Oportunidades y peligros de la "mala literatura". Aporías estéticas de Julio Cortázar

Abstract

There is a large critical literature on the major influences in the works of Julio Cortázar. These studies have dealt with the decisive readings of authors such as Rilke, Baudelaire, Keats, Lautréamont and so many others that it would seem that there is no much left to consider about the literary models for the singular Cortázar’s poetics. However, in spite of the myriad of critical studies dedicated to these issues, the continuing appearance of previously unpublished works (which comprises new and vastly enlarged edition of Cortázar’s letters and other materials, critical studies and rejected or unfinished works) allows new insights. This is so in as much as what are considered are not the assumed canonic models, but the reading experience that is paradoxically characterized by its absence. In other words, this article intends to elucidate the notion of “great bad literature” for Cortázar and, in his own words, the different ways he used it to write. It thus provides some interpretative clues on uses and values of this “bad literature” in the work of Cortázar, and aesthetic antinomies implicit in these poetics.