Yours Truly, Buenos Aires: Affective Distributions in the Writings of Ricardo Strafacce

The novels La boliviana (2008) and Gerardo y Mercedes (2013), by the Argentine Ricardo Strafacce, offer sweeping, chaotic tales that sprawl across varying physical and social environments that define the parameters of contemporary Buenos Aires. In presenting stories that employ parody to question delineations of class and cultural standing, Strafacce's novels engage contemporary mass media narrative strategies that underpin a particular mode of presenting and receiving information. In so doing, Strafacce's novels call into question the means by which mass media formats like the telenovela propagate stereotypes that permeate the urban experience of Buenos Aires. Employing a theoretical approach grounded, on one hand, in Jacques Rancière's concepts of the distribution of the sensible, and on the other, in Jonathan Flatley's work on affective mapping (which itself draws upon Fredric Jameson's cognitive mapping), I argue that Strafacce utilizes affect as a mode of intellectual comprehension in his novels. Playing upon popular, melodramatic media formats while questioning the reason and the particular sensibility in which they are rooted allows for an affective (or affected) reception of the text, running counter to mass-mediatized logic. Strafacce's novels thus showcase an approach to narrative that employs mass media strategies while at the same time undermining the very mechanisms through which new media affects its public.