Sistema Regional de Información
en línea para Revistas Científicas de América Latina,
el Caribe, España y Portugal

In La oscura memoria de las armas (2008) Ramón Díaz Eterovic explores the topics of memory, Chile’s dictatorship, transition, violence and truth from the perspective of Detective Heredia, who goes through the streets of Santiago elucidating a murder that, based on rumours and on a conscious of effort of not forgetting history, it deals with relevant topics that were not talked about on the time of the transition to democracy, where memories become an "endriaga" at the sight of the establishment of the collective memory, birthed on the streets of the city. A memory made of testimonies dripping with the horror, torment and silence that the dictatorship imposed over the inhabitants of Santiago and allows us to configure the urban imaginary of Santiago de Chile at the time of the transition to democracy, introducing a new character into the national literary imaginary: the victim of the dictatorship who seeks justice and revenge.

Palamás, Echevete y yo o el lago asfaltado (Palamás, Echevete and I or the asphalted lake), Mexican Diego Cañedo’s second novel (1945), elaborates the time travel to the Mexican past. The sci-fi theme of the novel sustains a social criticism, and imitates H. G. Wells’ The Time Machine plot. In this essay, the sociocritical part of Cañedo’s work is studied, on one hand, because it seems to respond to the social problems of the period 1934-1946; and, on the other hand, because the relations established with Wells’ novel.

This article addresses the novel Nefando, by Mónica Ojeda, based on the experience of pain as a supplement, from the theoretical paradigm of Jacques Derrida, since its enunciation functions as a sign of a sign, which does not properly represent affect, rather, it generates a false representative that makes the sign itself present only by its absence. Consequently, the enunciation of affect is articulated as difference insofar as it configures a series of possible disseminated and deferred meanings that put into play the limits of meaning by pointing out its original lack. Thus, the (re)signification of pain makes the production of an original discourse impossible, since it produces other modes of signification that call into question the fixity of the discourse and show the de-centering of the textual structure. 

Starting from the concepts “fiction line [ligne de fiction]” and “textual unconciousness”, developed by Lacan and Jean Bellemin-Noël respectively, this article presents the analysis of a piece of the Alejandra Pizarnik’s diary. The text seems representative of the author’s meta-literary concerns, among which stands out the conflict between the language as a tool and the non-communicable nature of the reality. The psychoanalytic analysis of the discourse given by the subject of the statement reveals, as Kristeva argues, a desire to transcend the narrow limits of the symbolic sphere and to open an alternative literary space closer to the embodiment and its drives.

This article studies the configuration of the family in two recent Argentine novels, La familia by Gustavo Ferreyra and El absoluto by Daniel Guebel. Starting from a recognition of the attributes that the family had in the tradition of the novel, this text examines the values that these two novels built around genealogy, lineage and kinship. At the same time, the article study the articulations with the concept of gender in relationship with two fictions not clearly related to this contemporary pattern of reading and fiction production. Finally, this article analyzes the temporal variables, an aspect that is linked to the time allotted to the family through lineage and reproduction. The extensive, profuse and unconventional configuration of this novels indicates a divergence with respect to this assignment and the possibility of other forms and binders of the family.

This paper seeks to connect the concepts of “terror” and “horror” proposed by Gothic novelist Ann Radcliffe to films by Brazilian directors Walter Hugo Khouri and José Mojica Marins. It will be discussed here how such concepts manifest themselves in the national context and in which senses, trapped somewhere between repetition and difference, Khouri and Mojica’s films can be deemed expressions of a Brazilian Gothic. Stemming from elements derived from Anglo-American criticism, but, highlighting the different meanings that these elements gain in Brazil. To interpret Brazilian films in the light of the Gothic means addressing the issue of “construction of meaning” in national history, as the Gothic has the potential to revive old traumas and generate discussions about specific social contexts.

Clarice Lispector's Água viva [1973] can be read as a project of a linguistic resignification. For this, it is necessary to understand the context in which it is set, the third phase of literary Modernism in Brazil. The movement, not only in its literary segment, influenced by European vanguards such as abstractionism (and the denial, too, of the discursive figure in the text), surrealism etc., found new incorporations in Latin America, resulting in genuine productions which were consolidated, breaking away from mimetic Romanticism and establishing the mark of a production that incorporated elements of Brazilianness. The enunciation in Água viva brushes up effects of musical intonation and iconographic plasticity to address the form and the non-form, on the threshold between them, in the construction of this iconoclastic project permeated by moments sometimes of abstraction, sometimes of figurativity. We present some keys for this reading of the book in this paper.

The objective of this article is to trace the participation of women in the historical sequence of the main milestones of origin and evolutionary development of the Coordinadora Arauco Malleco from the category "body-space/time-territory", approached by the philosopher Francesca Gargallo The subject of study are the bodies located in a space-time that takes place in the surroundings of Lake Lleu Lleu, the axial geopolitical space where, from the Mapuche shamanic perspective, more than 30 years ago the spirit of thunder revived the power and violence of the ancient warriors of theweichan. Two generations of women exposed their bodies in the struggle to recover a liberated territory, transgressing cultural mandates and bearing the costs of confronting the State with prison and a fugitive life. However, the protagonism of women linked to the CAM has been silenced by traditional historiography as well as by the hegemonic masculine discourse of the Coordinadora itself. The becoming militant of women constitutes a complex plot that includes displacement of gender roles in the Mapuche culture and a transition from the political militancy of the weichafe to auxiliary spiritual roles of the machi such as tayilfe, curiche and dungumachife.

The aim of this article is to read four works from the recent Chilean literary field as a series of reflections on print culture. These novels start from the premise that print has been profoundly affected by the digital revolution. In the first part of the article, I develop a theoretical model to understand the effect of digital on print based on the concepts of remediation, materiality, and practices of print culture. I propose that the digital revolution produced a liberation and tension in the printed culture that the four novels I study reflect, and they do so from the questioning of the functions that print has historically had. Facsímil (2014), El sistema del tacto (2018), Scout and Leñador, are novels aware of their status as a physical object, and therefore use their materiality to reflect, intervene and comment on the role printed book plays in the contemporary world. The article seeks to show that printed culture in Chile is in a moment of paradigmatic change and that literature is an exceptional starting point to understand it.

Reseña. Geraldine Rogers. Raúl G. Tuñón, poesía y reportaje: incluye crónicas viajeras del escritor 1932-1936. Mérida: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 2020