| This dissertation explores the ways in which contemporary Latin American narratives address the issue of marginal bodies and subjectivities by producing intricate aesthetic and ethical projects that, from a non-representational perspective, challenge the idea of one-dimensional meanings and clear-cut social and discursive identities. The argument arises from the hypothesis that these narratives articulate themselves to a contemporary historical moment marked by a social and epistemological crisis, a crisis that has to do with both current uncertainties about the future and what seems to be an historical impossibility of solving the social problems and deep economic inequalities that neoliberalism has brought to outrageous extremes.;Establishing textual connections and thematic encounters between voices that emerge from different standpoints and enunciation sites, the narratives under discussion pay special attention to those impoverished and marginal bodies that dwell at the margins of our contemporary urban societies. These bodies are generally considered useless and disposable, when not contaminated and corrupted, from the point of view of the ideological prevailing system. They constitute spaces where unfixed identities are constantly being displayed and performed and where historical failure has inscribed painful scars and produced social and physical ruins.;At the same time, these narratives are concerned with the problem of language and its capacity to depict a reality that cannot be completely contained by human knowledge and symbolizing devices. These narratives do not pretend simply to reflect an ongoing crisis and to represent the marginal bodies it has produced: they experiment with language in generating complex textual 'rhizomes' that impugn linear stories and contradict the normative space of fixed semantic oppositions. Language itself becomes a malleable dimension that establishes intriguing connections between textual compositions and marginal realities that, censored and usually silenced by the hegemonic and normative discourses, demand to be recognized, named and exposed by linguistic and literary forms that can interrupt 'normal' discourses and affect the comfortable stance of uncritical readers. |
