La poética de los desechos en Los papeleros de Isidora Aguirre

Abstract

Abstract: Existing research on Chilean playwright Isidora Aguirre's work has focused on her development of a critical discourse on marginality, exploitation, and the reconstruction of twentieth-century national narratives. The approaches that study Brechtian, melodramatic, and discursive procedures stand out in this context. In this article, we argue that Aguirre's drama Los papeleros (1963) can be also studied as an ecodrama through the lens of ecocriticism. We argue that Los papeleros ' interest by ecocriticism and environmental humanities stems from the use of a rhetoric of waste, the agency of the dramatic space of the dump and garbage, and the aesthetic treatment of papeleros (trash pickers) and their lives in relation to the ecological conditions in which they live.