Cuerpo y autoría en la escritura autobiográfica latinoamericana contemporánea: un diálogo diferido

Abstract

The following investigation resumes a theoretical discussion as immemorial as it is unfinished: the link between the authorial figure (their life) and the writing (creation), which in turn suggests another relation: reality-fiction. Even when, during diverse historical moments, literary studies have intended to elucidate-classify such an association through diverse genre denominations (memoirs, autobiography, autobiographical novel, autofiction), the dynamism of literature ends up tuning every typecasting obsolete. Reason why it is accurate to revisit the theoretical framework (network of relations) from which they have articulated, since wider, more inclusive perspectives detach from its understanding-questioning to engage in new dialogs with literary proposals, not with the purpose of setting boundaries anymore, but of tracing lines of encounter among writing practices beyond historiographic and special-temporal limits._x000D_ _x000D_ _x000D_ _x000D_ Accordingly, this study closely explores the values, concerns, and discourses that underlie and outline the category «autobiography» (concern about the «self», the «I», the authorial figure), analytical exercise where its double genre dimensionality acquires a special relevance: literary (genre) and sexual (gender). Indeed, acknowledging that autobiography has constituted, through history, a male writing practice forcibly demands a reading that considers this not only as a determining condition, but as a constitutive fact, projected on the hurdles that the assumption of speech implies; the treatment received by criticism and literary histories; the contextual, economic, political conditions of the «female» authorial figure and the motives that drive the pretense of «recounting life». _x000D_ _x000D_ _x000D_ _x000D_ Departing from such an understanding it is intended to execute an analytical reading from the body of the following corpus of autobiographical-memorial Latin American works written during the XX century and early XXI: Autobiografía [1979-1984],Victoria Ocampo; Cuadernos de infancia [1937], Antes que mueran [1944], Norah Lange; Epílogo [2003], Alicia Jurado; and from there establishing an intertextual dialog. It is convenient to clarify that such a proposal does not simply pursue to «map» the body-text of autobiographical narrative, but to raise the body-text as a category of analysis, as a reading perspective able of summoning discourses that traverse the autobiographical: power, language, gender. Undoubtedly, the scope of said theoretical-methodological approach will contribute to settle a historiographic outstanding debt to the autobiographical-memorial narrative of the female pen, while allowing to engage in a dialog where literary criticism, theory, and history coalesce to find connections or tipping points among the different accounts of the corpus. In this sense, while this study does not strive for becoming a generalization, its gaze might contribute to the discussion about the ways in which the writing of the «I» has been analyzed in the Latin American literary field (in particular) and to rethink autobiographical-memorial theory, in general.

Date of Award	1 Jun 2021
Original language	Spanish
Supervisor	Noemí Acedo Alonso (Director)