Problemáticas del espacio en la narrativa hispanoamericana contemporánea (1990-2010)

Abstract

My dissertation, “Problemáticas del espacio en la narrativa hispanoamericana contemporánea (1990-2010)” [Problematics of Space in Contemporary Spanish American Narrative (1990-2010)], focuses on the concept of space and its articulations in a diverse corpus of written and visual narratives by contemporary Latin American authors. The problematics of spaciality are analyzed within the specific time period encompassing the last decade of the 20th century and the first decade of the 21st century, a period in which space has emerged as an important category for understanding the present. The “spatial turn”, proposed and analyzed by Michel Foucault, David Harvey, and Edward Soja, assumes that space has become a more relevant analytical category than time, due to the emergence of new technologies and media, new forms of capital flow, and because of the preeminence of the image in contemporary times. Following Henri Lefebvre’s foundational proposal, I understand space in relation to social formation and as a product of human practices rather than as an a priori category or an abstract geometrical notion independent of subjectivity and human agency. Within this framework, the problematics of space are analyzed in a corpus that includes the novels Amuleto (1999) by Roberto Bolaño, La virgen de los sicarios (1994) by Fernando Vallejo, and El asco. Thomas Bernhard en San Salvador (1997) by Horacio Castellanos Moya, and two films, Los rubios (2003) directed by Albertina Carri, and La teta asustada (2009) by Claudia Llosa. The first chapter of the dissertation lays out the theoretical framework of the concept of space and the specific socio-economical characteristics of the studied time period. The second chapter analyzes the enclosed space of Amuleto in the context of Mexico’s 1968 Tlatelolco Massacre, and proposes that a “space of the abyss” emerges with the death of a Latin American generation and the fall of the utopias in the 1960s. The third chapter compares and contrasts the films La teta asustada and Los rubios with respect to the theme of postmemory in the periods following the internal conflict in Peru and the military dictatorship in Argentina. The “space of postmemory” that arises in both films relates to the interplay between the absence/presence of the bodies of the parents – who lived the traumatic events – and the second generation that inherits the trauma. The fourth chapter examines the “spaces of escape” that emerge from La virgen de los sicarios and El asco as a possibility of escape for protagonists who face collapsed cities and states: Medellin after the death of Pablo Escobar, and San Salvador after the end of the Civil War. The three configurations of space that arise from the corpus – “space of the abyss”, “space of postmemory”, and “space of escape” – articulate crucial issues of contemporary Latin America such as the fall of modernizing utopias, trauma, postmemory, disenchantment, and the failure of the liberal state. They also bring to light three key features of contemporary spatiality: the individualization of spaces pointing to individualism as a necessary condition for new fluxes of capitalism; the reduction of diegetic spaces that relates to the concept of time-space compression proposed to account for the spatial changes of the studied period; and the appearance of spaces of refuge as a general response to the ephemeral conditions of the present.