“We Have a Right to This Tradition”: The Cosmopolitan Writer and Liberal Right

Authors

  • Mariano Siskind Harvard University

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.18485/beoiber.2024.8.2.1

Abstract

The vast critical bibliography that has dealt with “The Argentine Writer and Tradition” overlooked a crucial detail for the conceptualization of Borges’ cosmopolitanism: the essay characterizes the relationship of the marginal/interstitial writer to Western/universal culture in terms of a cosmopolitan right that must be read in relation to the liberal philosophical and political tradition that extends from John Stuart Mill’s “On Liberty” (1859) to Isaiah Berlin’s “Two Concepts of Liberty” (1958). Based on this new interpretation and historicization of Borges’ cosmopolitanism, this article presents a re-reading of “The Argentine Writer and Tradition,” but also of the relationship between literature and justice and of the rough edges that connect and pull apart the notion of right at stake in Borges’ essay and the civil rights that Perón’s government sanctioned and curtailed.

Author Biography

Mariano Siskind, Harvard University

Mariano Siskind is Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures and Comparative Literature at Harvard University. He is the author of Cosmopolitan Desires. Global Modernity and World Literature in Latin America (2014), Rumo a um cosmopolitismo da perda. Ensaio sobre o fim do mundo (2020) and The Modernist Songbook. Standards y variaciones sobre formas muertas (2021). He has edited Homi Bhabha's Nuevas minorías, nuevos derechos (2013) and has co-edited with Sylvia Molloy Poéticas de la distancia. Adentro y afuera de la literatura argentina (2006); with Gesine Müller, World Literature, Cosmopolitanism, Globality: Beyond, Against, Post, Otherwise (2019); and with Guillermina De Ferrari, The Routledge Companion to Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Latin American Literature and Culture (2022). In 2025 he will publish the collection of essays, Dislocaciones y fin de eso que ya no es mundo, and is working on a new book, tentatively titled About the End of the World: The Demise of Cosmopolitanism in Contemporary Culture.

References

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Published

2024-12-29

How to Cite

Siskind, M. “‘We Have a Right to This Tradition’: The Cosmopolitan Writer and Liberal Right”. BEOIBERÍSTICA - Journal of Iberian, Latin American and Comparative Studies (ISSN: 2560-4163 Online), vol. 8, no. 2, Dec. 2024, pp. 39-53, doi:10.18485/beoiber.2024.8.2.1.

Issue

Vol. 8 No. 2 (2024): Argentine Writers, Tradition, and World Literature: Borges and Cortázar

Section

LITERATURE

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Copyright (c) 2024 Mariano Siskind

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