Current MRes Student

Julio Cortázar (1914-1984) was a great player of literary games. His ‘mortal games’, as Pablo Neruda once wrote. One of the most enduring, and endearing, qualities of his writing is the invitation to the reader to perform the games his texts are playing, or playfulfully refusing. Another is the desire, practically and theoretically questionable, to escape from the oppressive limits of western metaphysics, and the ensuing limits of linguistic representation.  

My thesis thinks through the interrelation and concurrence of these two qualities as they arise in Cortázar’s engagement with, and pursuit of, an aesthetic ideal. This engagement, always in tension with the drives of his pursuit, reveals the ethical dimension of his work. Cortázar is at his most playful when he allows his texts, and invites us, as readers, to perform the (infinite) ethical demands the presence of the Other makes on their language and structure, their content and form. Positioning Cortázar in relation to post-structuralism, this study asks how playful uses of language relate to questions of how and why we use language, and how we may act positively in light of our language being called into question. There is always another game in town.