front cover of Conquest of the New Word
Conquest of the New Word
Experimental Fiction and Translation in the Americas
By Johnny Payne
University of Texas Press, 1993

Latin American fiction won great acclaim in the United States during the 1960s, when many North American writers and critics felt that our national writing had reached a low ebb. In this study of experimental fiction from both Americas, Johnny Payne argues that the North American reception of the "boom" in Latin American fiction distorted the historical grounding of this writing, erroneously presenting it as mainly an exotic "magical realism." He offers new readings that detail the specific, historical relation between experimental fiction and various authors' careful, deliberate deformations and reformations of the political rhetoric of the modern state.

Payne juxtaposes writers from Argentina and Uruguay with North American authors, setting up suggestive parallels between the diverse but convergent practices of writers on both continents. He considers Nelson Marra in conjunction with Donald Barthelme and Gordon Lish; Teresa Porzecanski with Harry Mathews; Ricardo Piglia with John Barth; Silvia Schmid and Manuel Puig with Fanny Howe and Lydia Davis; and Jorge Luis Borges and Luisa Valenzuela with William Burroughs and Kathy Acker.

With this innovative, dual-continent approach, Conquest of the New Word will be of great interest to everyone working in Latin American literature, women's studies, translation studies, creative writing, and cultural theory.

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front cover of The Corpus Delicti
The Corpus Delicti
A Manual of Argentine Fictions
Josefina Ludmer
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2004

An intellectual tour de force from one of today’s leading critics of Latin American literature and culture, The Corpus Delicti (The Body of Crime) is a manual of crime, a compendium of crime tales, and an extended meditation on the central role of crime in literature, in life, and in the life of the nation.

Drawing her examples from canonical texts, popular novels, newspaper serials, and more, Josefina Ludmer captures the wide range of Argentine crime stories and detective fiction from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She offers more than a mere genre study, examining the relationship of crime and punishment to the formation of law, the body, and the modern state, exposing the ways in which literature—both high art and mass culture—can help construct, not just represent, social reality.

Covering a dazzling array of primary sources, social history, and cultural theory, this provocative work is also a structural masterpiece, challenging readers as it charts new roles for text and notes. In this redefined dialogue, the notes variously offer alternate views, additional insights, and, often, parallel commentaries. Glen Close’s stylish translation captures the energy of Ludmer’s prose—simultaneously subtle and daring—for English-language readers.

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The Polyphonic Machine
Capitalism, Political Violence, and Resistance in Contemporary Argentine Literature
Niall H.D. Geraghty
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018
Focusing on the work of the Argentine authors César Aira, Marcelo Cohen, and Ricardo Piglia, The Polyphonic Machine conducts a close analysis of the interrelations between capitalism and political violence in late twentieth-century Argentina. Taking a long historical view, the book considers the most recent Argentine dictatorship of 1976–1983 together with its antecedents and its after-effects, exploring the transformations in power relations and conceptions of resistance which accompanied the political developments experienced throughout this period. By tracing allusive fragments of Argentine political history and drawing on a range of literary and theoretical sources Geraghty proposes that Aira, Cohen and Piglia propound a common analysis of Argentine politics during the twentieth century and construct a synergetic philosophical critique of capitalism and political violence. The book thus constitutes a radical reappraisal of three of the most important authors in contemporary Argentine literature and contributes to the philosophical and historical understanding of the most recent Argentine military government and their systematic plan of state terrorism.
 
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Postmodernity in Latin America
The Argentine Paradigm
Santiago Colás
Duke University Press, 1994
Postmodernity in Latin America contests the prevailing understanding of the relationship between postmodernity and Latin America by focusing on recent developments in Latin American, and particularly Argentine, political and literary culture. While European and North American theorists of postmodernity generally view Latin American fiction without regard for its political and cultural context, Latin Americanists often either uncritically apply the concept of postmodernity to Latin American literature and society or reject it in an equally uncritical fashion. The result has been both a limited understanding of the literature and an impoverished notion of postmodernity. Santiago Colás challenges both of these approaches and corrects their consequent distortions by locating Argentine postmodernity in the cultural dynamics of resistance as it operates within and against local expressions of late capitalism.
Focusing on literature, Colás uses Julio Cortázar’s Hopscotch to characterize modernity for Latin America as a whole, Manuel Puig’s Kiss of the Spider Woman to identify the transition to a more localized postmodernity, and Ricardo Piglia’s Artificial Respiration to exemplify the cultural coordinates of postmodernity in Argentina. Informed by the cycle of political transformation beginning with the Cuban Revolution, including its effects on Peronism, to the period of dictatorship, and finally to redemocratization, Colás’s examination of this literary progression leads to the reconstruction of three significant moments in the history of Argentina. His analysis provokes both a revised understanding of that history and the recognition that multiple meanings of postmodernity must be understood in ways that incorporate the complexity of regional differences.
Offering a new voice in the debate over postmodernity, one that challenges that debate’s leading thinkers, Postmodernity in Latin America will be of particular interest to students of Latin American literature and to scholars in all disciplines concerned with theories of the postmodern.
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