Synopsis:
A native of Peru, I specialize in contemporary Latin American literature.
My research focuses on the development of the twentieth century novel, the aesthetic
effect of rewriting history, the cultural implications of amalgamating the present
with its colonial past, and the hegemonic forces that impact the colonization
of language. Working with Carmen Boullosa's transatlantic and historical novels,
Rosario Castellanos's indigenist narratives, and Manuel Scorza's neoindigenist
ballads, I have traced various dissident discourses that permeate the language
of contemporary Latin American literary expressions. This is a language that
undergoes several transformations in order to empower the subaltern or the silenced
other; it connects Latin America with its Peninsular roots, and, at the same
time, renovates the ongoing need to piece together a fragmented cultural identity.
I have studied the metamorphoses of this language in the writings of Carlos
Fuentes, Ignacio Solares, Elena Poniatowska, and Carlos Monsiváis.
In many ways, my book manuscript, La imaginación novelesca. Bernal Díaz
entre géneros y épocas, incorporates this theoretical perspective.
I study this renowned sixteenth-century chronicler's voice for its novelistic
undertones, in order to delineate the construction of a nonconformist and nonetheless
literary discourse. Taking into account historiographical treatises that set
forth the theoretical parameters for writing history during the sixteenth-century,
at all times I draw explicit connections between the Historia verdadera and
the twentieth century novel. Therefore, I have considered postmodern theories
that focus, among other topics, on the development of the novel, its dialogic
qualities, its treatment of time and space, and its structure. Accordingly,
a substantial part of my book also deals with the rewritings of Bernal Díaz's
Historia verdadera in contemporary Mexican fiction.
I am currently studying the novels, short stories, and chronicles produced
by Xavier Velasco, Ana Clavel, Rosa Beltrán, Santiago Roncagliolo, and
Cristina Rivera Garza. The work of these and other Latin American authors of
today problematizes the construction of a hybrid identity, transgresses gender
boundaries, and manipulates various novelistic elements to question the course
of history and the development of ideas in Western philosophy.
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