The Polyphonic Machine

The book stands as a superb effort at unpicking the relationship between intellectual, especially literary, developments, such as ‘writing as resistance’, and political transformations in Argentina’s complex past that continues to permeate in overt and obscured ways the present.

The reader appreciates the interconnectedness of the chapters of Geraghty’s study and between the authors featured in it. With unquestionable mastery, Geraghty develops a multi-faceted argument that moves in various directions: forwards, sideways and performing various loops.

In this meticulously researched and lucidly argued work, Niall Geraghty explores the work of three of the most important novelists of the post-dictatorship period in Argentina. Balancing insightful textual analysis with detailed philosophical exposition, The Polyphonic Machine is essential reading for any student or scholar interested in the shifting landscapes of literature and power in Latin America.

'How does literature function in society?’ is the ambitious challenge confronted by Niall Geraghty with ostensible focus on, but reaching well beyond, the writings of César Aira, Marcelo Cohen, and Ricardo Piglia. Evidencing alertness to the particular debates and discourses arising from the terror, overt or disguised, of dictatorship and post-dictatorship Argentina, The Polyphonic Machine reveals how viable critical theories are produced, instrumentally, though the very act of writing fiction. It analyzes persuasively as ‘co-implicated and complementary literary projects often deemed irreconcilable yet inviting a shared immanent critique of the beyond words’ criminality of Dirty War and neo-liberal totalitarianisms.