Littoral of the Letter: Saer’s Art of Narration

Littoral of the Letter is the first full-fledged study in English of the world of the late Argentine author Juan Jose Saer (1937-2005), who was highly regarded as Argentina’s best living novelist, a continuator of Burgess’s literary legacy. Characterized by an uncommon coherence and rigor, Juan Jose Saer’s writing defies simple categories. In both his fictional and essayistic writing Saer defamiliarizes the reader by questioning some of the most cherished certainties, especially those having to do with the role ascribed to Latin American literature, the uses of prose and poetry in the present, and the relation between language and the mass media. By questioning the assimilation of prose theory and the novel theory dictated by pragmatic needs of the state and the market, Saer produces a change in the function of narrative language that allows him to start where more traditional forms of realism end: the unsayable. The purpose of this book is to make explicit Saer’s procedures, the main coordinates of his poetics and to reflect on the situation of literature in an age dominated by images and the ‘total’ cultural phenomenon.