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Towards An Art Of Landscapes And Loans: Sergio Chejfec And The Politics Of Literary Form, Stephen Buttes

Stephen M Buttes

This essay argues that Sergio Chejfec’s 2012 novel La experiencia dramática maps out a form for understanding the global function of debt by narrating a series of mundane everyday experiences (e.g. trivial conversations, inconsequential purchases, personal anecdotes, the use of Google Maps to navigate a city). Chejfec makes these everyday experiences available as representations of the global credit system not by explicitly linking them to debt obligations but rather through his development of a specifically literary form of writing, one that insists on a separation between aesthetic representation and lived experience. This project of separation is made possible through a …