Books by Emilio Sauri
New Comparisons in World Literature, 2017
This book attempts to understand what ‘contemporary’ has meant, and should mean, for literary stu... more This book attempts to understand what ‘contemporary’ has meant, and should mean, for literary studies. The essays in this volume suggest that an attentive reading of recent global literatures challenges the idea that our contemporary moment is best characterized as a timeless, instantaneous ‘now’. The contributors to this book argue that global literatures help us to conceive of the contemporary as an always plural, heterogeneous, and contested temporality. Far from suggesting that we replace theories of an omnipresent ‘end of history’ with a traditional, single, diachronic timeline, this book encourages the development of such a timeline’s rigorous inverse: a synchronic, multi-faceted and multi-temporal history of the contemporary in literature, and thus of contemporary global literatures. It opens up the concept of the contemporary for comparative study by unlocking its temporal, logical, political, and ultimately aesthetic and literary complexity.
Special Issues by Emilio Sauri
a special issue of Mediations (24.2), edited by Emilio Sauri and Mathias Nilges
Modern Fiction Studies , 2022
https://muse.jhu.edu/issue/47485
Articles by Emilio Sauri
Textual Practice, 2023
This essay considers several tendencies that have come to define the renewed concern with matter,... more This essay considers several tendencies that have come to define the renewed concern with matter, assemblages, and objects associated with the new materialisms. Drawing on Bruno Latour’s Actor-Network Theory (ANT), postcritics and new formalists link the effort to revitalise and rethink the methods and aims of literary criticism to these concerns, while alerting us to the unique agency of artworks. The result is not just an idiosyncratic view of literature or of its relationship to society, but rather a peculiar vision of the world in which the notion that we can convince others or that we ourselves can be convinced holds no water. Perhaps no living writer provides a clearer picture of what it might mean to fully embrace this postcritical view of the world than César Aira. This is especially true for his novella La villa (Shantytown), which, in telling the story of how Maxi – a ‘meathead’ and ‘brainless hulk’ – becomes a ‘legend’ among the poor, presents a world saturated with the networked agency of human and nonhuman actors alike. Drawing our attention to the aesthetic and political limits of such a worldview, Aira’s ANTsy fictions illustrate how the new materialist emphasis on description, immediacy, and the spontaneous not only alters literary criticism’s more foundational concepts – text, reading, interpretation, and critique – but also, and more crucially, entails a disavowal of conviction. This essay explores what this disavowal means for Aira’s entire approach to fiction, and what, in turn, it ought to mean for the future of literary studies itself.
Nicolás Cabral’s 2014 novel, Catálogo de formas, revisits the history of modern architecture and ... more Nicolás Cabral’s 2014 novel, Catálogo de formas, revisits the history of modern architecture and Mexican modernism to ask what literature can tell us about the concept of freedom today. Loosely based on the life of the Mexican architect Juan O’Gorman, Cabral’s novel traces the career of its protagonist, the Architect, from functionalist beginnings to radically organic ends—that is, from a purposeful architecture to one free from purpose. Neither mode of architecture succeeds in producing anything that is “free,” though Catálogo de formas is not so much the story this failure as it is one about the way in which the modernist identification of form with freedom can only be true today. This raises questions about the meaning of freedom and constraint, something which becomes all the clearer if we consider the role the concept of freedom has played in the policy programs and political strategies associated with neoliberalism. But while neoliberalism demands that we think freedom and constraint exclusively through the market, Catálogo de formas will suggests that literature’s own concern with form can today become a refusal of that demand, and in this way, suggest a different path not simply for the novel, but for politics too.
Literature and the Global Contemporary, 2017
Moden Fiction Studies, 2022
NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, 2018
First three pages of an article available here: https://doi.org/10.1215/00295132-6846102.
What ... more First three pages of an article available here: https://doi.org/10.1215/00295132-6846102.
What might it mean to conceive of a work of art not simply as a mirror held up to society but as a means to visualize the abstract functions that make society look the way it does? And what can this tell us about the novel's social, political, and artistic potential today? To raise these questions, of course, is to presume that society exists and that works of art are still possible in a situation in which neither of these claims is self-evident, as suggested by recent tendencies within literary studies associated with “postcritique.” Nevertheless, it is this situation that the novelist Yuri Herrera and the photographer Alejandro Cartagena both aim to address within the context of Mexico, where neoliberalism's virtually seamless identification of development with the free market has precipitated the sense of a present from which the future has all but vanished. Rather than merely reflect this state of affairs, Herrera offers a sense of how the contemporary novel departs from this perspective, by taking up a version of the problem that Cartagena's photography similarly attempts to resolve—namely, how to make visible the abstract in the concrete.
Mexican Literature in Theory, 2018
The Contemporaneity of Modernism
Nicolás Cabral’s 2014 novel, Catálogo de formas, revisits the history of modern architecture and ... more Nicolás Cabral’s 2014 novel, Catálogo de formas, revisits the history of modern architecture and Mexican modernism to ask what literature can tell us about the concept of freedom today. Loosely based on the life of the Mexican architect Juan O’Gorman, Cabral’s novel traces the career of its protagonist, the Architect, from functionalist beginnings to radically organic ends—that is, from a purposeful architecture to one free from purpose. Neither mode of architecture succeeds in producing anything that is “free,” though Catálogo de formas is not so much the story this failure as it is one about the way in which the modernist identification of form with freedom can only be true today. This raises questions about the meaning of freedom and constraint, something which becomes all the clearer if we consider the role the concept of freedom has played in the policy programs and political strategies associated with neoliberalism. But while neoliberalism demands that we think freedom and constraint exclusively through the market, Catálogo de formas will suggests that literature’s own concern with form can today become a refusal of that demand, and in this way, suggest a different path not simply for the novel, but for politics too.
Studies in American Fiction, 2013
Boston I. "We are all brothers" 1 I n an interview reported in the Brazilian newspaper O Estado d... more Boston I. "We are all brothers" 1 I n an interview reported in the Brazilian newspaper O Estado de São Paulo in August 1954, William Faulkner notes, "in my view, race is one of this continent's most pressing issues." Treating North and South America as one continent, he continues, "There is no reason why, in a continent as rich as ours, there should be social or economic distinctions between men. In the end, we are all brothers." 2 Speaking in Brazil three months after Brown v. Board of Education, Faulkner here appears to reiterate the aims of what is perhaps the most significant movement of the postwar period in the United States: the civil rights movement. But while that movement was and remains a somewhat foreign phenomenon in the context of Brazil-and Latin America more generally-we should remember that as Faulkner spoke, the most significant development of the same period in Latin America, the Cuban Revolution, was in its initial stages. Indeed, a year earlier, on 26 July 1953, Fidel Castro led the attack on the Moncada Barracks in Santiago de Cuba. Similarly concerned with the elimination of social and economic "distinctions," the successful revolution would, seven years later, affirm that "democracy is not compatible with financial oligarchy" or "with discrimination against the Negro"; it would even protest "disturbances by the Ku Klux Klan," and, echoing Faulkner, proclaim that "the peoples of the world are brothers." 3 Nevertheless, what Faulkner and the revolution mean by "brothers" is not the same, and as we will see, it is this distinction that affords a more complete understanding of the relationship between Faulkner's modernism and the Latin American "boom" literatures of the 1960s. Many commentators have already discussed the debt that Latin American literature owes to Faulkner (as well as to other modernists like Virginia Woolf,
Mediations 23.2 (Spring 2008) 1-8
… de JALLA 2004 Lima: sextas jornadas …, Jan 1, 2005
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Books by Emilio Sauri
Special Issues by Emilio Sauri
Articles by Emilio Sauri
Co-authored by Sarah Brouillette, Emilio Sauri, and Mathias Nilges
The Introduction to _Literature and the Global Contemporary_ (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017).
Read the complete Introduction here:
https://books.google.ca/books?id=r-M8DwAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false
What might it mean to conceive of a work of art not simply as a mirror held up to society but as a means to visualize the abstract functions that make society look the way it does? And what can this tell us about the novel's social, political, and artistic potential today? To raise these questions, of course, is to presume that society exists and that works of art are still possible in a situation in which neither of these claims is self-evident, as suggested by recent tendencies within literary studies associated with “postcritique.” Nevertheless, it is this situation that the novelist Yuri Herrera and the photographer Alejandro Cartagena both aim to address within the context of Mexico, where neoliberalism's virtually seamless identification of development with the free market has precipitated the sense of a present from which the future has all but vanished. Rather than merely reflect this state of affairs, Herrera offers a sense of how the contemporary novel departs from this perspective, by taking up a version of the problem that Cartagena's photography similarly attempts to resolve—namely, how to make visible the abstract in the concrete.
Co-authored by Sarah Brouillette, Emilio Sauri, and Mathias Nilges
The Introduction to _Literature and the Global Contemporary_ (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017).
Read the complete Introduction here:
https://books.google.ca/books?id=r-M8DwAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false
What might it mean to conceive of a work of art not simply as a mirror held up to society but as a means to visualize the abstract functions that make society look the way it does? And what can this tell us about the novel's social, political, and artistic potential today? To raise these questions, of course, is to presume that society exists and that works of art are still possible in a situation in which neither of these claims is self-evident, as suggested by recent tendencies within literary studies associated with “postcritique.” Nevertheless, it is this situation that the novelist Yuri Herrera and the photographer Alejandro Cartagena both aim to address within the context of Mexico, where neoliberalism's virtually seamless identification of development with the free market has precipitated the sense of a present from which the future has all but vanished. Rather than merely reflect this state of affairs, Herrera offers a sense of how the contemporary novel departs from this perspective, by taking up a version of the problem that Cartagena's photography similarly attempts to resolve—namely, how to make visible the abstract in the concrete.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction: Novel beyond Nation
Jernej Habjan
1 Novels before Nations: How Early US Novels Imagined Community
Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse
2 Pre-modern Joking Relationships In Modern Europe: From Le Neveu de Rameau to Le Neveu de Lacan
Jernej Habjan
3 The Nation Between the Epic and the Novel: France Prešeren’s The Baptism on the Savica As a Compromise “World Text”
Marko Juvan
4 Autonomy after Autonomy, or, the Novel beyond Nation: Roberto Bolaño’s 2666
Emilio Sauri
5 The Narrator and the Nation-Builder: Dialect, Dialogue, and Narrative Voice in Minority and Working-Class Fiction
Alexander Beecroft
6 Novel, Utopia, Nation: A History of Interdependence
Hrvoje Tutek
7 Neomedievalism in Three Contemporary City Novels: Tobar, Adichie, Lee
Caren Irr
8 Crisis of the Novel and the Novel of Crisis
Suman Gupta