SOURCE: Tandeciarz, Silvia. “Writing for Distinction?: A Reading of Cortázar's Final Short Story, ‘Diario para un Cuento’.” Latin American Literary Review 29, no. 58 (July-December 2001): 73-100.

In the following essay, Tandeciarz views “Diario para un Cuento” as representative of Cortázar's recurring thematic interests and determines the influence of his experiences in Peronist Argentina on his fiction.

[T]he logic of identity-formation involves distinctive associations and switching between location, class and the body, and these are not imposed upon subject-identity from the outside, they are core terms of an exchange network, an economy of signs, in which individuals, writers and authors are sometimes but perplexed agencies. A fundamental rule seems to be that what is excluded at the overt level of identity-formation is productive of new objects of desire.

—Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression

If Julio Cortázar is so widely read today...