Estudios de Teoría Literaria (Mar 2022)
Captivity experiences and the editor's digressions. Corpus divergences between Fray Servando Teresa de Mier and Reinaldo Arenas' construction
Abstract
What follows is undoubtedly a reduction, but it is also a library of human affections that reveals the complexity of the whole, the contradictions, and the convergences in Latin American literature. The writing is then anchored in the different ways that the experience of political imprisonment can be narrated as well as the strategies employed by survivors turned into editors of their own story. I am particularly interested in interpreting the tensions and crossings between characters and authors that are lodged in the tension between the Carta de despedida a los mexicanos, de Fray Servando Teresa de Mier (1821), and the construction of a fictionalized life as proposed by Reinaldo Arenas in the novel El mundo alucinante (1965). I then attempt to organize a collection of Latin American narratives centered on the experiences of captivity, in which first person writing derives into divergence beyond the binary logics of testimony as canonical genre. The series is heterogeneous in its composition, and accounts for a particular approach to the organization of a literary system.
