Littoral of the Letter

Saer's Art of Narration

Gabriel Riera

2007
173 pages
$78.00
ISBN 9781611482706
Bucknell Studies in Latin American Literature and Theory

Littoral of the Letter is the first full-fledged study in English of the world of the late Argentine author Juan José Saer (1937-2005), who was highly regarded as Argentina's best living novelist, a continuator of Burgess's literary legacy. Characterized by an uncommon coherence and rigor, Juan José Saer's writing defies simple categories. In both his fictional and essayistic writing Saer defamiliarizes the reader by questioning some of the most cherished certainties, especially those having to do with the role ascribed to Latin American literature, the uses of prose and poetry in the present, and the relation between language and the mass media. By questioning the assimilation of prose theory and the novel theory dictated by pragmatic needs of the state and the market, Saer produces a change in the function of narrative language that allows him to start where more traditional forms of realism end: the unsayable. The purpose of this book is to make explicit Saer's procedures, the main coordinates of his poetics and to reflect on the situation of literature in an age dominated by images and the "total" cultural phenomenon.

About the author:

Gabriel Riera is Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at Princeton University. His most recent books are Alain Badiou: Philosophy and its Conditions (2005) and Intrigues: From Being to the Other (2006). He is also the author of numerous articles published in MLN, Diacritics, Angelaki, Revista Iberoamericana, qui parle?, Romance Studies, Variaciones Borges, Revista de Crítica Literaria Latinoamericana, and in several edited essay collections.