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

Geraghty, Niall HD; (2022) Becoming Menard? Geopolitical Readings and the Authorial Subject in César Aira. Romance Studies , 40 (1) pp. 1-18. 10.1080/02639904.2021.1950360. Green open access

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Abstract

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.

Type: Article
Title: Becoming Menard? Geopolitical Readings and the Authorial Subject in César Aira
Open access status: An open access version is available from UCL Discovery
DOI: 10.1080/02639904.2021.1950360
Publisher version: https://doi.org/10.1080/02639904.2021.1950360
Language: English
Additional information: © 2022 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way.
Keywords: Jorge Luis Borges, César Aira, ‘Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote’, Duchampian ready-made, postcolonialism, literary process
UCL classification: UCL
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of Arts and Humanities
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of Arts and Humanities > SELCS
URI: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10128416
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