Mi nombre es Rufus: Memoirs from Capitalist Modernity

This article analyzes Mi nombre es Rufus (2008) by Juan Terranova as a post-Menemist memoir/Bildungsroman that reflects the cultural and socioeconomic transformations of Argentina in the 1990s. Framed as the memoirs of a former punk guitarist in Buenos Aires, the novel articulates rock culture, memory, and political history to explore the effects of neoliberal reform and capitalist modernity on the Argentine lifeworld. Contrary to the author’s claim that the text avoids nostalgia or melancholy, this reading argues that it performs a Benjaminian melancholy, transforming the return to an intense cultural experience into historical allegory. Drawing on thinkers such as Walter Benjamin, Jürgen Habermas, and Bolívar Echeverría, the article situates the novel within broader debates on the erosion of symbolic worlds under global capitalism and the cultural function of rock as a form of resistance and affective memory. [Article copies available for a fee from The Transformative Studies Institute. E-mail address: journal@transformativestudies.org Website: http://www.transformativestudies.org ©2026 by The Transformative Studies Institute. All rights reserved.]