Publications


 

“Affect as Class Passion: Roberto Arlt’s Petty Bourgeoisie” (Hispanic Review, forthcoming)

Abstract: This article links the form of Roberto Arlt’s novels, Los siete locos (1929) and Los lanzallamas (1931), to a process of class consolidation, specifically the emergence of the petty bourgeoisie in Argentina. It argues that Arlt was a pioneer in describing the behavior of the middle sectors, and that sociological scholarship built on Arlt’s observations. Arlt’s novels depict an inchoate petty bourgeoisie that must differentiate itself from proletarian and lumpen sectors: for the novels’ characters, morality offers an avenue to achieve this distinction. Arlt’s novels explore this avenue, which entails an activation of the body, and thus expresses itself via two kinds of affect: experiential and literary. I focus on how affect intersects the structure of character motivation and extended descriptions. I argue that attending to affect in Arlt can illuminate long-standing debates about his place in literary history, and provides an opportunity to assess how affect theory can enrich ideological analysis. 


“Memory Forged in Genocide: What Nietzsche Meant for Borges” (under review)

Abstract: This article examines Jorge Luis Borges’s critical appropriation of Friedrich Nietzsche through a reading of “Funes el memorioso” (1942). I argue that Nietzsche, specifically his account of forgetting, is an important intertext in the story. Borges critiques Nietzsche’s exaltation of forgetting, on philosophical and political grounds. The story sets up a dynamic whereby the narrator distorts Funes, whom Borges identifies with the Argentine past, specifically with a time prior to the genocidal Conquest of the Desert (1879-1885). The narrator’s distortion and praise of forgetfulness are ideologically significant, and Borges invites a connection to modes of distortion and repression operative in Nazism and Argentine nationalism. Against a critical consensus that, taking a page from the narrator, holds that Funes cannot think, I show, with recourse to Kant’s idea of the intuitive understanding, that Funes does think, just not in a stereotypically human way. This reassessment of Funes’s consciousness has important repercussions for the aesthetic debates this story has been enlisted in, which revolve around Borges’s own relation to realism and modernism.  


“Reframing Novelistic Recognition.” Review of Ben Parker, Misrecognitions: Plotting Capital in the Victorian Novel (The Cambridge Quarterly, forthcoming)