Ricardo Piglia, a story about an imaginary writer

• Grant number: 24/10067-0
• Support Opportunities: Regular Research Grants
• Start date: March 01, 2025
• End date: February 29, 2028
• Field of knowledge: Linguistics, Literature and Arts - Literature - Literature Theory
• Principal Investigator: Adriano Schwartz
• Grantee: Adriano Schwartz
• Host Institution: Escola de Artes, Ciências e Humanidades (EACH). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil
• City of the host institution: São Paulo

Abstract

Emilio Renzi is almost universally considered by critics, readers, and often by the creator himself as a kind of alter ego of Ricardo Piglia. This research disagrees with this premise and will attempt to substantiate this disagreement. It is also conceived here an apparent contradiction between the immense visibility of the writer and the character with whom he has shared his existence since the beginning of his career, and the recurring reflection that, with variations, asserts throughout his entire production that a revolutionary, avant-garde artist, a conspirator, needs to erase his traces, transforming into nobody. To address this disagreement and this apparent contradiction, this research suggests the hypothesis that Ricardo Piglia established very early on an artistic and ethical program based on the formal/fictional creation of unstable authorial figurations and on the need for constant validation of his craft. Thus emerges an 'imaginary writer' who has neither his own name nor that of Emilio Renzi. This research aims to narrate a story of this quiet and discreet 'other,' conceived in youth and perpetually reconfigured from that point onward. (AU)