The impulse sentences: Mauro Javier Cárdenas in conversation with Jonathan Moreland

Since 2016, Mauro Javier Cárdenas, an Ecuadorian author based in the United States, has been experimenting with the most primary unit of linguistic discourse: the sentence. Across three novels, he expands the limits of literary fiction by weaponising the long sentence as a means of depicting the clashing networks, hierarchies, and cultural influences which disrupt the identities of his migrant characters as they attempt to make new lives in the United States. This conversation draws interest from my thesis, which features a chapter on Cárdenas’s novels and focusses on the long sentence as a formal response to the sociopolitical and economic pressures that pervade contemporary culture. We met online to discuss his relationship to the literary history of Central and South America, his evolving literary form, the place of technology in contemporary fiction, the ethical responsibilities of the migrant writer, and his methods in constructing his increasingly complex sentences.