The Misfortunes of a Genre: Prins by César Aira as an Allegory of the Gothic

Abstract

The gothic genre in Latin American literature has been the object of fashionable interest in recent decades and seems to absorb all the elements of the politically correct agenda; however, in the current trend of absolute presentism that seems regular in the critics, it is not taken into account that there exists a previous tradition more or less connected with its European sources but in search of its own cultural character. I would like to comment on some specifically gothic novels published in Argentina between the 1980s and the 1990s, as well as a recent one by the prolific writer César Aira. Prins can be analyzed as an ambiguous culmination of the gothic tendency, as well as a symptom of the disorientation of a genre that threatens to become a label as broad as it is empty.