Un/doing Eurocentrism: Claudio Magris, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Gao Xingjian

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article analyzes two works by Claudio Magris published in dialogue with two Nobel Prize laureates: Letteratura e ideologia [Literature and ideology] (2012) with Gao Xingjian, and La letteratura è la mia vendetta [Literature is my revenge] (2012) with Mario Vargas Llosa. These transnational and transcultural dialogues on writing practices can be understood as paradigm shifts on at least two levels: Magris’s European perspective of border poetics expands into a global perspective; and this leads to a decolonization of the concept of irrationality, which in modernity has mostly been attributed to alterity. The article illustrates the legitimacy of irrationality as part of human existence through a discussion of Vargas Llosa’s El Hablador (1987; The Storyteller, 1989) and Magris’s novel Non luogo a procedere (2015; Blameless, 2017), and the collection of stories Croce del Sud. Tre vite vere e improbabili [Southern cross: Three real and improbable lives] (2020).