Latin American Narrative Research Articles

A tentação do relato: formas fantasiadas e desejo de escritura na narrativa contemporânea

Neste trabalho analisamos como certas fantasias acerca do relato na literatura estão associadas à escritura na narrativa contemporânea, por meio do investimento nas indefinições estruturais, na forma errante e na expansão do literário como forma cognitiva. Para isso, dialogamos com diferentes narrativas latinoamericanas pós-1990, centrando-nos em Shiki Nagaoka: una nariz de ficción, de Bellatin, 2666, de Bolaño, e El olvido que seremos, de Faciolince.

Historia y ficción en la narrativa latinoamericana: la Trilogía del siglo XX, de Jorge Volpi

ABSTRACTThis article examines Trilogía del siglo XX, by the Mexican writer Jorge Volpi (1968). The study centers its major purpose on the considerations of history and fiction and on the analyses derived from human experience, reality, time, place, space and the linguistic turn. Given this critical backdrop, it also aims to analyze the scope of those approaches by placing them on present Latin American narrative and especially on the Trilogía del siglo XX, a set of three novels, En busca de Klingsor (1999), No será la tierra (2003) and El fin de la locura (2006). This article is sustained by a cross-disciplinary method drawn from the social and human sciences and that analyzes critical orientations between history and the fictional locus to show that truth and fiction are indissoluble elements of reality.

Appropriating Theory. Ángel Rama's Critical Work by José Eduardo González

Reviewed by: Appropriating Theory. Ángel Rama's Critical Work by José Eduardo González Juan Poblete González, José Eduardo. Appropriating Theory. Ángel Rama's Critical Work. U of Pittsburgh P, 2017. 232 pp. José Eduardo González—author of Borges and the Politics of Form (Garland/Routledge, 1998); and co-editor of New Trends in Contemporary Latin American Narrative: Post-National Literatures and the Canon (Palgrave McMillan, 2014) and Primitivism and Identity in Latin America. Essays on Art, Literature and Culture (U of Arizona P, 2000)—has written an important, and problematic, overview of Ángel Rama's influential and prolific critical writing on Latin American culture, and more specifically, on Latin American literature. To my knowledge, this is the first volume in English to engage this ambitious effort. Appropriating Theory was clearly conceived as a mediating book. It was designed to mediate between Ángel Rama and the English-language academic public that know little about his work. In order to successfully deliver on the promise of that mediation, Gonzalez's book emphasizes over and over the relations between Rama's thought and the more prestigious and better-known thinkers his audience will have no trouble recognizing: Adorno, Lukács, Benjamin, Said, Foucault. This is a standard move—and, here, a well accomplished one—of traditionally conceived comparativism. By the same token, this strength is also, on the reverse, the most significant limitation of this fine and useful study of Ángel Rama's thought. The book includes an introduction, seven chapters, and a brief but important conclusion. The first chapter, "Debates, Dreams, and Fears," presents some of González's main claims and guiding threads: the debates refer to Rama's famous clashes with other important Latin American critics, such as Emir Rodríguez Monegal and Mario Vargas Llosa; the dreams are those of social justice and progress for the continent as inspired by the Cuban revolution of 1959; the fears, finally, are thus stated: "in his later years, the painful experience of exile clouded his writings, and Rama produced pessimistic readings of Latin American culture in which he expressed doubts that democracy or education could have any lasting, significant effect in transforming the societies in the region" (12). González's claim is that Rama's critical work has two parts: the first—and positive—one includes Rama's book on Latin American modernismo and culminates in Transculturación narrativa. The [End Page 413] second, more pessimistic, would presumably be represented by Rama's alleged mis-reading of Foucault in La Ciudad letrada and its tone is explained here by Rama's biography. The second chapter presents "The early influence of Benjamin and Adorno in Ángel Rama's literary criticism" (5). The third and fourth chapters deal with Benjamin's influence on Rama. The third concentrates on Benjamin's impact on the development of Rama's idea of narrative transculturation. It includes the book's second big claim: "as my research in this chapter shows Benjamin's essay 'The Work of Art in the Age of Technological Reproduction', alongside with his writings on photography, were an unacknowledged inspiration for Rama's early ideas about the process of transculturation. I demonstrate that Ángel Rama had fully developed his theory before he encountered the work of Fernando Ortiz and borrowed the latter's term" (6). The fourth chapter, by further exploring "Benjamin's influence on Rama, as well as that of several other thinkers such as Ernst Cassirer, Lucien Goldman, and Lukács" focuses on the concept of mediation as both the connection between writing and the specific historical and social context in which it emerges, and that between the writer as intellectual and society (6). The fifth chapter discusses "The importance that the concept of literary technique possesses for Rama's idea of the role of literature as a social act" and claims that "Rama's uncritical acceptance of the notion of advanced artistic techniques limits his view of modern literature" (7). Since Rama's preoccupation with the development of creative and original novelistic forms in the transculturating work of José María Arguedas is one of the key aspects González and many other critics before him appreciate in...

„Borg er byggð. Og byggð er borg.“

This introductory chapter focuses on the multiple and diverse representations of urban communities and their infinite complexity. Firstly, the chapter introduces samples of recent representations of the city of Reykjavík, from Icelandic artists and scholars. Then the focus shifts to Enrique del Acebo Ibáñez´s theoretical ideas, as revealed in his book Sociología del arraigo: Una lectura crítica de la teoría de la ciudad (1996), (Sociology of Rootedness: Theories on the Origin and Nature of Urban Communities), translated into Icelandic in 2007, where he discusses the complex phenomenon of the “city” and questions the role of its inhabitants. His reflections substantiate previous theories of scholars such as Ferdinand Tönnies, Emile Durkheim, Georg Simmel, Oswald Spengler, René König and Henri Lefebvre, whose writings are introduced and discussed in the chapter as well. Finally, the chapter applies a critical approach to a brief analysis of well-known Latin American narrative readily available in Icelandic, such as One hundred years of solitude (Cien años de soledad, 1967) by Gabriel García Márquez, The House of the Spirits (La casa de los espíritus, 1982) by Isabel Allende, and Amulet (Amuleto, 1999) by Eduardo Bolaño.

Historia y cognición en la narrativa de Latinoamerica: Jorge Volpi y la Trilogía del siglo XX.

Las interrelaciones entre historia, cognición y conocimiento en la Trilogía del siglo XX, del escritor mexicano Jorge Volpi, constituyen un espacio discursivo donde tanto el lector como el crítico pueden indagar en el sentido de la narrativa latinoamericana actual. A pesar de la evanescencia y del fragmentarismo de las obras analizadas, el estudio subraya su valor como transcursos de un “saber serial” y como tentativas del difícil equilibrio entre lo real y lo imaginario. Junto a ello el estudio sugiere que la expresión de las obras nos conduce a una aceptación “fundacionalista” de la historia como cognición de la realidad presente y de la propia realidad atemporal.

Santiago Gamboa y Jorge Volpi, una mirada compartida de una narrativa global y local

La narrativa actual latinoamericana está representada por escritores cuyas historias suceden en espacios que superan las coordenadas nacionales. Se trata del espacio de la modernidad: lo local, lo nacional y lo global, como apunta Huyssen (2010). Al poner en situación de igualdad dichos lugares se podría conciliar la dicotomía civilización y barbarie. Es lo que se busca argumentar mediante el acercamiento crítico a Plegarias nocturnas (2012) de Santiago Gamboa y, de manera panorámica, a ciertas obras de Jorge Volpi para determinar si escriben una narrativa global y local con la finalidad de ir definiendo las características de esta nueva literatura latinoamericana.

Narrar después del “boom”: la clase media y la desnacionalización en Hipotermia de Álvaro Enrigue

Hipotermia by the Mexican author Álvaro Enrigue was published in 2006. Even though it is considered an example of the most recent Latin American narrative, reflecting on the effects of globalization and neoliberalism in Mexico, the most evident effect of which is a blurring of the idea of nation, it has not been well acknowledged for depicting the incertitude of our days in a more social way. In this article I read Hipotermia as a novel where the Writer (as a social representation of the intellectual) deals with a creative block as a result of his anxiety regarding the traditional concept of an author in the boom period (1970s). The way he works through it consists in a fictional project about non-epic characters. As a result of this, the book creates a mosaic of voices that can be identified as experiences of the middle class in the context of a global society. I try to prove that the concept of “Global Class,” developed by Saskia Sassen, describes Enrigue’s conception of both the exile’s experience and the middle class’s subjectivity.

Sampling and Remixing in Recent Latin American Narrative

This article examines the ways in which the theoretical concepts of remixing and sampling help us understand innovations in contemporary Latin American narrative and film. Using the Cuban film Juan de los muertos by Alejandro Brugués, Norte by the Bolivian novelist Edmundo Paz Soldán, El púgil by the Chilean/Argentine/American Mike Wilson, and short stories by the Chilean writer Álvaro Bisama, I analyze modes of cultural appropriation arguing that they are best understood within the broader artistic context of the remix and the sample. In dialogue with theoretical interventions by Lev Manovich, Eduardo Navas, Henry Jenkins, David Laderman and Laurel Westrup, I chart the ways in which contemporary narrative incorporates and highlights artistic and cultural strategies more commonly understood within the realms of music and digital art even as they repeat and expand the more traditionally literary concepts of collage and intertextuality. I argue specifically that in each text we see how the writers especially use pop culture reference as a narrative building block, incorporating hidden beats and repetitions that are best appreciated as one would a hip hop song constructed of musical samples. I further use this phenomenon to consider the ways in which print narrative uses these strategies to resist relegation to the past as it faces the rise of digital culture.

Introduction: The Politics of Latinx Literature Today

The Politics of Latinx Literature Today Amanda M. Smith, Issue Editor (bio) and Alfredo Franco (bio), Issue Editor When Jane Gloriana Villanueva becomes a “published freaking author” on the award-winning telenovela spoof Jane the Virgin,1 the fictional character’s debut romance novel, Snow Falling, became available for purchase in real bookstores across the United States (“Chapter Seventy”).2 That the work of a fictional Latina from a fringe television network—even the characters mock The CW’s obscurity in one of the show’s many meta moments—can appear on the pages of a book by a major New York publishing house3 speaks to what critics have deemed the “mainstreaming” of Latinx literature in the US literary market. Jane’s literary coming of age on the show further emphasizes the mainstream quality of her character’s intellectual development. In one montage, she passes from childhood to expectant mother devouring popular Latinx and Latin American authors on the floor of a community bookstore. Guided by the apparition of Isabel Allende, commercially successful Latin American literature personified,4 Jane reads Latin American narrative in translation and post-60s Latinx fiction that falls loosely under the magical realist mode. Fictions (1944), Pedro Páramo (1955), One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), The House of the Spirits (1982), and Like Water for Chocolate (1989) fly like butterflies off the shelf and into Jane’s arms, where they form part of the same [End Page 5] corpus as The House on Mango Street (1984) and Dreaming in Cuban (1992). Snow Falling, then, emerges as a continuation of the hemispherically American corpus that Jane consumes, and as a mass-market literary genre with a lusty cover featuring the author’s multisyllabic, bilingual name, it claims its place in the mainstream in a most obtrusive fashion. Such a foregrounding of works that critics and publishing houses alike have depoliticized may appear to reaffirm a sacrificing of politics in exchange for market appeal in Jane’s canon. Yet Jane the Virgin introduces this issue on literature and politics because this story of the journey of a young Latina reader and writer on her way to literary recognition in fact asserts its politics in conspicuous ways. Jane, a second-generation Miamian of Venezuelan and Mexican heritage, moves through a network of immigrant families whose daily realities involve navigating multiple languages, cultural practices, and expectations. Her son’s biological father is from an Italian family, and another member of her complex, blended family was born in the Czech Republic. Even Jane’s husband, Michael, the seeming gringo par excellence, bears an unmistakably Spanish last name: Cordero. This world where migration is normalized nevertheless comes into contact with the world where it is criminalized, catalyzing the characters’ political consciousness, as when a hospitalization outs Jane’s grandmother’s undocumented status and threatens her with deportation. Jane takes up her abuela’s cause, but her political activism does not end there, nor does it stop at the diegetic level. Show creator Jennie Snyder Urman has expressed a feeling of “responsibility to react to this presidency,” and the show has used its narrative structure and expository intertitle asides to educate viewers about immigration reform, reproductive justice, queer sexuality, and voting rights (qtd. in Nguyen). Furthermore, Jane’s education involves continuous battles against racial inequalities that characterize the mainstream. She reads on her own with an imagined literary godmother presumably because the kind of Latinx education she seeks, though commercially recognized, is not available in her public Florida school. Combined with the fact that her graduate advisor, a commercially unsuccessful white feminist scholar, initially rejects Jane’s desire to write romance novels with an unapologetic, one-word dismissal—“Barf”—Jane begins to craft a narrative about the obstacles that US educational institutions present to Latinx students seeking to define and express their voices (“Chapter Thirty-Seven”). In graduate school, Jane confronts what John Beverley has called the problem of “how to make the state and the state ideological apparatuses more like the (real) [multicultural] nation/s” (232). One solution appears to be pedagogical. Though the advisor will eventually become Jane’s trusted and supportive mentor, Jane’s fight for a place...

El hombre de Montserrat: writings on violence in the latin american crime fiction

Abstract: The article adresses the novel El hombre de Montserrat, written by the Guatemalan writer Dante Liano and recognized within the genre of crime fiction, as a precursory model for a narrative that established a way of rewriting the history of violence in Central American countries in both fictional and theoretical terms. Dante Liano’s successful reception has turned the novel into a reference of the Central American literature of the nineties. This is due to the fact that his narrative is replete with mechanisms that were seen in the best works of the previous Latin American narrative, far from the great discourses, by a displaying genre hybridization, a parodic transgression or lexical localism. This article analyses the interweaving of genres and the subversion of the plot, the characters and the rewriting of the history against the postulates of the classic detective novel.

¡Hay un fusilado que vive! Hibridación literaria en Operación masacre, una obra de Rodolfo Walsh

Este ensayo se detiene en el análisis de la hibridación literaria que, mediante la convergencia del relato policial, el discurso testimonial y la adopción de los elementos constituyentes de la novela corta, convierte a la obra Operación masacre de Rodolfo Walsh en el espacio idóneo para albergar un relato histórico congestionado de incertidumbres sin respuesta. A partir de esta mirada y mediante la revisión de las distintas estrategias narrativas implementadas por Walsh, es posible revisar su vanguardista ejercicio de experimentación en la escritura y exponer por qué Operación masacre es una de las piezas determinantes para la narrativa latinoamericana contemporánea.

Sincretimo "mágico": laberintos en los textos de Jorge Luis Borges y de la "nueva novela" francesa

La prosa latinoamericana postmoderna recrea de alguna manera las ideas de la “nueva novela” francesa. El llamado “realismo mágico”, con su ficcionalidad tendente a lo fantástico, a menudo enriquece las características irracionales-aporéticas de la narrativa de la “nueva novela” con ciertos procedimientos como la hibridación y el sincretismo estilístico-cultural. En este estudio se propone a examinar según los aspectos anteriormente mencionados a dos relatos muy discutidos de Jorge Luis Borges (“El jardín de los senderos que se bifurcan” y “Abenjacán el Bojarí, muerto en su laberinto”), ambos vinculados con uno de los tropos maestros del œuvre borgeano: el motivo del laberinto. Se puede observar en ellos dos formas antagónicas del sincretismo: el primer cuento se fundamenta en la naturaleza significativa —significativa porque deviene mensaje (lenguaje comprensible, información)— del diálogo de elementos desemejantes, mientras que el segundo pone en escena la variación infinita de signos despojados de significado, de irreconocibles referencias “sin rostro” que, impeliéndose, negándose y apartándose, llegan a formar una suerte de vorágine. Las dos novelas de Alain Robbe-Grillet que se pretenden comparar con los cuentos borgeanos de manera esquemática serán En el Laberinto y La doble muerte del profesor Dupont.

Literary deterritorializations (and reterritorializations). Notes on the literature of no fixed abode in current Latin American narrative: tensions between the global and the localbal and local

Hoy la nueva narrativa latinoamericana está poblada de personajes en desarraigo permanente, que atraviesan fronteras, territorios y espacios, expresando una nueva subjetividad permeada por la carencia de un lugar fjo de residencia. De igual modo, las nuevas generaciones de escritores latinoamericanos viven en un desplazamiento constante, que no se corresponde con lo que fue el exilio voluntario de los escritores del “boom” o el exilio forzado de quienes debieron huir de las dictaduras en la década de los setenta. Esta nueva “geografía de la pertenencia”, en palabras de Fernando Aínsa, crea nuevos mapas de pertenencia ajenos a nociones unívocas de identidad y de patria. Pero, al mismo tiempo, una vertiente temática importante de la nueva narrativa latinoamericana se refere al retorno a las provincias olvidadas, a los pueblos de los confnes, a los territorios interiores, donde se despliega “otra” forma de vivir, en contraposición con la historia del resto del país. En todos ellos el espacio regional adquiere una vida propia y se referen a “historias, espacios y personas (alejados) de una idea global”, en palabras de Martín Caparrós.

New Trends in Contemporary Latin American Narrative: Post-National Literatures and the Canon ed. by Timothy R. Robbins and José Eduardo González

Reviewed by: New Trends in Contemporary Latin American Narrative: Post-National Literatures and the Canon ed. by Timothy R. Robbins and José Eduardo González Vinodh Venkatesh Robbins, Timothy R., and José Eduardo González, eds. New Trends in Contemporary Latin American Narrative: Post-National Literatures and the Canon. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. 252 pp. New Trends in Contemporary Latin American Narrative: Post-National Literatures and the Canon is a well-conceived examination of recent Latin American narrative that furthers two parallel yet connected lines of inquiry: first, the collection of essays establishes the groundwork for discussing several contemporary movements or “generations,” working through their poetics and roughly tracing their aesthetics; second, it situates these works in relation to the greater body of Latin American narrative, more specifically the Boom and its immediate aftermath. Make no mistake about it—this is an ambitious project, and one that Timothy R. Robbins and José Eduardo González hone and craft to produce a finished product that is useful not only as a reference guide to non-specialist readers, but to researchers interested in locating authors and texts within the wide spectrum that New Trends outlines. The volume is not, however, an encyclopedic reference—like the recent The Contemporary Spanish-American Novel: Bolaño and After—but an orientative text that includes a few essays that will be essential reading for the topic at hand. [End Page 782] New Trends opens with a quote by Ángel Rama on the enduring presence of modernismo. This citation sets the tone for not only the introduction but several of the chapters in the anthology, as there is a genuine attempt to seek a balance between thinkers from different geo-academic circles. There is, thus, a balance between Pascale Casanova’s The World Republic of Letters and theories forwarded by the likes of Beatriz Sarlo, Donald Shaw, and Néstor García Canclini on the genesis of a literature after the Boom. Robbins and González mobilize Rama’s musings on Darío to further a concise but illuminative discussion of the rough swaths or trajectories that have been planted in recent Latin American narrative, discussing albeit overtly the very designator of “Latin American” to these at times disparate works and authors. The editors outline the work and manifestos of McOndo and Crack writers, to then segue into a discussion of what they term posnacionalista fiction (6), echoing works by others such as Aníbal González who have discussed writers “after the nation.” For the editors of New Trends, these new works are characterized by “the erosion of the nation-state and the fragile production of locality” (6). There is no effort to clearly define this periodization of Latin American literature (something that will later be argued to be intrinsic to the reception of the Boom)—instead, the editors focus on “four aspects of contemporary life in Latin America that . . . are strongly shaping the way cultural producers relate to their social formation and their national spaces” (6). Namely, they examine “the emergence of a global popular culture,” “the rise of the internet,” “a disinterest in politics,” and “the effects of the dissolution of the nation-state discourse” (12). Several of these factors have been mulled over, reconfigured, and deconstructed in other places, but Robbins and González adhere to them as founding principles to contemporary Latin American narrative. The introduction, then, proves useful for critics attempting to situate many new(er) writers who clearly conform to these rough characteristics that the editors trace. The individual essays of New Trends covers work from Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Cuba, Mexico, Peru, and Puerto Rico, focusing at times on wider movements such as the Crack (as is the case of Regalado López’s excellent piece) or on individual authors, and, at times, a specific work. The breadth of the texts and writers analyzed is not exhaustive—and the editors make it clear early on that it is not their intention to be so—but well-represented and useful for both generalists and specialists. The lack, however, of any mention of Central American fiction is almost criminal, given the importance of writers such as Horacio Castellanos Moya, Rodrigo Rey...

Apuntes para una cartografía (parcial) de la literatura latinoamericana a lo largo de los últimos cincuenta años Del Boom a la nueva narrativa

This article aims at tracing a cartography of several of the roads taken by Latin American literature throughout the last fifty years, from the Boom of the 1960s, to the new generation of writers that today set the narrative course of the continent. The text analyzes the relationship among the diverse literary trends that flourished during the period and the social, economic, and cultural processes that took place during that same period; it emphasizes the characteristics of present day Latin American narrative and addresses some of the main topics it covers.

La condición traductora: Sobre los nuevos protagonistas de la literatura latinoamericana by Martín Gaspar

Reviewed by: La condición traductora: Sobre los nuevos protagonistas de la literatura latinoamericana by Martín Gaspar Felipe Méndez Alvarado Gaspar, Martín. La condición traductora: Sobre los nuevos protagonistas de la literatura latino-americana. Rosario: Viterbo, 2014. Pp. 225. ISBN 978-9-508-45306-8. In La condición traductora: Sobre los nuevos protagonistas de la literatura latinoamericana, Martín Gaspar delivers a series of critical essays on translation as a situated social practice, the emergence of “translator-heroes” in Latin American fiction, and the field of translation studies as a culturally mediated métier. This thoroughly researched, well-crafted study will be of interest to literary and cultural theorists, traductologists, narratologists, and to academic and lay audiences who are passionate about contemporary Latin American fiction. In broad terms, this study is a significant contribution towards a principled poetics of traductology in its encounter with Latin American fiction: through its invocation of a Bourdieuian framework, it situates the act of translation as habitus and social act. This learned tome is therefore a welcome, thought-provoking disquisition on the aesthetic and philosophical underpinnings of the métier traducteur. Gaspar traces the act of translation in nineteenth-century Latin American fiction and presents it as a transformative act that is deeply meaningful to current understandings of the region’s literary production and cultural outlook. Drawing on South American, including Brazilian, novels where translations and [End Page 687] translators play a central role, and on his own sophisticated critical and philosophical thought, Gaspar writes in the tradition of great Latin American polymaths. La condición traductora makes a delectable read, for the scope, breadth, and depth found in its pages. The author’s intentions can be pithily summarized in the following lines: “Este estudio aspira a iniciar este modo de análisis: el análisis de temperamentos y proclividades en la novela contemporánea. . . . [A] mi modo de ver, una manera de examinarlas que resulta tal vez más productiva que el examen de realidades, afectos y experiencias” (214). Clearly, this argument is not without controversy, though Gaspar meets it with encyclopedic verve in this five chapter monograph, plus appendix. Truly exegetic in form, chapter one situates the act of translation and translators at the forefront of cultural creation in Latin America since the XIX century, aims to establish the genetic lineages of translation and translators, and offers a typology of translator temperaments: “traductor verosímil,” “aclimatador,” “excéntrico,” “creador de sentidos” and finally, “el traductor y la contrahistoria.” To Gaspar, the importance of that strategy is that “[l]a táctica cultural inscripta en las figuras del traductor que leímos hasta ahora—importar, aclimatar, posicionarse excéntricamente, rebelarse, jugar—es primaria y da forma a la vida representada” (78). Chapters 2 to 4 are devoted to explicating and theorizing the emergence, recurrence, and prominence of translators and the act of translation in four novels. The first work addressed is Mario Bellatín’s Shiki Nagaoka: Una nariz de ficción, followed by two of Joao Gilberto Noll’s novels, Lorde and Berkeley em Bellagio; lastly, there follows a discussion of Chico Buarque’s Budapeste. In Gaspar’s critical examinations of these novels’ cultural and historical emergence, he proposes that the act of translation and of self-translation (traducirse) has come to play a central role in Latin American narrative. Gaspar argues that literary production that focuses on translation and translators warrants the invocation of a genre, “la novela del traductor,” where, “los protagonistas—entrenados por el habitus y destinados por su temperamento a la producción de equivalencias—buscan navegar la dificultad de conceptualizar la sensación de estar en medio de una totalidad” (215). In this volume, we are invited to witness the appearance of the translator as protagonist in Latin American fiction; and equally, to discern whether the translator’s habitus is indeed an interpretive, exegetic instrument in the toolkit of literary criticism, one whose nuances and limitations are eruditely addressed in chapter five. The topic of the appendix, the vastly more prosaic figure of Julio Vacarezza, an Argentinean translator into Spanish of mostly canonical English-language literature, takes account of the diminished glamour associated...

Desde los márgenes: Los detectives salvajes, novela transnacional

Es el objetivo de este ensayo interpretar y analizar las propuestas literarias, artísticas y estéticas que el desaparecido escritor chileno Roberto Bolaño (1953 - 2003) plantea en su novela Los detectives salvajes. Se trata esta, de la obra que lo dio a conocer internacionalmente y que reveló a un escritor amante del nomadismo y los desplazamientos no tradicionales, no siempre guiado por la comodidad sino más bien por las condiciones críticas que obligaban a tales tránsitos. En plena época de globalización, en un mundo influenciado por la ideología neoliberal, en que el mercado es visto como un tótem, que todo lo define, Bolaño se nos aparece como un escritor capaz de enfrentar precisamente este panorama frío y calculador al que nos ha conducido la etapa más avanzada del capitalismo que intenta quebrar cualquier barrera.

PERFORMATIVITY, SOCIAL ONTOLOGY, AND THE USES OF NARRATIVES IN LATIN AMERICA

This article explains the relationship between performativity and social ontology in the case of Latin American narratives of resistance and liberation. In particular, it shows how these narratives construct social facts and provide social reality to experiences of oppression and to efforts of resistance and liberation, by means of performative functions tied to the creation and maintenance of social ontologies and to the struggle for identity, social recognition, sources of legitimacy, and hegemony. Latin America is not singular in the use of these kinds of narratives but it is special in the centrality that it gives to them and in its awareness of it. By way of example, the article touches upon four narratives that display some of these narrative features and functions: Elena Poniatowska's Massacre in Mexico (1975), Rigoberta Menchu's I, Rigoberta Menchu: An Indian Woman in Guatemala (1984), Domitila Barrios de Chungara's Let Me Speak!: Testimony of Domitila, a Woman of the Bolivian Mines (1978), and Jose Ignacio Lopez Vigil's Rebel Radio: The Story of El Salvador's Radio Venceremos (1991).

Boom and the new tendencies in Latin American narrative

The Hispanic American world and its 20th century fertile literary scene brought to the world of literature a powerful voice of a new generation of writers at the beginning of the sixties who created true masterpieces of lasting value and left a unique literary trail. Occurrence of the crisis of the so-called 'boom', whose protagonists were Mario Vargas Lola, Julio Cortázar, Carlos Fuentes and Gabriel Garcia Márquez, created the 'postboom' in the mid 70s. It offered a criticism of previous flows and brought significant changes in the direction of compromised reality, aware of the complex life circumstances of Latin America. In the nineties, this movement was transformed into the 'postmodern' and became interested in the experiment, political violence as an immediate reality, Post vanguard group experience, globalization, mass media and new technologies, which also brought a new approach to the literature. By researching the crisis of literary creativity in the Latin America of the twenty-first century and through exploring a new poetics of Hispanic American writers, this paper will try to point to its ramifications and highlight the new trends, themes and characteristics which formed their own authors, literary critics, scholars and our direct interlocutors.

La crítica de la obra narrativa de Gabriel García Márquez: en las revistas literarias serbias

La crítica de la obra narrativa de Gabriel García Márquez: en las revistas literarias serbias