Procedure and performance in contemporany novel

an analysis of La Mendiga, by César Aira

Abstract

This article consists of a reflection on procedural and performative characteristics of contemporary novels. For this, it aims to analyze the narrative La Mendiga (1999), by the Argentine writer César Aira, in light of the notion of ‘left literature’, by the also Argentine Damián Tabarovsky (2017), who thus names a literature that seeks to disassociate itself from a validated literary model, either because it is inserted in the so-called literary canon (by academic legitimacy), or because it corresponds to well-accepted models by the press, in a cult established within a framework of what is recognizable as literary rhetoric. Thus, it seeks to understand to what extent certain themes and aesthetic procedures of a procedural/performative writing configure specific enunciative possibilities of the contemporary novel.