The ironical readerly: retraction and survival of the scientific guarantee in Hernán Vanoli’s Cataratas

Abstract

Dystopia has not ceased to spread in the current Argentine literary scene and it is a problem for critics to distinguish generic invariants from what appears to be altered in itself. The description of a slightly future world, captured by large biotechnological trusts and their effects on the standardization of intersubjectivity, in a recent novel such as Cataratas by Hernán Vanoli (2015), is indivisible – as we will try to prove – from a deliberate use of social theories. What role do these fulfill in a literature that, although perceived as the heir to science fiction, has lost scientificity? Despite an unquestionable heterodoxy, the generic legibility, and therefore its legality, was never safer than among its recreators.