The fol­low­ing was pub­lished in the 2011 Prince­ton Uni­ver­sity Emer­i­tus Booklet.

It is very dif­fi­cult to imag­ine Latin Amer­i­can lit­er­a­ture at Prince­ton with­out Ricardo Piglia.  He is not only an admired nov­el­ist but also an inspir­ing teacher and the author of bril­liant essays on major Argen­tine writ­ers and on the art of fic­tion.  Piglia has been asso­ci­ated with Prince­ton for almost 25 years since his appoint­ment as a fel­low in the Coun­cil of the Human­i­ties in 1987. During the 1990s he taught at the Uni­ver­si­dad de Buenos Aires, and returned to Prince­ton on sev­eral occa­sion as a vis­it­ing pro­fes­sor.  He also taught at Har­vard Uni­ver­sity and at the Uni­ver­sity of California-Davis.  In 2001 he accepted a posi­tion in the newly cre­ated Depart­ment of Span­ish and Por­tuguese Lan­guages and Cul­tures at Prince­ton and since then has been the Wal­ter S. Car­pen­ter Pro­fes­sor of Lan­guage, Lit­er­a­ture, and Civ­i­liza­tion of Spain.

Dur­ing the Prince­ton years, Piglia has been a dynamic and com­mit­ted mem­ber of the depart­ment and of the Pro­gram in Latin Amer­i­can Stud­ies. He has taught mem­o­rable under­grad­u­ate and grad­u­ate sem­i­nars and has made invalu­able con­tri­bu­tions to the intel­lec­tual pro­duc­tiv­ity of stu­dents and col­leagues. His ded­i­ca­tion as a teacher, his abil­ity to lis­ten respect­fully, his orig­i­nal insights into writ­ers’ ideas about lit­er­a­ture, and his wit and wis­dom in dis­ser­ta­tion defenses and panel dis­cus­sions have left a last­ing impact on our community.

Piglia’s efforts to pro­mote the work of writ­ers and artists he admires have been tire­less. In 2002, he founded the Prince­ton Doc­u­men­tary Film Fes­ti­val in col­lab­o­ra­tion with film­maker Andrés di Tella. He also has been instru­men­tal in bring­ing to cam­pus notable artists and writ­ers such as pianist Ger­ardo Gan­dini, artist Roberto Jacoby, poet Arturo Car­rera, and nov­el­ist Juan José Saer, among oth­ers. He co-organized a sym­po­sium on “Lit­er­a­ture After Borges” that brought together writ­ers from Mex­ico, Argentina, and Puerto Rico. Piglia is also an acute observer of the Amer­i­can scene, par­tic­u­larly of the cul­tural and polit­i­cal rich­ness and chal­lenges rep­re­sented by Lati­nos in this coun­try. Many of us will miss lis­ten­ing to his shrewd com­ments on the works of James Joyce, William Faulkner, Philip Dick, and Thomas Pyn­chon or his pas­sion for movies, moviemak­ing, and his admi­ra­tion for the inven­tive­ness of Amer­i­can com­mer­cial tele­vi­sion series.

It is impor­tant to note how closely inter­twined Piglia’s very pop­u­lar classes are with his own lit­er­ary oeu­vre. He was born in Buenos Aires in 1940 and grew up on Mar del Plata. He stud­ied at the Uni­ver­si­dad Nacional de la Plata where he majored in his­tory and grad­u­ated in 1965. Early in his career, Piglia was con­nected to the impor­tant lit­er­ary and polit­i­cal mag­a­zine Los Libros (1968–1974) and in 1968 began the pub­li­ca­tion of his first edited col­lec­tion of detec­tive nov­els: La Serie Negra. Already evi­dent in this early work are his provoca­tive essays that pre­pared the way for a reread­ing of authors such as Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, Jorge Luis Borges, and Roberto Arlt, and the ways in which they con­tributed to shape the national lit­er­ary tra­di­tion. Piglia also estab­lished him­self as a writer of short stores and was the recip­i­ent of dis­tin­guished awards. His fic­tion grap­ples with the mean­ing of social and polit­i­cal processes as is evi­dent in the sto­ries col­lected in the vol­ume Nom­bre falso (1975), trans­lated as Assumed Name in 1995. This vol­ume includes his cel­e­brated short novel Hom­e­naje a Roberto Arlt where his pas­sion for the detec­tive novel and lit­er­ary inves­ti­ga­tion comes through vividly.

Dur­ing the Argen­tine mil­i­tary dic­ta­tor­ship (1976–1983), and at a time when left­ist intel­lec­tu­als worked in extreme dan­ger, he remained in Buenos Aires. Like other promi­nent intel­lec­tu­als, Piglia was excluded from state insti­tu­tions and earned a liv­ing teach­ing pri­vate sem­i­nars in what truly became an under­ground uni­ver­sity. Much of his later work and the con­cerns that lie at the heart of his teach­ing grew out of these var­i­ous forms of resis­tance to the extreme repres­sion of the time.

In 1978, Piglia was one of the co-founders of the influ­en­tial cul­tural jour­nal Punto de Vista. His first novel Res­piración arti­fi­cial (1980) coura­geously texted the lim­its of polit­i­cal cen­sor­ship at a time of tor­ture and “dis­ap­pear­ance.” The novel was justly acclaimed by lit­er­ary crit­ics and pro­fes­sional his­to­ri­ans, bring­ing Piglia inter­na­tional atten­tion. In an indi­rect but provoca­tive way it con­fronts the reader with unspeak­able trauma and the vio­lent foun­da­tion of the nation. Trans­lated into Eng­lish, Por­tuguese, and other lan­guages, Arti­fi­cial Res­pi­ra­tion is con­sid­ered a clas­sic of con­tem­po­rary Latin Amer­i­can lit­er­a­ture and con­tin­ues to pro­vide pow­er­ful tools for a crit­i­cal debate on mem­ory and his­tory. La ciu­dad ausente (1992), another novel later made into an opera, also addresses the utopian act of remem­ber­ing and the desire to cap­ture the mem­ory of the sur­vivors of cat­a­stro­phe through literature.

At Prince­ton, Piglia reg­u­larly taught his now leg­endary courses on Borges. In other sem­i­nars he has been con­sis­tently inter­ested in adding depth and com­plex­ity to the under­stand­ing of the nar­ra­tive poet­ics of avant-garde writ­ers includ­ing Mace­do­nio Fer­nán­dez, Juan José Saer, and Rodolfo Walsh, all cen­tral to his own work. Piglia has also taught classes deal­ing with lit­er­a­ture and pol­i­tics. One of his first sem­i­nars was on “Argen­tine Cul­ture and Per­o­nismo.” In 1997 he taught another sem­i­nar on “Para­noid Fic­tion: the Detec­tive Genre in Latin Amer­ica,” which became part of his reg­u­lar offer­ings. He later devel­oped a new course on Che Gue­vara that gen­er­ated great excite­ment. Gue­vara is also one of the sub­jects of his won­der­ful book of essays El ultimo lec­tor (2005). More recently, Piglia intro­duced a new course on “Argen­tine Lit­er­a­ture and Tango,” highly praised by his students.

Dur­ing his last year at Prince­ton, Piglia pub­lished a new novel, Blanco noc­turno. We regret that he stood firm and refused a pub­lic cel­e­bra­tion of his book. At Prince­ton he wanted to be “el pro­fe­sor” — not the nov­el­ist. Nonethe­less, we are delighted and eager to cel­e­brate him now that he has just been awarded the pres­ti­gious Pre­mio Nacional de la Crítica for the best novel pub­lished in Spain in 2010.