Toward a Latin American Irony: English Intertextuality and the Transnational Reception of Machado de Assis and Borges

Abstract

This thesis undertakes a comparative study of Brazilian writer Machado de Assis and Argentinean writer Borges in terms of the changing reception of their works vis-à-vis their intertextualities with English ironists. The focus is on Machado’s and Borges’ cross-cultural ironies: their idiosyncratic adaptations of the narrative devices and strategies used by English ironists, such as Sterne, Dickens, Chesterton and Stevenson. International critics have compared Machado and Borges as precursors of the 1960s Latin American Boom—the belated international recognition of Latin American writers in English translation. However, this connection between these writers and Latin American narrative traditions was never explained in terms of the presence of English ironists within their narratives; further, it was not explained in terms of developments in the reception of their work by critics in transnational contexts. This comparative study is based on an examination of the writers’ use of irony and intertextualities and the evolution of the critical reception of their works within different horizons of expectations: from their early local critics, in late nineteenth-century Brazil and twentieth-century Argentina; to their first critical discovery in the Englishspeaking world, from the 1960s; thence to their subsequent reception by later writers in Brazil and Argentina; and finally to the transnational reassessment of their work in the context of the Latin American Boom, in the late 1960s and 1970s. This thesis demonstrates that while Machado and Borges were writing within specific socio-cultural, historical and geographic discursive traditions, their innovative narratives prompt diverse interpretations across different cultures. As a result, their narratives have become models not only for transnational Latin American writers, but also for Euro-American readers, writers and critics across broader cultural horizons and networks of literary reception. This thesis critically analyses the reception of Machado’s and Borges’ works, to establish that, in fact, what situated them as concurrently national and universal writers, as well as precursors of the distinctive Latin American new narrative that was identified as the Boom, was their use of English irony.