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Metaplagiarism and the Critic's Role as Detective: Ricardo Piglia's Reinvention of Roberto Arlt

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Ellen McCracken
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Abstract

In 1975 the Argentine writer Ricardo Piglia published a trasgressive appropriation of a short story from a prestigious European tradition to call into question the notion of literary private property. Using such postmodernist techniques as scholarly parody and metaplagiarism, Piglia succeeded in catching critics at their own game: few read carefully enough to decipher the elaborate literary crime he had constructed as a tribute to an important but undervalued Argentine writer, Roberto Arlt. The double codes of entrapment and disclosure in Piglia's narrative pose a special challenge to contemporary readers: in a noteworthy reversal of current critical fashion, the vanguard reader on whom Piglia's text depends must engage in a careful, formalist decoding in order to apprehend the text's larger theoretical concerns.

Type
Cluster on Reader-Response Criticism
Information
PMLA , Volume 106 , Issue 5 , October 1991 , pp. 1071 - 1082
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1991

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