Meathead materialisms: César Aira’s ANTsy fictions of a world without conviction Emilio Sauri Department of English, University of Massachusetts Boston, Boston, MA, USA ABSTRACT This essay considers several tendencies that have come to define the renewed concern with matter, assemblages, and objects associated with the new materialisms. Drawing on Bruno Latour’s Actor-Network Theory (ANT), postcritics and new formalists link the effort to revitalise and rethink the methods and aims of literary criticism to these concerns, while alerting us to the unique agency of artworks. The result is not just an idiosyncratic view of literature or of its relationship to society, but rather a peculiar vision of the world in which the notion that we can convince others or that we ourselves can be convinced holds no water. Perhaps no living writer provides a clearer picture of what it might mean to fully embrace this postcritical view of the world than César Aira. This is especially true for his novella La villa (Shantytown), which, in telling the story of how Maxi – a ‘meathead’ and ‘brainless hulk’– becomes a ‘legend’ among the poor, presents a world saturated with the networked agency of human and nonhuman actors alike. Drawing our attention to the aesthetic and political limits of such a worldview, Aira’s ANTsy fictions illustrate how the new materialist emphasis on description, immediacy, and the spontaneous not only alters literary criticism’s more foundational concepts – text, reading, interpretation, and critique – but also, and more crucially, entails a disavowal of conviction. This essay explores what this disavowal means for Aira’s entire approach to fiction, and what, in turn, it ought to mean for the future of literary studies itself.. ARTICLE HISTORY Received 14 July 2022; Accepted 10 February 2023 KEYWORDS Postcritique; new materialisms; literary criticism; Latin America; César Aira [T]o write yet never correct what has been written implies both the absence of intention and the most fully considered intentionality. – Walter Benjamin, ‘Robert Walser’ (1929) 1 Meathead or brainless hulk César Aira’s novel La villa (translated into English as Shantytown) opens by noting that, ‘One way Maxi chose to spend his time was to help the local © 2023 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group CONTACT Emilio Sauri Emilio.Sauri@umb.edu Department of English, University of Massachu- setts Boston, 100 Morrissey Blvd., Boston, MA 02125-3393 TEXTUAL PRACTICE 2023, VOL. 37, NO. 2, 317–338 https://doi.org/10.1080/0950236X.2023.2180895