Ricardo Piglia

Ricardo Piglia is one of the most influential Latin American writers of the second half of the 20th century. The literary strategies he developed in his work are recognizable and admired for their originality and great impact on the cultural field in the Spanish language: first, because of the shifting and re-evaluation of marginal authors and the use of “lesser” genres; second, because of the conjunction of Jorge Luis Borges and Roberto Arlt as the epitome of the avant-garde; third, because of the crossover between criticism and fiction; and fourth, because of the technique of the secret tied to the novella and to uses redirected from the crime novel. We can add to this the incorporation in Argentine national literature of some authors of world literature (such as Bertolt Brecht, Edgar A. Poe, James Joyce, Franz Kafka, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Henry James, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Truman Capote, Cesare Pavese, Italo Calvino, and Osamu Dazai), whose works Piglia translated into his own language and into a national context in order to propound a transcultural poetics that represented an alternative to that of Borges, Cortázar, and the Latin American Boom. The politics of literature developed by Ricardo Piglia is defined by the intersection of diary and fiction, by nonfiction and autobiography, and by the use of narrative techniques from the avant-garde, Russian formalism, and Lacanian thought: the secret, the unreliable narrator, and the split subject. However, his politics of criticism is based on five procedures that articulate his reflection on the relationship between literature and society: writer criticism, avant-garde ethos, ontology of crossing, criticism of the masses, and materialist criticism.