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César Aira y la novela de la crisis
- Revista Hispánica Moderna
- University of Pennsylvania Press
- Volume 70, Number 2, December 2017
- pp. 179-195
- 10.1353/rhm.2017.0013
- Article
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In its role as articulator of national communities, Latin America literature was read as a powerful mechanism of naturalization of the Nation State and capitalism. However, by 2000, literature and the arts record the fragmentation of national imaginaries by exploring a new cultural configuration dominated by the temporality of the crisis and the decomposition of the sense of national belonging. New maps and forms of subjectivity arise for the novel of the new millennium, beyond the imaginary identification of the individual with nation. The work of the Argentine writer César Aira engaged in the perception and imagination of the crisis very early, exploring the long neoliberal night in a quasi-dreamlike logic that reveals a new regime of urban marginality without the stability of national enclosures. In Aira’s novels La Villa (2001) and Las noches de Flores (2004), the passage from national spaces to post-national distributions of bodies and signs takes the form of an interruption of the order of realistic causality, opening the novel to new spaces of experimentation.