Memories and development imaginaries of the children in recent chilean fiction

Abstract

The following paper explores the recent Chilean narrative which recalls childhood during the dictatorship, the so-called “literatura de los hijos” (literature of sons and daughters), establishing an aesthetic and discoursive link between shared memory and the development imaginaries of those who were children during the dictatorial past and that are writers in the post-dictatorial present. The affective continuity of a conflict, between a present state of memory and a past of childhood learning, still incomplete or with potential for understanding, explains the perspective chosen of sons and daughters of the narrators in some of the fictional works by Nona Fernández (1971), Álvaro Bisama (1975), and Alejandro Zambra (1975). In the three imaginary constructions explored in the following pages, the aim of these authors is described, in terms of their intention to articulate, within fiction, childhood imaginaries that establish and explain their current social, intellectual, and affective positions.