Cortázar's Almanaques: Literature and Revolution through the Artists' Book

Abstract

We aim to investigate how visual and textual media are intertwined in the space of the book as in its materiality through the analysis of La vuelta al día en ochenta mundos (1967) and Último round (1969), produced by Julio Cortázar in collaboration with plastic artist Julio Silva. First, we will start from the notion of apparatus, coined by Foucault, and expanded by Agamben; then, we will study how these almanaques, so named by the author, relate with the Latin American intellectual field of those years; finally, we will examine the non-sequential reading operations carried out in these volumes. Our purpose is to conclude, on one hand, that these works attempt to merge aesthetic and political avant-garde; on the other hand, that the production of meaning they intend to create can be set as an example to understand the rest of Cortázar's production.