Academic reading can have different epistemic objectives and be situated at different levels, such as the development of disciplinary knowledge, the observation and development of scientific reasoning, as well as the awareness and refinement of reading strategies. From the pedagogical perspective, given the cognitive complexity of academic reading, it is advisable to combine academic reading tasks with writing tasks, the so-called intermediate genres (reading report, reformulation, summary). The aim of this article is to examine how MA students in Romance languages evaluate their reading strategies both in paired discussions after reading an article and in written reformulation, with a view to using its content in approaching a new research problem.

The cross-interpretation of two texts: a novel by Margarita García Robayo, The Delivery (2022), and an essay by Violeta Serrano, “Flowers in the Dustbin” (2022) focuses on four main issues: the intention that reveals itself in the genre, the considerations on everyday life in regard to the family baggage that one carries and has to deal with in order to redefine their own identity, the migrant’s status and its relation to the quotidian dimension of being, and, lastly, the employment precariousness and financial difficulties common in the lives of the millennials. The article also outlines the significance of Argentina as setting in both texts. The methodological frame is constituted by the metatextual ponderings by García Robayo, the notion of Everyday according to Alfred Schutz, Maurice Blanchot and Roland Barthes, as well as a concept of degrowth by Serge Latouche.

This article analyzes the relationship between affects and everyday life in two novels by the Colombian writer Fernando Vallejo (b. 1942), Los días azules (1985) and La virgen de los sicarios (1994). While the first novel portrays forces of affective dynamics such as joy, compassion, and hope that still guide social practices in everyday life, in La virgen de los sicarios these forces disappear and are replaced by hatred, rage, and violence. Consequently, both affects and everyday life undergo a transformation, proving to be, above all, a permanent field of conflict and tensions.

Much of the Argentine narrative of the 21st century refracts the social context, determined by capitalism and its consequences in terms of exclusion, precariousness, individualism, among others. In this framework, space and temporality are related, in some cases, to processes of isolation and self-destruction of the characters; in others, to the possibility of marginal communities which resist the impositions of the hegemonic system. In this communication, I propose the idea of refuge, as a crossing point for several theoretical categories: the image of “house/home” as a place of safety (Bachelard, 2000) and home as “chronotope of intimacy” (Arfuch, 2014). The novels construct a space that includes the historical dimension of the 21st century, through a critical vision of the hegemonic system. I will tackle these lines of analysis in Mal de época, by María Sonia Cristoff, and Una música, by Hernán Ronsino.

This article analyses how the concept of ‘everyday inhabiting’ is problematised in the novel A house full of people (2019) by Mariana Sández. The methodology is based on the philosophy of Giorgio Agamben, especially on two critical categories: use and care, identified by Camilo Boano as components of the definition of inhabiting. In addition, it incorporates Jolanta Brach-Czaina’s theoretical approach to domestic life, highlighting her concept of “everyday hustle and bustle”. The article focuses on ontological and existential considerations, exploring the ethics of daily choices in the way of inhabiting as a key element in the organisation of communal life.

Within the framework of the cognitive approach to the perception of reality distinguishing between grounds and figures, the main aim of this article is to study the foreground of fantastic stories, corresponding to elements of everyday life, unlike the figure, which usually is the preternatural motive. Thus, in this work the vision of everyday life proposed by the philosopher Bruce Bégout and the concept “ways of doing” created by the thinker Michel de Certeau will also be applied, as well as settled contemporary theories of the fantastic. As an illustration of all this, three Spanish short stories presenting ideological significance and written in different periods will be analyzed: La muerte de Capeto by V. Blasco Ibáñez, La resucitada by E. Pardo Bazán, and Reliquias by A. Martínez Castillo.

During almost ten years, between 1949 and 1958, Juan Manuel Silvel Sangro writes a series of notebooks that cover this period of absolute rest that he experiences following the diagnosis of a rare congenital heart disease. This writing exercise originates the posthumously edited Diario de una vida breve (1967), a melancholic record of the convalescent everyday life, where life is barely rooted in the diary’s time, whilst it seeks a kind of salvation. Even though Silvela Sangro’s life could be considered a failed one, he presents it as being “complete”, insofar its textual representation is permeated by a series of specific qualities: ‘passivity’, seen as a mode of existence that opens up the opportunity of confession in front of the ‘ontological helplessness’ (Zambrano); inoperosità, understood as a supreme happiness in the ethical exercise of self-contemplation and recognition (Spinoza/Agamben); and ‘care of the self’ as a practice of freedom, that, through intimate writing, points to the process of subjectivation (Foucault). The paper is based on these premises retrieved from the field of the contemporary “philosophy of life,” which indicate the complex relationship between ‘life’ and ‘writing’; a relation that Silvela Sangro codifies in the ‘(im)potence’ of his diary as vitae forma to suspend the illness and death.

This study deals with everyday life in Gabriela Massuh’s La intemperie in the context of post-2001 Argentina. The rupture of everyday life produced by this circumstance allows us to observe the mechanisms of dehumanisation and exclusion that capitalist Modernity (understood as biopower) uses for its systematic “purge” of the political community of what it considers to be “surplus”. In these terms, the disintegration of the self that the narrator suffers will trace the first line of the study. The second will examine the functions of the everyday in this work, as the factor of agency, denunciation and subversion in the processes of the re-establishment of everyday routines. Both strands constantly converge with the role of mediation and art in the invention of the everyday and the elaboration of counter-hegemonic discourse.

In La novela luminosa (2005), the last great narrative project of Uruguayan Mario Levrero, an ambivalent relationship with the space of the everyday is exposed. Everyday life appears, in the first place, as a disturbing dimension that reminds the protagonist of his finitude, that is, his precarious state, both economically and in terms of physical-psychic health. Secondly, however, it is these same unstable conditions of the everyday that also stimulate the feeling of ‘heroic’ resistance exhibited by the protagonist of the autofictional text. La novela luminosa thus pays an ambiguous homage – of acceptance and rejection at the same time – to a daily routine to which its author, on the threshold of old age and close to death, ends up clinging, in spite of everything and until the end, in order to leave testimony of his life as an author by means of a writing that ironizes his own status as a fragmented work.