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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
Modern Fiction Studies , 2022
https://muse.jhu.edu/issue/47485
a special issue of Mediations (24.2), edited by Emilio Sauri and Mathias Nilges
Articles by Emilio Sauri
Constelaciones: Revista de teoría crítica, 2024
Traducción del artículo "The Abstract, the Concrete, and the Labor of the Novel," originalmente p... more Traducción del artículo "The Abstract, the Concrete, and the Labor
of the Novel," originalmente publicado en la revista Novel: A Forum on Fiction.
¿Qué puede significar concebir una obra de arte no como un simple espejo de la sociedad, sino como un medio para visualizar las funciones abstractas que hacen que la sociedad se vea del modo en que se vea? ¿Y qué puede decirnos esto sobre el potencial social, político y artístico de la novela hoy en día? Plantear estas preguntas, por supuesto, es suponer que la sociedad existe y que las obras de arte siguen siendo posibles en una situación en la que ninguna de estas afirmaciones es evidente, como sugieren las recientes tendencias de los estudios literarios asociadas a la “postcrítica”. Sin embargo, es esta situación la que tanto el novelista Yuri Herrera como el fotógrafo Alejandro Cartagena pretenden abordar en el contexto de México, donde la identificación prácticamente sin fisuras del desarrollo con el libre mercado por parte del neoliberalismo ha precipitado la sensación de un presente del que el futuro prácticamente se ha desvanecido. En lugar de limitarse a reflejar este estado de cosas, Herrera ofrece una idea de cómo la novela contemporánea se aleja de esta perspectiva, retomando una versión del problema que la fotografía de Cartagena intenta resolver de forma similar, a saber, como hacer visible lo abstracto en lo concreto.
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.
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
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.
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.
Literature and the Global Contemporary, 2017
(full text at Google Books--see link below) Co-authored by Sarah Brouillette, Emilio Sauri, and ... more (full text at Google Books--see link below)
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
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
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.
Modern Fiction Studies , 2022
https://muse.jhu.edu/issue/47485
a special issue of Mediations (24.2), edited by Emilio Sauri and Mathias Nilges
Constelaciones: Revista de teoría crítica, 2024
Traducción del artículo "The Abstract, the Concrete, and the Labor of the Novel," originalmente p... more Traducción del artículo "The Abstract, the Concrete, and the Labor
of the Novel," originalmente publicado en la revista Novel: A Forum on Fiction.
¿Qué puede significar concebir una obra de arte no como un simple espejo de la sociedad, sino como un medio para visualizar las funciones abstractas que hacen que la sociedad se vea del modo en que se vea? ¿Y qué puede decirnos esto sobre el potencial social, político y artístico de la novela hoy en día? Plantear estas preguntas, por supuesto, es suponer que la sociedad existe y que las obras de arte siguen siendo posibles en una situación en la que ninguna de estas afirmaciones es evidente, como sugieren las recientes tendencias de los estudios literarios asociadas a la “postcrítica”. Sin embargo, es esta situación la que tanto el novelista Yuri Herrera como el fotógrafo Alejandro Cartagena pretenden abordar en el contexto de México, donde la identificación prácticamente sin fisuras del desarrollo con el libre mercado por parte del neoliberalismo ha precipitado la sensación de un presente del que el futuro prácticamente se ha desvanecido. En lugar de limitarse a reflejar este estado de cosas, Herrera ofrece una idea de cómo la novela contemporánea se aleja de esta perspectiva, retomando una versión del problema que la fotografía de Cartagena intenta resolver de forma similar, a saber, como hacer visible lo abstracto en lo concreto.
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.
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
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.
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.
Literature and the Global Contemporary, 2017
(full text at Google Books--see link below) Co-authored by Sarah Brouillette, Emilio Sauri, and ... more (full text at Google Books--see link below)
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
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
Mediations vol. 27, no. 1-2 (fall/spring 2013-14)
Mediations 23.3 (Fall 2007) 27-61
Chow, Rey. Entanglements, or Transmedial Thinking about Capture. Durham: Duke UP, 2012.
Review of Roberto Schwarz's Two Girls and Other Essays (Verso, 2012)
NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction 45.3 (Fall 2012) 479-482
Canadian Review of Comparative Literature / Revue Canadienne de Littérature Comparée, 2015
Twentieth-Century Literature, 2011
Mere belief is hostile to the whole idea of thinking. To wear credulity as one's badge of int... more Mere belief is hostile to the whole idea of thinking. To wear credulity as one's badge of intellect is not to be a thinker as such --n+1, "A Regressive Avant-Garde" (2004) And yet, the best of Jameson's work has felt mind-blowing in the way of LSD or mushrooms: here before you is the world you'd always known you were living in, but apprehended as if for the first time in the freshness of its beauty and horror. --Benjamin Kunkel, "Into the Tent" (2009) Toward the middle of Benjamin Kunkel's Indecision (2005), Dwight B. Wilmerding tells his sister Alice, "I feel like I'm evens proof: That's one idea for a major problem I must have" (141) Reflecting on the end of the Cold War, Dwight explains that, "The Wall came down, whole world changed, now we're not going to die in a nuclear holocaust anymore. But it really didn't feel like anything was happening--not to me. I feel like I have a certain resistance to events. (140). What Kunkel's narrator means when he describes himself as "event proof" would seem to be an inability to "feel" history, and this is confirmed later, when, in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, he recalls being "amazed ... that I continued living my life, doing everything I did, despite the confusion involved, like it was somehow regular and automatic" (183). Thus, if Dwight feels as if "events don't always seem to happen, even when they do" (149), then his "major problem" is that this "resistance to events" prevents him not from knowing history but from experiencing it. In indecision, then, the fact that Dwight cannot experience history is also conceived as the source of his abulia, a condition that not only leaves him with a chronic inability to make any decision, no matter how trivial, but also incapable of conceptualizing historical change: "I couldn't think of the future," Dwight says, "until I arrived there" (3). But while this unique condition animates an almost exaggerated form of self-consciousness that contributes to what a number of critics have described as the novel's equally unique narrative voice, it is this same "resistance to events" that will lead his Argentine-Belgian love interest, Brigid, to complain, "Nothing can happen to you. You are that type" (175). (1) indecision nonetheless is, as Dwight affirms in its opening pages, a "narrative of life-changing events" (3), in which a fruit conjured up in the jungles of Ecuador comes to embody the solution to his "major problem": "When you eat from this fruit," Brigid tells Dwight, "then whenever you put your hand on a product, a commodity, an article, then, at the moment of your touch, how this commodity came into your hands becomes plainly evident to you" (216). This solution, then, will not only allow Dwight to "feel" history in a strangely literal sense, but also alerts ' us to the novels marked interest in a distinctly postmodern predicament. For what Indecision evokes here is nothing other than the possibility of overcoming what Fredric Jameson first described in 1984 as the "waning of our historicity, of our lived possibility of experiencing history in some active way" ("Postmodernism" 68). Indeed, one cannot help but think of the subject Jameson identifies as having "lost its capacity to organize its past and future into coherent experience" (71), when, for example, Dwight recounts living "from day to day as if ... on a bridge saying in the wind while both sides of the canyon ... past and future ... disappeared in foggy weather" (19). Which is to say that if Dwight is, in Brigid's words, a "type," he is one that will recall Jameson's subject of postmodernism in rather explicit ways. And if Kunkel's novel can be best understood as an attempt to dramatize what Jameson calls a "weakening of historicity" ("Postmodernism" 58), it is perhaps not surprising that the possibility of overcoming what Dwight recognizes as an inability to experience history is also imagined in the novel as having decisively political consequences; consequences which, in taking the form of a political awakening, will speak directly to both our understanding of postmodernism then, and the possibility of imagining something like an after-postmodernism now. …
Studies in American Fiction, 2013
MFS Modern Fiction Studies, 2022
https://muse.jhu.edu/issue/47485
American Literature in Transition, 2000–2010
Canadian Review of Comparative Literature / Revue canadienne de littérature comparée, 2015
This special issue of CRCL/RCLC titled “Novel beyond Nation” is devoted to a rethinking of the co... more This special issue of CRCL/RCLC titled “Novel beyond Nation” is devoted to a rethinking of the conjuncture between the nation and the novel in light of the contemporary persistence of the novel despite the rise of identity politics and other post-nationalist types of social bond. The issue will hence welcome papers on any aspect of the history of the novel and/or the nation from the joint rise of the two forms to the current moment of the prevalence of the former despite the crisis of the latter.
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
A special double issue of Twentieth-Century Literature 57.3-4 (Fall/Winter 2011), edited by Jason... more A special double issue of Twentieth-Century Literature 57.3-4 (Fall/Winter 2011), edited by Jason Gladstone and Daniel Worden. Available at https://www.dukeupress.edu/postmodernism-then