Poetics of Landscape and Foundational Narratives: Borges and Carpentier

CORTES ROCCA, PAOLA

Princeton

Exposición; Charla - Conferenciante invitada; 2006

Departamento de Literatura comparada, Princeton University

A possible way of reviewing Latin American literature could take the form of a cartography, of a collection of Latin American landscapes. I am not referring to landscape as an already given territorial configuration, nor as a scenario in which a narrative unfolds but as the protagonist of a text, as a mechanism that connects a territorial formation to an aesthetic, cultural, and political project. Re-reading the notion of the Marvelous Real in the Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier and the concepts of artifice and translation in Jorge Luis Borges, this talk will focus on two poetics that are intimately tied to the problem of landscape and cultural identity. Borges and Carpentier return, both in their own way, to the moment when the Spaniards arrived in America, a moment that shapes the discussion of the relations among foundation, landscape, poetics in Latin America.