Presenter: Felicia Hamilton
Faculty Mentor: Mayra Bottaro, Helen Southworth
Presentation Type: Oral
Primary Research Area: Humanities
Major: Romance Languages
What is the purpose of nostalgia in literature? How does it respond to modernity? And what is its function as a temporal tool? These are the driving questions behind my research, which will focus on Evaristo Carriego, an early work by Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges. This eponymous biographical work serves more to paint a picture of Buenos Aires in development than to chronicle the life of the man himself. Borges uses popular and historical mythologies to construct a mythic image of the neighborhood Palermo during the early twentieth century. Because of this, the work is often read as a “pre-text”, that is, a history that the rest of Borges’ writings would reference. I aim to build on this, examining how this particular work creates counternarratives to modernity. I propose the idea that nostalgia (a sentiment born of temporal or spatial distance) is a key tool in the timelines of and counter to modernity. Beyond simply reading and explaining Carriego as a pre-text, I hope to draw broader conclusions about the impact of various iterations of time in a modern and postmodern culture.