Monika Raič studied Political Science and Comparative Literature at the Goethe University Frankfurt (2003-2009) and the Universidad de Buenos Aires (2006-2007). Since 2013 Monika Raič works as a university assistant at the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of Innsbruck where she is also a doctoral candidate. Her research focuses on cosmopolitanism, Orientalism and Weltliteratur. Specifically, she is interested in the classic French ‘Voyage en Orient’, the late works of Roberto Arlt, 1920/30ies cinema and photography.

Cosmopolitanism and Orientalism. Aesthetics, Politics and ‘Weltliteratur’ in the late work of Roberto Arlt

My current research project interrogates the late work of the Argentine writer Roberto Arlt, re-examining his literary oeuvre after 1935/6. After a posting as a newspaper correspondent in pre-Civil War Spain and a brief stay in Morocco, his writing changes genres and themes, exhibiting a strong tendency towards so-called “orientalist” motifs. By reading his texts against the backdrop of classic Orientalists like Chateaubriand, Nerval and Flaubert, and by incorporating analyses of photography and contemporary film, I aim at excavating the structures by means of which Arlt tries to understand “world”, produce world himself and by doing so inscribe his enunciations into a worldly rather than a local realm. This problematizes yet another paradigm, namely the possibilities to contribute to the global process of world-making from the marginal speaking position at which Argentina or Latin America is located.