Skip to main content
Kent Academic Repository

Juan Filloy's Caterva and the Geopolitics of the Joycean Novel in Argentina

Novillo Corvalan, Patricia (2022) Juan Filloy's Caterva and the Geopolitics of the Joycean Novel in Argentina. Textual Practice, . ISSN 0950-236X. E-ISSN 1470-1308. (doi:10.1080/0950236X.2022.2003097) (KAR id:89903)

Abstract

James Joyce’s Ulysses has had a profound impact on the Argentine literary imagination, renewing and redefining style, language, and narrative technique, as part of an expansive legacy that kicked off with Borges’s early reception of Ulysses and fragmentary translation of ‘Penelope’ in 1925 and gained increasing momentum throughout the twentieth century, peaking with the stylistic fireworks ignited by Cortázar’s experimental novel Rayuela (Hopscotch) in 1963. Yet this impact, I suggest, raises not only stylistic but also ideological questions, as well as problematic issues of canonicity and literary genealogies. In this essay, I engage with one of the most significant works of the Argentine Joycean tradition: Juan Filloy’s modernist masterpiece Caterva (1937), a work which I define here as a ‘Ulyssean’ novel. In what follows, I insert Caterva within the long arc of Argentina’s Joycean novelistic tradition in a reading that destabilises previous critical narratives from which it had been erased, while mapping out new transnational affiliations with Joyce. My claim is that Joyce’s and Filloy’s modernist novels intersect stylistically and ideologically through their use of rhetorical devices emulating the movement of trains and trams as quintessential symbols of modernity, but in a manner that foregrounds British imperialism as the engine powering infrastructure projects in Ireland and Argentina respectively within the intricate global networks of Empire.

Item Type: Article
DOI/Identification number: 10.1080/0950236X.2022.2003097
Uncontrolled keywords: James Joyce, Juan Filloy, Ulysses, Caterva, Dublin, Argentina, pampas, Jorge Luis Borges, modernism, modernity, global South
Subjects: P Language and Literature > PN Literature (General) > PN851 Comparative Literature
Divisions: Divisions > Division of Arts and Humanities > School of Culture and Languages
Signature Themes: Migration and Movement
Depositing User: Patricia Novillo-Corvalan
Date Deposited: 25 Aug 2021 13:07 UTC
Last Modified: 27 May 2022 09:00 UTC
Resource URI: https://kar.kent.ac.uk/id/eprint/89903 (The current URI for this page, for reference purposes)

University of Kent Author Information

Novillo Corvalan, Patricia.

Creator's ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0751-1930
CReDIT Contributor Roles:
  • Depositors only (login required):

Total unique views for this document in KAR since July 2020. For more details click on the image.