NATURE AS A TOTAL MONTAGE
CÉSAR AIRA, ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT, AND THE CONCEPT OF POSTHUMAN “NATURE”
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.24029/lejana.2020.14.1667Keywords:
critical posthumanism, dehumanizing staging, natural physiognomy, César Aira, Alexander von HumboldtAbstract
The study seeks a critical posthumanist interpretation of César Aira’s novel Un episodio en la vida del pintor viajero (2000; An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter, 2006). In this context the so-called dehumanizing staging becomes a central methodological concept. Dehumanizing staging refers to different poetic strategies that are not intended to represent the total erasure of the anthropological dimension but constitute an aesthetic performance in which anthropomorphizing and desanthropomorphizing tendencies occur simultaneously. In Aira’s novel, the contradictory relationship between nature and the human subject is what serves as the medium of the dehumanizing staging. At the same time, I argue, an ideologically dimension is emerging, as the text depicts the aesthetic intensity that subverts the orders of perception and representation in the reflected context of natural physiognomy and landscape painting.
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