Form, reading, posterity: notes on Beatriz Sarlo’s Zona Saer

Abstract

This paper proposes a detailed reading of the book Zona Saer, by essayist and literary critic Beatriz Sarlo, one of the staunchest defenders of the literary value of Juan José Saer's work in Argentine literature. Published in 2016, the book represented a critical return to Saer's work and a privileged occasion to return to practice an analysis of the literary field in which said work was established and was acquiring, over the years, a definitive centrality. Likewise, the self—referential bias of Saer's writing at times brings out the other side of an integral and formalist reading: scenes in which the essayist herself is not so much the great promoter of Saer's entry into posterity as the devoted reader who awaits each new novel as one who seeks to meet again with fictitious characters whose vicissitudes accompanied the reader's own life.