of ‘Pierre Menard’ to augment the political significance of the story. In developing these arguments, it will ultimately be shown that Piglia seeks to become the titular character, reproducing his literary experiments further to develop the postcolonial critique contained in Borges’s original story

Creative Spaces: Urban Culture and Marginality

Creative Spaces: Urban Culture and Marginality is an interdisciplinary exploration of the different ways in which marginal urban spaces have become privileged locations for creativity in Latin America. The essays within the collection reassess dominant theoretical notions of ‘marginality’ in the region and argue that, in contemporary society, it invariably allows for (if not leads to) the production of the new. While Latin American cities have, since their foundation, always included marginal spaces (due, for example, to the segregation of indigenous groups), the massive expansion of informal housing constructed on occupied land in the second half of the twentieth century have brought them into the collective imaginary like never before. Originally viewed as spaces of deprivation, violence, and dangerous alterity, the urban margins were later romanticized as spaces of opportunity and popular empowerment. Instead, this volume analyses the production of new art forms, political organizations and subjectivities emerging from the urban margins in Latin America, neither condemning nor idealizing the effects they produce. To account for the complex nature of contemporary urban marginality, the volume draws on research from a wide spectrum of disciplines, ranging from cultural and urban studies to architecture and sociology. Thus the collection analyzes how these different conceptions of marginal spaces work together and contribute to the imagined and material reality of the wider city

Sonorous memory in Jonathan Perel’s El predio (2010) and Los murales (2011)

Throughout his filmic production, Argentine director Jonathan Perel has demonstrated strict adherence to a unique aesthetic programme in which human agents appear to have only a minimal role. Each film contains only diegetic sounds and consists of fixed shots of architectural spaces and objects closely associated with the most recent Argentine military dictatorship (1976–1983) and recent attempts to memorialise the atrocities they committed. Through the close analysis of Perel’s first two films – El predio (2010) and Los murales (2011) – this article focusses on Perel’s highly distinctive use of environmental sound and argues that they are, in fact, uniquely musical works. Drawing on the work of John Cage, Michel Chion, Deleuze and Guattari, and Doreen Massey, the article proposes that Perel manipulates sound in order to situate debates over the memorialisation of recent atrocities in a perpetual present and thus critique contemporary abuses of power in Argentina