Jason A Bartles | West Chester University of PA (original) (raw)

Book by Jason A Bartles

Purdue University Press, 2021

Premio Mejor Libro en Humanidades - Mención Honrosa - LASA Southern Cone Studies Section 2022 ... more Premio Mejor Libro en Humanidades - Mención Honrosa - LASA Southern Cone Studies Section 2022

ARTELETRA analyzes the Sixties in Latin America in order to revisit the core claim of literary and cultural studies to political relevancy in the contemporary world: the task of making visible the invisible. Though visibility can secure rights for the disenfranchised, it also risks subjecting them to the biopolitical and capitalist arrangements of space. What is at stake in this book is a series of aesthetic and ethical tools for engaging in politics— defined here as the potential to disagree—without first passing through visibility. These tools cohere around a practice Bartles calls “the politics of going unnoticed,” which he derives from an archive of three noteworthy, though under-appreciated, authors who wrote during the Sixties: Calvert Casey (1924–69), Juan Filloy (1894–2000), and Armonía Somers (1914–94). For the first time ever, Casey, Filloy, and Somers are put in dialogue with one another to further demonstrate the unique contributions of Latin American writers to contemporary debates about the cross- roads of literatures and politics. What unites them is their shared investment in stories about those who go unnoticed. As a practice, going unnoticed creates space and opportunities for queer, rural, and female subjects, among others, to step back from unjust institutions. As a political discourse, going unnoticed deactivates the binary structures of biopolitics (e.g., visible/invisible, pure/ filthy, friend/enemy) that divide humans from one another in the service of power and economic inequality. Though the politics of going unnoticed was ignored during the Sixties for its apparent individualism, these three writers work through alternatives to the politics of visibility that has animated political discourse on the left for the last half-century. More than a self-interested critique, going unnoticed opens new possibilities for engaging in the messy business of politics while imagining and creating better communities.

Peer-Reviewed Essays by Jason A Bartles

The Film Archipelago: Islands in Latin American Cinema, 2022

A comparative analysis of La deuda interna (1987) by Miguel Pereira, La campana (2010) by Fredy T... more A comparative analysis of La deuda interna (1987) by Miguel Pereira, La campana (2010) by Fredy Torres, and La forma exacta de las islas (2013) by Daniel Casabé, Edgardo Dieleke, and Julieta Vitullo.

Utopian Studies, 2022

The phrase “ambiguous utopia” was coined by Ursula K. Le Guin in the subtitle of her novel, The D... more The phrase “ambiguous utopia” was coined by Ursula K. Le Guin in the subtitle of her novel, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia (1974). That work appeared when utopian narratives had been displaced by dystopian imaginaries. This article embarks on a comparative analysis of three short stories: Ursula K. Le Guin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” (1973), Angélica Gorodischer’s “Of Navigators” (1979), and N. K. Jemisin’s “The Ones Who Stay and Fight” (2018). Each author installs ambiguity at the center of their open-ended utopian imaginaries as a way to challenge dogma, pessimism, and complacency. Le Guin interrogates the boundary between belief and knowledge to hold the threat of authoritarianism at bay. Gorodischer, a friend and contemporary of Le Guin, is considered a central figure of Argentine science fiction and fantasy. Her story imagines the discovery of a second Earth set in 1492 and highlights the need for utopianism to challenge the legacy of colonization. Finally, Jemisin’s story is a critical homage to “Omelas.” Jemisin shares the decolonial impetus of Gorodischer’s fiction, and she constructs Um-Helat on an explicitly antiracist foundation. Instead of walking away, her characters actively fight the creeping threat of intolerance while working toward that better place.

CR: The New Centennial Review, 2021

Smart power with a liberal, friendly appearance-power that stimulates and seduces-is more compell... more Smart power with a liberal, friendly appearance-power that stimulates and seduces-is more compelling than power that imposes, threatens and decrees. Its signal and seal is the Like button. Now, people subjugate themselves to domination by consuming and communicating-and they click Like all the while.-Byung-Chul Han, Psychopolitics "Are you a happy person?" ask Niels Boeing and Andreas Lebert in an interview with the South Korean-born German philosopher Byung-Chul Han. The question risks dismissing Han's insightful critique of neoliberalism as little more than the scribblings of a maladjusted philosopher. Han replies,

La escritura de Armonía Somers: Pulsión y riesgo (Ed. María Cristina Dalmagro) Editorial Universidad de Sevilla, 2019

This essay analyzes the ethics of exposure before another in the 1965 novel De miedo en miedo (Lo... more This essay analyzes the ethics of exposure before another in the 1965 novel De miedo en miedo (Los manuscritos del río) by the Uruguayan author, Armonía Somers. Drawing primarily from the ethics of Levinas and Jean-Luc Nancy, Bartles studies the protagonist's gradual development of an ethical dialogue with a mysterious woman as they struggle to understand one another.

Revista de Estudios Hispánicos, 2019

Héctor Manjarrez’s fictional worlds are populated by characters who are uncertain about their pla... more Héctor Manjarrez’s fictional worlds are populated by characters who are uncertain about their place in the Mexican Student Movement of 1968 both before and after the massacre at Tlatelolco on October 2. In contrast to the certainty that underscores the Mexican state’s paternalistic prescriptions, exclusions, and violence in the mid-twentieth century, this essay analyzes how Manjarrez de- ploys uncertainty in order to restore the potential for a democratizing politics. Through an analysis of París desaparece (2014), Pasaban en silencio nuestros dioses (1987), as well as the short story, “Johnny,” from Acto propiciatorio (1970), this essay explores Manjarrez’s attempt to construct secularized narratives of 1968 that resist defining the Tlatelolco massacre as a necessary sacrifice for future redemption. Building from that violent defeat, Manjarrez sheds the disillusionment of his generation and mobilizes literature to search for new political alternatives. Thus the literary becomes an important site from which to think and narrate a radically democratic politics for the left by making room for the contradictions and everyday indecisions of human beings whose uncertainty exceeds their dogmatic desires and programs.

Revista Hispánica Moderna, 2017

In the 1960s, Calvert Casey wrote fiction and essays in support of the Cuban Revolution as a memb... more In the 1960s, Calvert Casey wrote fiction and essays in support of the Cuban Revolution as a member of Lunes de Revolución and Casa de las Américas before going into exile. This essay argues that he developed a revolutionary, though ultimately wasted, model by which individuals can form a political community despite the rigid social barriers that persisted from Cuba's colonial and neocolonial past. In his writings, Casey explores Havana's sewers and the forgotten stories of the capital city. His focus on literal and figurative waste is not an isolated moment in the history of Cuban aesthetics, but one that he locates in the works of nineteenth-and early twentieth-century Cuban authors, including Cirilo Villaverde, Ramón Meza, and Miguel de Carrión. Casey critiques a certain Romantic vision of the past that, in his view, idealized pre-Revolutionary Cuba as a tropical paradise set for epic struggles and sublime realizations. Against this mythical, Romantic image of the Cuban nation, he proposes an aesthetics and politics without the lofty, normative values that exclude images of sullied objects, disreputable places, and people getting wasted. The essay concludes with an analysis of the film P.M. alongside Casey's posthumously published short story "Piazza Margana" to situate both of these seemingly aberrant texts within a long-standing, though infrequently celebrated, national tradition of reveling in filthy places packed with writhing, drunken bodies.

Revista Iberoamericana, 2016

Se conoce a Juan Filloy como el escritor de tres siglos y el autor de miles de palíndromos que, s... more Se conoce a Juan Filloy como el escritor de tres siglos y el autor de miles de palíndromos que, según él, le confieren el récord mundial (Ambort 59). Escribió aproximadamente cincuenta novelas, la mitad de las cuales permanece inédita todavía; la primera, Periplo, se publicó en 1930 y la última, Decio 8A, en 1997. Hubo un lapso de silencio entre la publicación de Finesse (1939) y la reedición en 1967 de Op Oloop (1934) después de lo cual volvió a publicar con más frecuencia. Filloy explica que su silencio se debió a su carrera como juez en Río Cuarto, Argentina, donde vivió por casi toda su vida. En el presente ensayo, me interesa analizar el gesto político y estético de "Yo y los intrusos", un cuento que apareció en Yo, yo y yo. (Monodiálogos paranoicos) en 1971, en diálogo con sus ensayos sobre el arte de escribir palíndromos que se publicaron en Karcino. Tratado de palindromía (1988). En primer lugar, interpreto el cuento como la ficcionalización de los palíndromos en la estructura de la torre-cueva desde el "desierto" argentino donde el protagonista del cuento se refugia. En segundo lugar, esta torre-cueva se presta para una lectura alegórica que se asemeja a la de la caverna de Platón; por otro lado, el cuento de Filloy requiere una lectura al revés como si fuera un palíndromo, pero un palíndromo errante e irónico. Así, el texto de Filloy abre un nuevo itinerario que atraviesa los discursos políticos y estéticos de los años sesenta y setenta desde la ficción.

Variaciones Borges, 2015

Fue tantos otros y hoy es una quieta pieza que mueve la literatura.

Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies, 2014

, in order to explore their common aesthetic sensibility. This sensibility is what I call rasquac... more , in order to explore their common aesthetic sensibility. This sensibility is what I call rasquache camp, a stance that arises from the complex entanglement of rasquachismo's utilitarian aspects of making do and the funky irreverence of camp, without resulting in a dialectical sublation between the two. This essay intervenes in the recent debates on the appropriateness of using rasquachismo as a tool for studying (queer) Chicana/o cultural productions. Informed by rasquache camp, I contend that these two novels develop and employ an ethics of representing marginalized queer and Chicana/o subjects who face insurmountable adversity by overturning the paradigms of morality and literary value, not from idealized, theoretical stances but by making use of imperfect, often cobbled-together solutions. As the future-oriented projects of these novels come to a close, both texts consciously fail to achieve their goals, but this failure allows the future to remain open to new and better aesthetic and ethical interventions by others.