Revista Chilena de Literatura

Detonaciones meridianas (nota acerca de las escansiones tonales en la escritura poética de Paul Celan)

Andres Ajens — 2025-06-26

Starting from some verses of Fadensonnen (1968), we synoptically address the development of tone in the poetic writing of Paul Celan. Faced with the given tone of the historical, his verses deploy a tonal dissemination that each time affirms a second tone. Often this response – which Celan may have once called (in French) détonation – involves irony and/or critical parody, and even sarcasm. In turn, this second tonality usually comes scanned in movements that leave all tonal economy in suspense, not far from the undecidable humor in Kafka and the serene joviality in Hölderlin. Finally, we offer a translation of the text in which Celan (cited by Daive) lets come à la lettre the term détonation.

El grito de Munch en versos latinoamericanos

Biviana Hernandez — 2025-06-26

Si, de acuerdo con Mario Montalbetti, en el poema “lo que se dice / está desfasado / de lo que se ve” (118), esto implicaría un “desfase entre lo que se dice / y lo que no se ve” (119). El aserto del escritor y lingüista peruano me lleva a pensar en la écfrasis como un tropo literario que dice lo que no se ve en una imagen, pues, por más que un texto visual actúe de fuente o modelo para la escritura o reescritura de un poema, este activará resonancias que escapan de la literalidad de la imagen, y en ese desfase producirá una lectura/mirada otra acerca de aquella.

Tres tesis sobre teoría literaria hoy: políticas de la teoría

Andrea Torres-Perdigón — 2025-06-26

¿Para qué hablar de teoría literaria hoy? ¿Por qué valdría la pena defender su vigencia o necesidad? ¿Qué sentido tiene enseñar e investigar en torno a la teoría literaria en un mundo en el que esas reflexiones parecen no tener lugar o, de tenerlo, solo son importantes en los contextos universitarios? ¿Qué hacer para que el pensamiento sobre lo literario se recubra (¿de nuevo?) de relevancia social y política? Esta nota se adentra en el problema de qué es hoy aquello que identificamos con la tradición de la teoría literaria, dado que su papel social, político y disciplinar, por fuera de círculos académicos, parece ser poco significativo, contradictorio o, en el mejor de los casos, poco nítido.

ANAGNORISES OF WAR AND EXILE: REUNIONS AND RECOGNITIONS IN FRANCISCO AYALA’S LA CABEZA DEL CORDERO

Lola Burgos Ballester — 2025-06-26

The Aristotelian concept of anagnorisis has been studied in earlier literary traditions, but it has hardly been applied to contemporary texts. The latter include twentieth-century Spanish narrative written in the context of the civil war and the exile of 1939, circumstances that involved many separations, returns and reunions. In this article we aim to analyse the particularities of these recognitions in the short stories included in Francisco Ayala's La cabeza del cordero (1949). In doing so, we intend to demonstrate that these anagnorises are far from corresponding to the classical patterns stipulated for the Greco-Latin epic or the theatre of the Spanish Golden Age, as well as to highlight the need to address, in future research, this same review of the agnitions in other works of this canon.

MAITÉ ALLAMAND: YOKE AND NOT NECKLACE OR HOW “AMATEUR” WRITING MAKES VULNERABLE MOTHERHOODS VISIBLE

Ana María Cristi — 2025-06-26

During the first half of the twentieth century in Chile, experience as a principle of literary inspiration was widely linked to the gestation of amateur writing. In this context, the figures of the “self-taught writer” and the “amateur writer” emerged, who were characterized by exploring other forms of expression away from the positivist perspective to represent reality. The following article aims to examine the work of one of these “non-professional” writers, Maité Allamand, to show, from her narrative perspective, the development of a vitalist writing, which draws on the outside, exteriority, or experience to shape her literary work. In this aspect, it is interesting to focus the analysis on one of the themes that appear in different moments of her literary trajectory: the precarious or vulnerable maternities, which arise in the context of poverty, violence, and abandonment. In this sense, the reading proposal seeks to relate these maternities’ inclusion in her work with her conception of experimental (or amateur) writing marked in the affections and experience, looking for a resignification of autodidacticism, which allows reading this type of writing from its aesthetic-political power.

El entre lenguas y la autotraducción como procedimientos lingüísticos, literarios y políticos. Sobre La resistencia, de Julián Fuks

Estefanía Luján Di Meglio — 2025-06-26

In this paper, we analyze the space between languages, and self-translation of La resistencia (2018) (A resistência, 2015) by Julián Fuks. Both procedures are understood as closely related to a literary militancy that aims to preserve the historical memory of the last dictatorship in Argentina. The purpose is to think about this space between languages by relating it directly to banishment, in which the novel takes part, and to memory. We also show how self-translation (as opposed to allograph translation), besides complementing that space between languages, characteristic of the text, and apart from being a form of inscription in the historical memory of Argentina, also constitutes a filiatory mechanism with Argentine literature.

ABOUT “JUANES” AND “PEDROS”: SOCIAL CONCERN AND CRITIQUE OF CHRISTIANITY IN THE POEM “ALEGRES PORQUE NO TENDRÁN FAENA” BY GABRIELA MISTRAL

Lorena Garrido Donoso — 2025-06-26

The objective of this article is, through the analysis of the poem “Alegres porque no tendrán faena”, belonging to the manuscripts of Gabriela Mistral, unpublished until 2018, to revisit the social thought of its author, which in this case she develops by questioning the religious beliefs of Christianity. Unlike other poems of the same kind included in Poema de Chile, we do not see hope for a better future here: social justice appears as an unfulfilled task that calls into question the promises of the New Testament embodied in the “Beatitudes.” Through the critical influence she takes from theosophy, Mistral questions the religious principles that have governed the West for centuries. From a linguistic point of view, Gabriela Mistral uses various degrees of irony as a pragmatic resource to communicate with the reader and to express her disenchantment and the deep religious crisis that she experienced for a period, in her permanent search for spirituality.

THE REGENERATION OF AN ARTHURIAN MYTH: A NEOMEDIEVAL READING OF EREC Y ENIDE (2002) BY MANUEL VÁZQUEZ MONTALBÁN

Antonio Huertas-Morales — 2025-06-26

The rewriting and updating carried out by Manuel Vázquez Montalbán in Erec y Enide (2002) from the homonymous medieval roman of Chrétien de Troyes (ca. 1176) is an exceptional case in contemporary Spanish literary production. Indeed, Hispanic historical novels tend to resort to the Middle Ages as a fictional heritage based on historical facts and not literary elements. In addition, for the basic pillar of the adventure, the Latin American territory is used as a framework because of its remoteness that would enable the wonder and the temporal shift facing the European gaze. The hypothesis, and we will analyze the functionalities of this assertion, is that Vázquez Montalbán takes Chrétien’s structure for the concatenation of adventures and scholarly disquisition with the aim of providing an ethical interpretation of both the medieval text and its present.

THE ÉMIGRÉ POET JEAN ZALAQUETT AND THE ARAB CULTURE IN CHILE

Alberto Benjamín López-Oliva — 2025-06-26

The article analyzes the life and literary production of the Lebanese poet Jean Zalaquett (19131976), who emigrated to Chile in the first decades of the twentieth century. His participation in three Arab cultural associations founded in Santiago is highlighted, with the additional objective of pondering the literary substratum in which the author participated. We rely on bibliographical and journalistic references, both in Spanish and Arabic. Among the latter, we include an interview Zalaquett gave in the sixties in Syria and several of his articles for the Arab press in Chile.

POET OF ROT: THE MACABRE POETRY OF ARMANDO URIBE ARCE

Romuald Achille Mahop Ma Mahop — 2025-06-26

An essential part of the lyrical work of the Chilean Armando Uribe Arce is marked by ontological meditation, very often articulated around a kind of lyrical phenomenology of death. The present work analyses the poetic figuration of the dead body, the primacy of an eminently macabre lyrical discourse, enunciated in the first person, the expressive resources involved in such a process and its literary and philosophical implications.

GÜNTER GRASS: THE TENACIOUS MEMORY OF A REFUGEE

Juan Manuel Martín-Martín — 2025-06-26

Following the publication of his novel Crabwalk (Im Krebsgang) in 2002, Günter Grass publicly regretted that he and his entire generation had ignored the memory of the millions of German refugees at the end of World War II. This paper aims to show that the memory of this group, to which Grass himself belonged, is a fundamental element in his work, even if he claimed that it had even been a taboo for him and for German society. Special attention is paid to two works that appeared at very significant moments in his life: his first novel after reunification and after he won the Nobel Prize for Literature, respectively. The process experienced by the author is also placed in the context of a country whose relationship with the past is in permanent transformation.

POSTMODERN TRAITS IN CHILEAN NEOPOLICIAL: FRANCISCO MORALES AND PABLO RUMEL

Rocío Peñalta-Catalán — 2025-06-26

The purpose of this paper is to illustrate some of the thematic and formal features that have contributed to renewing the Chilean neopolicial since the beginning of the 21st century. To do this, we have analyzed the works of two young writers who have published their novels in the last decade: Francisco Morales, with Matanzas, and Pablo Rumel, with El secuestro and Secuencia Chobart. Although each of the proposals reflects the interests and concerns of its author, there are a series of concomitants that allow us to characterize the postmodern Chilean noir genre, such as extreme fragmentation, polyphony of voices and discourses, generic hybridism, the unsuccessful search for a single solution or truth, and the need for an active reader trying to fit the pieces of the puzzle together.

THE FIGURE OF THE SCIENTIST IN ERNESTO SILVA ROMÁN’S FANTASTIC NARRATIVE

Francisco Javier Pizarro-Obaid — 2025-06-26

During the modernization processes of the second half of the 19th century, scientific and technological developments acquired a double cultural status by producing the promise of unlimited progress and generating, at the same time, fear and uncertainty about the future. In literature, these transformations implied that the classical figure of the “wise man” was replaced by that of the savant fou, mad doctor or científico loco. This article explores how Chilean writer Enrique Silva Román (1897-1976) depicted the figure of the scientist and, at the same time, analyzes the way in which his fantastic narrative addressed the classic motifs associated with this character, namely, the dangers of science and progress, the contradictions between the human and the divine, as well as the ethical dilemmas linked to scientific knowledge.

NARRATION AND STATE IN RICARDO PIGLIA: NOTES ON THE PRESENCE OF GRAMSCI AND ONETTI IN PIGLIA’S POETICS

Ignacio Ramírez-Andrade — 2025-06-26

This article analyzes the Gramscian reminiscences underlying the notion of the State in the narrative and critical works of Ricardo Piglia. The influence of the Italian Marxist on Piglia’s work is contextualized in a time of revolutionary fervor, such as the 60’s, when intellectuals demanded a new articulation between politics and culture. Next, the article considers how this theoretical and historical framework contributed to Piglia’s adherence to an irreconciliable opposition between State and literature. Finally, some aspects of Piglia’s analysis of the nouvelle in his Theory of Prose are discussed, to gain a deeper understanding of the narrative techniques he uses to test his own response to how to narrate real events in a context or repression and censorship.

A FLIGHT TOWARDS THE PICTORIAL: THE CASE OF NATURALEZA MUERTA CON CACHIMBA BY JOSÉ DONOSO

Sebastián Schoennenbeck-Grohnert — 2025-06-26

José Donoso’s short novel, Naturaleza muerta con cachimba (1990), can be considered a pictorial simulacrum. The brevity of the story and the narrator’s limited knowledge of art –whose testimony corresponds to the entire novel– are analogous to the characteristics of still life, which has historically been positioned as a minor pictorial genre. Through this simulation, José Donoso would lead to a deterritorialization of literature, freeing it from institutional weights and expanding its possibilities of expression.

MARIAN DELUSIONS AND OBSESSIONS IN LINH AND BISAMA, OR THE MEDIATIC PLOT OF THE APPARITIONS OF THE VIRGIN

Ignacio Veraguas-Caripan — 2025-06-26

This article examines the literary treatment of the Marian apparitions in La aparición de la Virgen (1987) by Enrique Lihn and the novel Ruido (2012) by Álvaro Bisama. Both texts reflect on the visual and historical aspects that constitute the phenomenon of the Virgin’s apparition, whether through a narrative that returns to a visionary to reconstruct the past, or through the mediated image that the poem calls into question. Instead of simply accusing the spectacle of the apparitions being false, they think of the very fictionality of that event and the inescapable setback –which it affirms while pretending to deny– of the media saturation with the historical pain.

Jaime Huenún Villa. Los viajes, las vigilias: antología personal. Temuco: UFRO, 2023. 179 páginas.

Marco Chandia-Araya — 2025-06-26

La Antología personal que el premiado poeta nos ofrece, en una edición cuidadosamente preparada por la casa editorial de la Universidad de la Frontera e ilustrada con acuarelas de Eduardo Rapimán, abre con el prólogo “Jaime Huenún: ‘Una lengua en el fondo de la lengua’”, de Ana Traverso, y cierra con el Discurso de aceptación del Premio Nacional de Poesía Jorge Teillier 2020 que proclamara Huenún en 2022, en Santiago y Temuco. El texto reúne una selección de poemas de sus obras Ceremonias (1999), Puerto Trakl (2001), Reducciones (2012), Fanon city meu (2014), La calle Mandelstam y otros territorios apócrifos (2016), Ceremonia de los nombres (2019) y Crónicas de la nueva esperanza (inédita). Es decir, una muestra íntima de lo que este escritor huilliche-chileno viene publicando hace más de veinte años y que el galardón reconoce como una creación innovadora que irrumpe con fuerza en el escenario literario regional. Si bien el texto se presenta como una antología, lo cierto es que Los viajes y las vigilias, además de incluir un trabajo inédito, definitivamente es otra obra: el canto oculto que resuena en el sur intercultural para remecer la experiencia poética.

José Manuel Losada. Mitocrítica cultural. Madrid: Akal, 2022. 832 páginas.

Fernando Gil-González — 2025-06-26

El libro Mitocrítica Cultural: Una definición del mito ha sido publicado por la prestigiosa editorial Akal con la enorme labor de su autor; comprendida como la quintaesencia del profesor doctor José Manuel Losada, catedrático en la Universidad Complutense de Madrid. De hecho, esta monografía es fruto de una investigación de más de 15 años para cuestionarse, tras una gran reflexión, la esencia en torno al mito y de la mitocrítica desde una perspectiva global, dinámica y mediante un enfoque multidisciplinar (sociología, literatura, historia, antropología y psicología, entre otras). Esta magnífica obra se articula, con destreza, en dos partes y aparece dividida en once capítulos. La primera alude a un estudio introductorio, mientras que la segunda analiza la definición del mito y sus variantes.

Mauricio Arley Fonseca. Leer a Borges en una banda infinita. Costa Rica: UNED, 2022, 224 páginas.

María Gabriela Raidé — 2025-06-26

En los últimos años, parecería que los estudios borgianos han cobrado un nuevo ímpetu. Sin duda, esta inclinación da cuenta de que la fascinación por Jorge Luis Borges –en relación con su obra y su vida– está lejos de acabar. Muy por el contrario, el interés se renueva de forma constante, a partir del surgimiento de nuevas lecturas que se plasman en actividades como conferencias, seminarios o cursos, así como artículos y libros.

Ana Gallego Cuiñas. Cultura literaria y políticas de mercado: editoriales, ferias y festivales. Boston: De Gruyter, 2022.

Io Paula De la Vega — 2025-06-26

Partiendo de una breve consideración acerca de la manera en la que el escritor argentino César Aira y su obra ilustran las transformaciones y contradicciones del mercado editorial, el libro Cultura literaria y políticas de mercado. Editoriales, ferias y festivales de Ana Gallego Cuiñas nos presenta las piedras angulares de los modos de producción, circulación (transnacional) y consumo literario contemporáneos. Se trata entonces de un estudio que, desde una perspectiva materialista, tiene por objetivo descifrar los acontecimientos, siguiendo a Badiou, que caracterizan la cultura literaria en el ámbito hispanoamericano hoy y su acentuada presencia en la esfera pública: el boom de la edición independiente y el boom de las ferias y festivales.

Íñigo Salvador. 1822. Bogotá: Editorial Planeta, 2022.

Manuel Villavicencio — 2025-06-26

Los críticos Seymur Menton (1993) y Fernando Aínsa (1991) coinciden en que la nueva novela histórica busca a) una relectura de la historia fundada en un historicismo crítico; b) la impugnación de las versiones oficiales de la historia; c) la denuncia de una multiplicidad de verdades históricas; d) la desmitificación de la historia y de sus héroes; e) la reescritura irónica de la historia; y f) el uso de lenguajes arcaicos para ficcionalizar la época, que deviene en una suerte de barroquismo literario.