Una máquina neobarroca: la escritura de Diamela Eltit

Abstract

The article analyzes the conformation of a neo-baroque repertoire in the narrative of the Chilean writer Diamela Eltit (Santiago, 1949). For this, the reflection focuses on a reduced corpus made up of the novels: El cuartomundo, Los trabajadores de la muerte and Fuerzas especiales. From an approach that attends to the intersections between literature and society, it is assumed as a presupposition that the neo-baroque manifests itself as a form of aesthetic experimentation and political interpellation regarding discourses and social practices traversed by violence. The hypothesis holds that the author’s novels combine a series of discursive operations that highlight the complex articulation between the historical forms of violence, the social conformation of citizen subjectivities, and the materiality of language. The work is oriented in two directions: reconstructing some theoretical debates referring to the modulations of the neo-baroque in Hispanic American Literature (Bustillo, Richard, Rojas and Sarduy, among others) and characterizing the operations and meanings associated with this movement in Eltit’s novels.