Abstract
The following paper explores how literary criticism questions the relationship between desert, emptiness and imagination based on the modern notion of landscape. From the theoretical-critical contributions of F. Rodríguez, J. Andermann, J. Uriarte, we wonder about the aesthetic operations that expose the contemporary crisis of the landscape form and its critical drifts around the imagination. To this end we will discuss César Aira’s An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter (2015), a return to the desert that imagines and thereby recommences the conformation of a new territory, but also the invention of a gaze that reconfigures the senses of landscape and its relationship with nature. Between hallucination and trance, Aira's fiction rehearses new relationships around perception and discovers a series of procedures that imagine another beginning and shake the basis of the foundation.
Keywords:
César Aira; landscape; literary criticism; desert