Barroco and Other Writings - Severo Sarduy, Translated by Al...

Literary Studies and Literature / Criticism and Theory

Severo Sarduy was among the most important figures in twentieth-century Latin American fiction and a major representative of the literary tendency to which he gave the name Neobaroque. While most of Sarduy's literary work is available in English, his theoretical writings have largely remained untranslated. This volume—presenting Sarduy's central theoretical contribution, Barroco (1974), alongside other related works—remedies that oversight.

Barroco marks a watershed in postwar thought on the Baroque, both in French post-structuralism and in the Latin American context. Sarduy traces a double history, reading events in the history of science alongside developments in the history of art, architecture, and literature. What emerges is a theory of the Baroque as decentering and displacement, as supplement and excess, a theory capacious enough to account for the old European Baroque as well as its queer, Latin American and global futures.

In addition to Barroco, this volume includes texts spanning Sarduy's career, from 1960s essays published originally in Tel Quel to late works from the 1980s and '90s. It thus offers a complete picture of Sarduy's thinking on the Baroque.

About the author

Severo Sarduy (1937-1993) was a Cuban novelist, poet, playwright, painter, critic, and winner of the Prix Médicis Étranger.

Alex Verdolini is a PhD candidate in Comparative Literature at Yale University and teaches at the Cooper Union.

Iván Hofman is a PhD candidate in Comparative Literature at New York University.

"Severo Sarduy's writings combine a vibrant Cuban language with sophisticated theoretical reflections, and Barroco is one of his most important works: a meditation on the aesthetic that shaped Latin American and European cultures in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, along with a Neo-Baroque turn in the twentieth."

—Rubén Gallo, Princeton University

"The Baroque, it could be said, is an exercise in the liberation of the Spanish language. Barroco refuses the foregone conclusions perpetuated by language; Sarduy embraces the Neo-Baroque practice of remaking representation, impelled by the need for a language free of the world's mere duplication in writing."

—Julio Ortega, Brown University

"At long last, in a new and complete translation that navigates the author's tergiversation between Spanish and French, we have a definitive English edition of Barroco: an intriguing experiment with theories of figuration, geometric formalism, temporal recursion (retombée), and cosmic eccentricity by the Cuban exile Severo Sarduy. A novel exercise in anamorphic, elliptical thinking, a true event in the history of poetics and critical thought, Barroco will become essential reading for thinkers and comparatists of every stripe."

—Emily Apter, New York University