Gustavo Llarull | Cornell University (original) (raw)
Papers by Gustavo Llarull
Sample material from The R. J. Cox Online Archive covering 1) networking initiatives with Amnesty... more Sample material from The R. J. Cox Online Archive covering 1) networking initiatives with Amnesty International and the IACHR; 2) US international human rights policy: Argentina and the Carter Administration; 3) semantics and politics: "insurgents," "guerrillas," and "terrorists"--Argentina and beyond.
Sample Archive Material Part 1: From death squads to Armed Forces. Military and civil society vie... more Sample Archive Material Part 1: From death squads to Armed Forces. Military and civil society views. Press, media, and networks in-the-making.
The papers of R. J. Cox, former editor of the Buenos Aires Herald, shed light on two sets of issu... more The papers of R. J. Cox, former editor of the Buenos Aires Herald, shed light on two sets of issues: 1. Debates about recent history (e.g., Argentina’s human rights movement vis-a-vis its international correlates; the US/Latin America relationship during the 1970s; the role of the press); 2. Current discussions regarding the weakening of trust in institutions constitutive of liberal democracies—from trust in governments to trust in the media. These sets of issues are interrelated: concerns about the reliability of the media, and the allegedly partisan use of human rights policies, for instance, straddle many contemporary sociopolitical debates.
![Research paper thumbnail of But who's the Girl? Laura Alcoba's Manèges: petite histoire argentine (2007) [La casa de los conejos/The Rabbit House (2008)]](https://attachments.academia-assets.com/103299374/thumbnails/1.jpg)
](Chapter from dissertation, Unsettling Interpretations: Reading Practices, Memory, and Politics in... more Chapter from dissertation, Unsettling Interpretations: Reading Practices, Memory, and Politics in Laura Alcoba's Manèges: petite histoire argentine (2007) [La casa de los conejos/The Rabbit House (2008)], Héctor Abad Faciolince's Traiciones de la memoria (2009), and Albertina Carri's Los rubios (2003)
At the intersection of the autobiographical, the historical, and the fictional, Laura Alcoba's Ma... more At the intersection of the autobiographical, the historical, and the fictional, Laura Alcoba's Manèges (2007) [La casa de los Conejos/The Rabbit House (2008)], Héctor Abad Faciolince's Traiciones de la memoria (2009), and Albertina Carri's Los rubios (2003) deal with contemporary quandaries in the aftermath of the Latin American regimes of the seventies and eighties. They make a sideways approach to protracted, polarized discussions on issues surrounding recent history and politics of memory-including present-ramifications that impact concrete governmental policies. The critical reception of Abad, Alcoba, and Carri shows signs of an analogous turn toward polarization. I argue that such turn is unwarranted, for these works challenge our interpretive practices precisely by appeal to rhetorical strategies and innovative uses of textual performativity that preclude settling on any one reading, thus eroding the basis of any "strong," polarized view. Shifts from direct report to free indirect discourse in three-person dialogue scenes, for instance, prevent us from matching utterances and speakers. In the absence of textual markers to justify one matching over others, favoring and settling on any one of them involves forcing the text into an arbitrary interpretive framework. Thus, we violate the formal structure of these texts and foreclose a more nuanced assessment demanded by the very texts: if we can't make justified matchings, we are limited but urged to increase the projection of tentative matchings. Since each set of speaker-utterance attributions yields different scenarios, the upshot is a palette of varied interpretations of the events, actions, and characters of the same dialogue scene. This "centrifugal" move-into the text-is complemented by a "centripetal" analogue that sends readers outside the text, into the "real world," in search of "missing pieces" whose necessity is hinted at by the texts themselves. This requirement to restitute what is missing and unsaid also tends to go unnoticed-or ignored. Such blindness, which leads to misreading and exerting violence on texts, also plagues interpretive approaches to sociopolitical phenomena, whether their focus be current events, recent history, or memory-related issues. If sound, this assessment calls for a deep revision of our interpretive practices. iii BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH Gustavo Llarull was born in La Plata (Buenos Aires), Argentina., where he completed a licenciatura in philosophy at the Universidad Nacional de La Plata (UNLP). While working towards this degree, he held part-time, mostly freelance jobs, gradually focusing on, and gaining experience in journalistic writing and research (esp. social and political issues, and cultural commentary), and the twin areas of translation and interpretation (Spanish/English). He applied for a teaching post at the UNLP, and taught introductory courses in philosophy. In 2002, a University of California fellowship allowed him to travel to the U.S. in order to join the graduate program in philosophy at UC-Riverside (Ph.D., 2007). He focused on the cluster-areas of agency theory, ethics, critical theory, and narrative conceptions of identity. He did further graduate work at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst (English Department-MFA Program), before coming to Cornell. iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS First, my endless gratitude to Debbie Castillo, whose contagious enthusiasm, intellectual rigor, creativity, and generosity-palpable in her feedback; transparent in her conversation-make her the best mentor and Chair one could ever hope for. I'm aware these words may confirm or even enhance a reputation that has already reached mythical proportions. It's probably not a good idea to conflate, or contribute to conflate, myth and reality; but in some rare cases, when one is so close to the other, I don't think much harm can come of it. By chance, during my first semester at Cornell, I took a class with Gerard Aching. Soon I realized it was chance of the Mallarmé kind-could it have been any better? His deep, detailed commentary on your work; his warm, encouraging rigor-a refusal to stop when you've reached a comfortable spot-always conveyed with a subtle, disarming sense of humor; all this strengthens your work tremendously; but much more important is the way in which it enhances and broadens your outlook. And not just in an intellectual sense. In time, you come to realize that every exchange with Gerard is an exercise in phronesis. I don't know how Debra does it, but there's a way, among her many ways, in which-it's like a magic trick-she mentions something; you blink, and you're on board; you just know it; you're enthused, and you do it. And I doubt I would've dared take Cathy Caruth's seminar on Milton otherwise. It was Paradise. Milton's Earth-shattering line-breaks, Hanna Arendt, Cathy's recent work on Latin American theater will be apparent on many of the following pages, even if the reader may become aware of them… belatedly. Sometime before my A exam, Edmundo Paz-Soldán suggested that I revisit Castellanos Moya's Insensatez (2004). I had been introduced to Moya's novel by Edmundo himself, two v years earlier, in a seminar, and, of course, it had caused a deep impression on me. Rereading is a joy and a discovery and a necessity, for reasons that we all know. So, while I had no objections to his suggestion, there was something intriguing about its timing. Evidently, he had seen something I hadn't seen yet. For I was not expecting Castellanos Moya to reshape the way I was seeing my ongoing work. No radical changes were brought about as a result of that discovery. It is in the realm of what I didn't do, rather than in what I did, where the influence of Edmundo's perceptive suggestion would be palpable. (I'll skip, for the sake of maintaining a sanitized version of the events, my initial bout of insensatez during which I wanted to include that novel, as well as El asco, in my dissertation). 1 I don't mean to be fashionably self-deprecating. But I am convinced that learning with Debbie, Cathy, Gerard, and Edmundo included a crucial skill: becoming aware that literature is, among other things, un laborioso avance a través de la propia estupidez [a laborious progression through one's own stupidity]-Rodolfo Walsh dixit-; and that the best thing to do about it is not to take oneself too seriously; to laugh, try to learn, and keep moving on. 1 So, the absence, and not the presence, of Insensatez will (not) be noticeable in the pages that follow. Yet, if there is a single momentary merit or felicitous passage in them, it will be in no small part due to that something that needed to be absent, which Edmundo knew Moya would be able to make me see. This is too subtle, too important, and too badly written to make any sense. With my excuses to the reader, I must say I will be satisfied if these words make Edmundo remember that intervention. And to round up the cryptic section of these notes, I'll mention the Sunday workshops, the risks of irse de mambo, and the New Voices colloquia-all hermetic endeavors that deserve a dissertation of their own. Information about the latter, however, is available in a few clicks. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS
Chasqui Revista De Literatura Latinoamericana, 2011
Since its publication in 2001, the novel Mantra , by Argentine Rodrigo Fresan, has elicited criti... more Since its publication in 2001, the novel Mantra , by Argentine Rodrigo Fresan, has elicited critical interest.1 However, critics have either focused on very interesting but narrow aspects of the novel (Candia; Gras Mirabet; Musset; Navarrete Gonzalez), or placed it in the context of the corpus of Fresan's work with the intention of reaching a global view of his literary production (Hidalgo; Kurlat Ares).2 While very productive, these two approaches cannot, in virtue of their nature, examine Mantra both in detail and as a whole. One notable exception is Paz Soldan 's comprehensive study, published in this very journal, in which the novelist and critic offers an indispensable analysis of the proliferation of technology and mass-media in Mantra. It is against the backdrop of Paz Soldan's analysis, then, that this article will unfold.3 In the last decade of the twentieth century, Fresan and Paz Soldan were members of the McOndo group, which was related, despite certain differences in their aesthetic projects, to the Crack group. (See Williams, ch. 1 0 and 1 3, for the overlapping agendas of the two groups. For their differences, see Carrion, which features an illuminating discussion between Paz Soldan and Volpi). Until a few years ago,4 the writers of these groups emphasized the need to break with the tradition of the modern Latin
Revista de Filosofía y Teoría Política, 2002
A comienzos del siglo XIX, cuando la idea del arte como expresión de la personalidad del artista ... more A comienzos del siglo XIX, cuando la idea del arte como expresión de la personalidad del artista estaba en su apogeo, la consideración de Shakespeare presentaba problemas tanto en Inglaterra como en Alemania. Mientras el primer Federico Schlegel lo evaluaba como ...
Abstract: In this dissertation I present a normative view that connects narrative self-conception... more Abstract: In this dissertation I present a normative view that connects narrative self-conceptions, ethicsie, morality strictu sensu and conceptions of the good lifeand literature. First, I claim that moral agents who have an inclination to organize (and reflect ...
Chasqui: Revista de Literatura Latinoamericana, May 2011
"This paper argues that Mantra makes innovative micro-political and rhetorical moves, which rest ... more "This paper argues that Mantra makes innovative micro-political and rhetorical moves, which rest on (or are enabled by) a blend of typical features and procedures of the modern Latin American novel *and* technology-related features and procedures that are more widely associated with Fresan's piece. Both this blend and its related discursive operations -- I argue -- have been obscured (mostly) by the excessive emphasis placed on the more salient, more widely discussed traits of Fresan's piece: fragmentation; technology and mass-media regarded both as central themes, and as sources of formal procedures and tropes, etc.. Therefore, I articulate an interpretive framework that gives visibility to these neglected micro-political and rhetorical operations -- a framework that yields at the same time a view of Mantra that proves it to be a textual artifact refractory to overarching, settled interpretations, but which also stimulates (and challenges and pushes) interpretive activity. The upshot of this activity is a proliferation of simultaneous yet distinct "worlds" that at times overlap or cross their own boundaries -- an "aleph-swimming-pool," as one of the narrator says. These "worlds" are the scenario where micro-political moves are played out.
Lastly, and contrary to the widespread view that Fresan's generation rejects engaging with political and historical issues, these scenarios are also the space of political struggles, often presented in brief, frequently elliptical or allusive -- almost elusive -- ways, which render them singularly disquieting. If our interpretive framework and its resulting reading are accepted, Mantra could be read as enacting subtle power-related, political tensions running across a variety of spaces: from the "private sphere" of a shared bedroom (pace Deleuze) to others carved out in recent history: from Sub-Comandante Marcos' Chiapas in the late 1990s to Peron's return to Buenos Aires in the 1970s and the ensuing prelude to the Dirty War. By the same token, the aforementioned blend allows Mantra to present new ways -- new narrative and linguistic devices -- to address the thorny issues of identity and agency, both at the collective and the individual levels (e.g., self-description and its implications for the subject's agency and capabilities)."
Other Degrees: PhD Philosophy (2007) UC-Riverside by Gustavo Llarull
Sample material from The R. J. Cox Online Archive covering 1) networking initiatives with Amnesty... more Sample material from The R. J. Cox Online Archive covering 1) networking initiatives with Amnesty International and the IACHR; 2) US international human rights policy: Argentina and the Carter Administration; 3) semantics and politics: "insurgents," "guerrillas," and "terrorists"--Argentina and beyond.
Sample Archive Material Part 1: From death squads to Armed Forces. Military and civil society vie... more Sample Archive Material Part 1: From death squads to Armed Forces. Military and civil society views. Press, media, and networks in-the-making.
The papers of R. J. Cox, former editor of the Buenos Aires Herald, shed light on two sets of issu... more The papers of R. J. Cox, former editor of the Buenos Aires Herald, shed light on two sets of issues: 1. Debates about recent history (e.g., Argentina’s human rights movement vis-a-vis its international correlates; the US/Latin America relationship during the 1970s; the role of the press); 2. Current discussions regarding the weakening of trust in institutions constitutive of liberal democracies—from trust in governments to trust in the media. These sets of issues are interrelated: concerns about the reliability of the media, and the allegedly partisan use of human rights policies, for instance, straddle many contemporary sociopolitical debates.
Chapter from dissertation, Unsettling Interpretations: Reading Practices, Memory, and Politics in... more Chapter from dissertation, Unsettling Interpretations: Reading Practices, Memory, and Politics in Laura Alcoba's Manèges: petite histoire argentine (2007) [La casa de los conejos/The Rabbit House (2008)], Héctor Abad Faciolince's Traiciones de la memoria (2009), and Albertina Carri's Los rubios (2003)
At the intersection of the autobiographical, the historical, and the fictional, Laura Alcoba's Ma... more At the intersection of the autobiographical, the historical, and the fictional, Laura Alcoba's Manèges (2007) [La casa de los Conejos/The Rabbit House (2008)], Héctor Abad Faciolince's Traiciones de la memoria (2009), and Albertina Carri's Los rubios (2003) deal with contemporary quandaries in the aftermath of the Latin American regimes of the seventies and eighties. They make a sideways approach to protracted, polarized discussions on issues surrounding recent history and politics of memory-including present-ramifications that impact concrete governmental policies. The critical reception of Abad, Alcoba, and Carri shows signs of an analogous turn toward polarization. I argue that such turn is unwarranted, for these works challenge our interpretive practices precisely by appeal to rhetorical strategies and innovative uses of textual performativity that preclude settling on any one reading, thus eroding the basis of any "strong," polarized view. Shifts from direct report to free indirect discourse in three-person dialogue scenes, for instance, prevent us from matching utterances and speakers. In the absence of textual markers to justify one matching over others, favoring and settling on any one of them involves forcing the text into an arbitrary interpretive framework. Thus, we violate the formal structure of these texts and foreclose a more nuanced assessment demanded by the very texts: if we can't make justified matchings, we are limited but urged to increase the projection of tentative matchings. Since each set of speaker-utterance attributions yields different scenarios, the upshot is a palette of varied interpretations of the events, actions, and characters of the same dialogue scene. This "centrifugal" move-into the text-is complemented by a "centripetal" analogue that sends readers outside the text, into the "real world," in search of "missing pieces" whose necessity is hinted at by the texts themselves. This requirement to restitute what is missing and unsaid also tends to go unnoticed-or ignored. Such blindness, which leads to misreading and exerting violence on texts, also plagues interpretive approaches to sociopolitical phenomena, whether their focus be current events, recent history, or memory-related issues. If sound, this assessment calls for a deep revision of our interpretive practices. iii BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH Gustavo Llarull was born in La Plata (Buenos Aires), Argentina., where he completed a licenciatura in philosophy at the Universidad Nacional de La Plata (UNLP). While working towards this degree, he held part-time, mostly freelance jobs, gradually focusing on, and gaining experience in journalistic writing and research (esp. social and political issues, and cultural commentary), and the twin areas of translation and interpretation (Spanish/English). He applied for a teaching post at the UNLP, and taught introductory courses in philosophy. In 2002, a University of California fellowship allowed him to travel to the U.S. in order to join the graduate program in philosophy at UC-Riverside (Ph.D., 2007). He focused on the cluster-areas of agency theory, ethics, critical theory, and narrative conceptions of identity. He did further graduate work at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst (English Department-MFA Program), before coming to Cornell. iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS First, my endless gratitude to Debbie Castillo, whose contagious enthusiasm, intellectual rigor, creativity, and generosity-palpable in her feedback; transparent in her conversation-make her the best mentor and Chair one could ever hope for. I'm aware these words may confirm or even enhance a reputation that has already reached mythical proportions. It's probably not a good idea to conflate, or contribute to conflate, myth and reality; but in some rare cases, when one is so close to the other, I don't think much harm can come of it. By chance, during my first semester at Cornell, I took a class with Gerard Aching. Soon I realized it was chance of the Mallarmé kind-could it have been any better? His deep, detailed commentary on your work; his warm, encouraging rigor-a refusal to stop when you've reached a comfortable spot-always conveyed with a subtle, disarming sense of humor; all this strengthens your work tremendously; but much more important is the way in which it enhances and broadens your outlook. And not just in an intellectual sense. In time, you come to realize that every exchange with Gerard is an exercise in phronesis. I don't know how Debra does it, but there's a way, among her many ways, in which-it's like a magic trick-she mentions something; you blink, and you're on board; you just know it; you're enthused, and you do it. And I doubt I would've dared take Cathy Caruth's seminar on Milton otherwise. It was Paradise. Milton's Earth-shattering line-breaks, Hanna Arendt, Cathy's recent work on Latin American theater will be apparent on many of the following pages, even if the reader may become aware of them… belatedly. Sometime before my A exam, Edmundo Paz-Soldán suggested that I revisit Castellanos Moya's Insensatez (2004). I had been introduced to Moya's novel by Edmundo himself, two v years earlier, in a seminar, and, of course, it had caused a deep impression on me. Rereading is a joy and a discovery and a necessity, for reasons that we all know. So, while I had no objections to his suggestion, there was something intriguing about its timing. Evidently, he had seen something I hadn't seen yet. For I was not expecting Castellanos Moya to reshape the way I was seeing my ongoing work. No radical changes were brought about as a result of that discovery. It is in the realm of what I didn't do, rather than in what I did, where the influence of Edmundo's perceptive suggestion would be palpable. (I'll skip, for the sake of maintaining a sanitized version of the events, my initial bout of insensatez during which I wanted to include that novel, as well as El asco, in my dissertation). 1 I don't mean to be fashionably self-deprecating. But I am convinced that learning with Debbie, Cathy, Gerard, and Edmundo included a crucial skill: becoming aware that literature is, among other things, un laborioso avance a través de la propia estupidez [a laborious progression through one's own stupidity]-Rodolfo Walsh dixit-; and that the best thing to do about it is not to take oneself too seriously; to laugh, try to learn, and keep moving on. 1 So, the absence, and not the presence, of Insensatez will (not) be noticeable in the pages that follow. Yet, if there is a single momentary merit or felicitous passage in them, it will be in no small part due to that something that needed to be absent, which Edmundo knew Moya would be able to make me see. This is too subtle, too important, and too badly written to make any sense. With my excuses to the reader, I must say I will be satisfied if these words make Edmundo remember that intervention. And to round up the cryptic section of these notes, I'll mention the Sunday workshops, the risks of irse de mambo, and the New Voices colloquia-all hermetic endeavors that deserve a dissertation of their own. Information about the latter, however, is available in a few clicks. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS
Chasqui Revista De Literatura Latinoamericana, 2011
Since its publication in 2001, the novel Mantra , by Argentine Rodrigo Fresan, has elicited criti... more Since its publication in 2001, the novel Mantra , by Argentine Rodrigo Fresan, has elicited critical interest.1 However, critics have either focused on very interesting but narrow aspects of the novel (Candia; Gras Mirabet; Musset; Navarrete Gonzalez), or placed it in the context of the corpus of Fresan's work with the intention of reaching a global view of his literary production (Hidalgo; Kurlat Ares).2 While very productive, these two approaches cannot, in virtue of their nature, examine Mantra both in detail and as a whole. One notable exception is Paz Soldan 's comprehensive study, published in this very journal, in which the novelist and critic offers an indispensable analysis of the proliferation of technology and mass-media in Mantra. It is against the backdrop of Paz Soldan's analysis, then, that this article will unfold.3 In the last decade of the twentieth century, Fresan and Paz Soldan were members of the McOndo group, which was related, despite certain differences in their aesthetic projects, to the Crack group. (See Williams, ch. 1 0 and 1 3, for the overlapping agendas of the two groups. For their differences, see Carrion, which features an illuminating discussion between Paz Soldan and Volpi). Until a few years ago,4 the writers of these groups emphasized the need to break with the tradition of the modern Latin
Revista de Filosofía y Teoría Política, 2002
A comienzos del siglo XIX, cuando la idea del arte como expresión de la personalidad del artista ... more A comienzos del siglo XIX, cuando la idea del arte como expresión de la personalidad del artista estaba en su apogeo, la consideración de Shakespeare presentaba problemas tanto en Inglaterra como en Alemania. Mientras el primer Federico Schlegel lo evaluaba como ...
Abstract: In this dissertation I present a normative view that connects narrative self-conception... more Abstract: In this dissertation I present a normative view that connects narrative self-conceptions, ethicsie, morality strictu sensu and conceptions of the good lifeand literature. First, I claim that moral agents who have an inclination to organize (and reflect ...
Chasqui: Revista de Literatura Latinoamericana, May 2011
"This paper argues that Mantra makes innovative micro-political and rhetorical moves, which rest ... more "This paper argues that Mantra makes innovative micro-political and rhetorical moves, which rest on (or are enabled by) a blend of typical features and procedures of the modern Latin American novel *and* technology-related features and procedures that are more widely associated with Fresan's piece. Both this blend and its related discursive operations -- I argue -- have been obscured (mostly) by the excessive emphasis placed on the more salient, more widely discussed traits of Fresan's piece: fragmentation; technology and mass-media regarded both as central themes, and as sources of formal procedures and tropes, etc.. Therefore, I articulate an interpretive framework that gives visibility to these neglected micro-political and rhetorical operations -- a framework that yields at the same time a view of Mantra that proves it to be a textual artifact refractory to overarching, settled interpretations, but which also stimulates (and challenges and pushes) interpretive activity. The upshot of this activity is a proliferation of simultaneous yet distinct "worlds" that at times overlap or cross their own boundaries -- an "aleph-swimming-pool," as one of the narrator says. These "worlds" are the scenario where micro-political moves are played out.
Lastly, and contrary to the widespread view that Fresan's generation rejects engaging with political and historical issues, these scenarios are also the space of political struggles, often presented in brief, frequently elliptical or allusive -- almost elusive -- ways, which render them singularly disquieting. If our interpretive framework and its resulting reading are accepted, Mantra could be read as enacting subtle power-related, political tensions running across a variety of spaces: from the "private sphere" of a shared bedroom (pace Deleuze) to others carved out in recent history: from Sub-Comandante Marcos' Chiapas in the late 1990s to Peron's return to Buenos Aires in the 1970s and the ensuing prelude to the Dirty War. By the same token, the aforementioned blend allows Mantra to present new ways -- new narrative and linguistic devices -- to address the thorny issues of identity and agency, both at the collective and the individual levels (e.g., self-description and its implications for the subject's agency and capabilities)."