Estudios de Teoría Literaria (Mar 2024)
Conterfactual Criticism: Science Fiction as a Response to The Discourse of The Crisis of Literary Theory
Abstract
This work proposes a reading of the poetry-novel relationship in Juan José Saer Faced with the discourse of the “end of literary theory” or of a recognition of a certain state of crisis, there have been various responses that sought a continuity of its incidence, putting continuities, displacements and transformations ahead that propose a new state: “theory beyond theory”. In the present work, we will seek to review the type of particular operation that the work of Michel Nieva (Buenos Aires, 1988) carries out in the face of this discourse of the crisis, adopting elements from both literature and theory to arrange them in a writing that is thought of as “counterfactual literature” – that is, a type of literature that “stubborn” (as Julio Premat concludes when speaking of certain literature of the present in ¿Qué será la vanguardia?) in thinking of theory as a fully current discourse that is outside or beyond its own conditions of possibility, in the manner of an "expanded literature" that is also an criticism, theory and nothing in particular, by overcoming the limitations of those views in a writing “in parallel” that is thought of as belonging to an impossible world, insisting on ours.
