The Three Avant Gardes

NON FICTION. ETERNA CADENCIA, 2016. 224 PAGES.

This volume contains eleven seminar classes given by Ricardo Piglia at the Universidad de Buenos Aires in 1990. The texts are meant as a starting point for addressing the problems presented in contemporary readings of the poetics of the novel, focusing especially on the idea of the avant garde while also insisting that there is no such thing, or that it has been replaced by other concepts. • After the end of the period of the great ‘Argentine' poetics of the novel that began with Macedonio Fernández and also featured figures such as Arlt, Marechal, Borges and Cortázar, new poetics began to form. Piglia examines the works of Walsh, Puig and Saer as central texts in the formation of these other poetics and from there tries to define them with all their continuities and ruptures. In debates about the novel, the figure of the reader, the relationship between politics, fiction and the state and the tension between the novel and narrative are just some of the larger issues. Saer, Puig and Walsh offer three very different answers and poetics to these problems. Each has defined their space in a specific way and formed a distinctive relationship with tradition and the mass media. • This is an extraordinary book that combines the lucidity of the greatest critic and writer in Argentina with the explanatory clarity and quality of oral discourse.