How Cesar Aira can change your life

Abstract In this essay I seek to explore some resonances between the construction of a subgenre of contemporary literature commentary, translated into the hybrid criticism/self-help, and some aspects of César Aira's work, who has developed throughout his career a body of work that was quite refractory to the game commonly played between literature and pedagogy, founded on the leading role that literary creation could have in terms of fostering laudable moral prescriptions. Believing that this is how Aira thinks and acts, I also believe that, despite his possible authorial intentions, there is something in his literature that nurtures a certain ethical panorama. I seek here to comment on and discuss this panorama from a timely reading of a selection of texts by Aira that flirt with autobiography and autofiction (such as La Vida Nueva), associated with others that deal with the relationship between literature and life (such as El Náufrago and Cecil Taylor), summoned around a stock of personal anecdotes of exploratory motivation based on the theme established in the title.