Ricardo Piglia Page 1 of 24 Printed from Oxford Research Encyclopedias, Literature. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a single article for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice). Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 27 October 2025 Ricardo Piglia Ana Gallego Cuiñas, University of Granada https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190201098.013.1451 Published online: 20 May 2025 Summary Ricardo Piglia is one of the most influential Latin American writers of the second half of the 20th century. The literary strategies he developed in his work are recognizable and admired for their originality and great impact on the cultural field in the Spanish language: first, because of the shifting and re-evaluation of marginal authors and the use of “lesser” genres; second, because of the conjunction of Jorge Luis Borges and Roberto Arlt as the epitome of the avant-garde; third, because of the crossover between criticism and fiction; and fourth, because of the technique of the secret tied to the novella and to uses redirected from the crime novel. We can add to this the incorporation in Argentine national literature of some authors of world literature (such as Bertolt Brecht, Edgar A. Poe, James Joyce, Franz Kafka, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Henry James, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Truman Capote, Cesare Pavese, Italo Calvino, and Osamu Dazai), whose works Piglia translated into his own language and into a national context in order to propound a transcultural poetics that represented an alternative to that of Borges, Cortázar, and the Latin American Boom. The politics of literature developed by Ricardo Piglia is defined by the intersection of diary and fiction, by nonfiction and autobiography, and by the use of narrative techniques from the avant-garde, Russian formalism, and Lacanian thought: the secret, the unreliable narrator, and the split subject. However, his politics of criticism is based on five procedures that articulate his reflection on the relationship between literature and society: writer criticism, avant- garde ethos, ontology of crossing, criticism of the masses, and materialist criticism. Keywords: Ricardo Piglia, fiction and criticism, Argentine literature, Latin American literature, politics of literature, translation, transculturation, avant-garde, materialist criticism Subjects: Fiction, Latin American and Caribbean Literatures, 20th and 21st Century (1900-present), Literary Theory, Cultural Studies Ricardo Piglia: The Argentinean Writer and World Literature Of all Latin American writers, Ricardo Piglia (Adrogué, 1940—Buenos Aires, 2017) has had one of the greatest impacts on the world literary system during the late 20th and early 21st centuries. The key to his success lies in the development of a theoretical device that is reproduced in his fictional and critical work to merge both spheres and create a framework of legitimization and readability of Argentine literature that is unique and effective. The strategies that he deploys for this in his poetics are varied and well known: first, the shifting and re-evaluation of marginal authors and the use of “lesser” genres; second, the conjunction of Borges and Arlt as the epitome of the avant-garde; third, the crossover between criticism and fiction; and fourth, the technique of the secret tied to the nouvelle and to uses redirected from the crime novel. We can add to this the incorporation into Ana Gallego Cuiñas, University of Granada