Ricardo Piglia and the fiction machine

Abstract

From the book La ciudad ausente, this essay deals with the way in wich Ricardo Piglia's textual machinery establishes a dialogue with the literary museum of Macedonio Fernández, Roberto Arlt and Jorge Luis Borges. Through metaphors of the narration machine and the museum of tradition, the contemporary novel develops the theme of an end-of-the-century world in which political, scientific and technological experiments give birth to artificial beings and languages, alter the concepts of citizenship and nationality and resist the extinction of cultural traditions.