Passages of revolutionary desire: The writings of Julio Cortazar and Walter Benjamin

This dissertation hopes to show deep affinities in Julio Cortazar and Walter Benjamin's attempts to connect aesthetic, political, and sexual revolution.;Chapter One expounds the historical and critical methodology Benjamin sets up in his final "Theses on the Philosophy of History," using it to supplement Cortazar's figura, put into practice in Los premios, 62, "Todos los fuegos el fuego," and "El otro cielo.".;Both Cortazar and Benjamin achieved political radicalism by a roundabout route. Chapter Two synchronizes Benjamin's Origin of German Tragic Drama with Cortazar's Buenos Aires writings, Los reyes, Bestiario, and the posthumously published El examen, to explore the questions, What are the origins of our dissatisfaction with our moment in history? How does the artist express this anxiety towards a (revolutionary) crowd?;Two chapters examine the question of autobiography, a genre both writers repress in their conservative early careers but take up in exiles of greater opportunity (Cortazar) and danger (Benjamin). A short Chapter Three studies the hidden presence of "I" in Benjamin's non-autobiographical writings and Cortazar's fiction, especially "Las babas del diablo" and Libro de Manuel's "el que te dije." A long Chapter Four develops a theory of memory out of Rayuela and A Berlin Chronicle, then studies Cortazar's creation of an autobiographical persona, the Freudian dynamics between him and some fellow artists, and Cortazar and Benjamin's shift of attention to the "present" in Ultimo round and One-Way Street. The chapter ends suggesting that paratexts in Libro de Manuel are inevitable, as were Benjamin and Cortazar's self-alienations through the materiality of autobiographical writing.;In Chapter Five I study Libro de Manuel's contribution to debates on sexual politics on the left. I take seriously the erotic circumstances of Benjamin's turn to the left, and his and Cortazar's limited critiques of humanism. I also hope to eroticize the variety of reader-relations that Cortazar thematized: these can be the sites not just of voyeurism but of a masochism facing the "destructive character," of a fashionable sadism Cortazar writes about extensively, of one character's defense of masturbation and another's use of dolls to signify fetishism, especially the fetishization of literary language.;Chapter Six is about politicizing reading, using Benjamin's "The Author As Producer" throughout. First we see how Cortazar turns support of Nicaragua's revolution into a problem of building readerships; then we read about utopian hopes in language (Rayuela's "kibbutz del deseo"), in the past (Benjamin's Passagen-Werk), and in the refunctioning of popular culture (in Fantomas ... and in gay camp). (Abstract shortened by UMI.).