Remaking Poetics After Postmodernism: Intertextuality, Intermediality, and Cultural Circulation in the Wake of Borges

Abstract

This article examines how El hacedor (de Borges), Remake (2011) by the Spanish writer Agustín Fernández Mallo, a remake of Jorge Luis Borges's El hacedor (1960), constitutes an extremely relevant manifestation of contemporary poetics and transnational literature. I analyze the formal and conceptual relation between Fernández Mallo's version and Borges's original work and key theoretical implications connected to the removal of El hacedor (de Borges), Remake from publishing markets world-wide soon after its publication. By focusing on the concepts of intertextuality, intermediality, and transnational cultural circulation, I examine from a comparative perspective how Fernández Mallo's remake closely relates to Jeffrey Nealon's notion of “post-postmodernism”—as the contemporary cultural logic of neoliberal global capitalism—and to the transnational process of cultural exchange that Benjamin Lee and Edward LiPuma have defined as “cultures of circulation.”