I am a PhD Candidate in Comparative Literature working on 19th-21st century Anglo-American, French, and Latin American literatures. My dissertation, “The Literary Origins of the Middle Class in Argentina (1885-1946),” is a study of the category known as the middle class, its emergence in literary culture, and the transformation of Argentine society from a binary to a three-part structure. My aim in the dissertation is twofold: to understand how dynamics of class composition find their way into the content and form of important literary texts, and to show how these literary texts contribute to dynamics of class composition. Historians and social scientists have long debated when and how this important class fraction achieved political self-consciousness. I argue that the poetry of Almafuerte, the novels of Roberto Arlt, and the short stories of Jorge Luis Borges illuminate this debate and allow us to observe the gradual coming into being of the middle class as an analytic category and a political identity.
An article drawn from my dissertation, “Affect as Class Passion: Roberto Arlt’s Petty Bourgeoisie,” is forthcoming in Hispanic Review. This article spells out my proposal for how to coordinate affect theory and ideological analysis through a reading of Arlt’s novels, Los siete locos and Los lanzallamas.
I am also a Designated Emphasis student in Critical Theory. My article, “Memory Forged in Genocide: What Nietzsche Meant for Borges,” forthcoming in Modern Philology, develops a new reading of Borges’s short story “Funes el memorioso” in the tradition of critical theory, that is, a reading invested in aesthetic, political, and philosophical issues all at once.
With Gabrielle Elias (English), I coordinate the Consortium on the Novel, a Townsend Center Working Group. A recent foray into the field of novel theory is my review essay “Reframing Novelistic Recognition,” forthcoming in The Cambridge Quarterly.
You can learn more about my work here: www.pedrohurtadoortiz.com
