Cyborgs, Post-Punk, and the Neobaroque: Ricardo Piglia's La Ciudad Ausente

This essay focuses on Ricardo Piglia's use of cyborgs and post-punk music to generate the “proliferating nuclei” that Alejo Carpentier identifies as basic to baroque and neobaroque expressive structures. Brown traces the link between cyborgs and the New World baroque from Diego Rivera's mural Pan American Unity (1939) to La ciudad ausente (1992), arguing that Piglia's blend of science fiction, literary canons, and popular culture creates a model for understanding the neobaroque tendencies of a hemispheric American literature that includes Neal Stephenson, William Gibson, Jonathan Lethem, Edmundo Paz Soldán, Rodrigo Fresán, and Alberto Fuguet.