A visionary geography: Raúl Zurita and the problem of the land

Abstract

This essay argues for a reconsideration of Raúl Zurita’s early poetry in the context of the agrarian question in Chilean socialism and neoliberalism. Countering readings of Zurita’s landscape poetics as primarily metonymic depictions of bodily trauma suffered by the victims of the Pinochet dictatorship, I argue that space as it appears in Zurita’s first two collections, Purgatorio and Anteparaíso, is a non-mimetic, discursive, and contradictory object. Through this rendering, Zurita’s poetic speaker offers what I term a “visionary geography” which denaturalizes the Chilean landscape and reflects the centrality of land use to the crisis and conflict of the 1970s.