Indomitable chronicle: the genericity of non-fiction in two essays by María Sonia Cristoff

Abstract

This paper aims to analyze two essays by the Argentine writer María Sonia Cristoff (Trelew, 1965): “La no ficción hoy: una alternativa” (2014) and “Literatura y crónica. Gato por liebre” (Anfibia, s/d). We find that the normative and ontological notions of genre that underlie the most common definitions of the chronicle do not conform to the aesthetics that the author proposes for genre. The notion of genericity (Schaeffer, “Del texto al género”; Montes) is a more faithful approach to her proposal, akin to the notion of palimpsest (Genette). Finally, the author distinguishes between the journalistic chronicle and non-fiction literature and takes a position in the Latin American tradition compared to the North American one, which also supposes an ascription to an aesthetic of greater experimentation compared to the nineteenth-century realism model.

Keywords

• crónica
• no ficción
• género discursivo
• genericidad
• maría sonia cristoff