Title: Aesthetic constructs and the work of play in 20th century Latin American and Russian literature
Description: n their fictions, Jorge Luis Borges, Victor Pelevin, and Clarice Lispector show how the elaborate constructions of personhood, identity, and revelation can fall apart during a moment of crisis, vertiginous uncertainty, or even madness. But to illuminate this moment of crisis, these authors explore alternative constructs by resorting to the discourses of insanity and revelation. Insofar as construction is a way of engaging with the world and trying out various possibilities of action, these discourses provide us with alternate ways of seeing and enable agency. By showing us how constructions fall apart and then providing intriguing alternatives through the combinatory magic of words, Borges, Pelevin, and Lispector engage in literary play. In "The Aleph", Borges teases the reader with a vision of unimaginable magnitude, retracts it, and then reveals that the Aleph is a mirror that calls attention to its own artifice; the glimmers of its (aesthetic) revelations are the narrator's breathless litanies. In Buddha's Little Finger, Pelevin reveals that the protagonist's identity is the Void because he may suffer from schizophrenia, or because emptiness is the substrate of the universe, according to Zen Buddhism. Clarice Lispector stages her protagonist's breakdown as a moment of borderline insanity -- or a Joycean epiphany about the contradictions of human existence.

To engage in play is to explore the permutations of a given situation. It is to harbor a certain cognitive flexibility that allows the creative mind to combine the buildings blocks of memory and experience, identity and desire. Among the rhetorical features of play are defamiliarization, paradox, and irony. Pelevin's novel defamiliarizes us with the notion of a stable self; paradox illuminates the playful contradictions of Borges's visions; and irony creates a rhythm of cognitive disruption in Lispector's short story. In this work, I hope to highlight the role of play as consciously artificial construction in 20 th century Latin American and Russian narrative.