Book contents
- Latin American Literature in Transition 1980–2018
- Latin American Literature in Transition
- Latin American Literature in Transition 1980–2018
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Part I Security
- Chapter 1 Geological Writings
- Chapter 2 Literature, Trauma, and Human Rights
- Chapter 3 Literatura de Hijos in Post-Dictatorship South America
- Chapter 4 Mexican Narconarratives after Narcos
- Part II New Genres
- Part III Mobilities
- Part IV Positionalities
- Part V Latin American Literature in Global Markets
- Index
- References
Chapter 3 - Literatura de Hijos in Post-Dictatorship South America
from Part I - Security
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 November 2022
- Latin American Literature in Transition 1980–2018
- Latin American Literature in Transition
- Latin American Literature in Transition 1980–2018
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Part I Security
- Chapter 1 Geological Writings
- Chapter 2 Literature, Trauma, and Human Rights
- Chapter 3 Literatura de Hijos in Post-Dictatorship South America
- Chapter 4 Mexican Narconarratives after Narcos
- Part II New Genres
- Part III Mobilities
- Part IV Positionalities
- Part V Latin American Literature in Global Markets
- Index
- References
Summary
The turn of the new millennium has witnessed a growing number of cultural works – films, photographs, novels, plays, and blogs – by the so-called postmemory generations in Latin America. An already significant corpus of critical essays has addressed some of their most common attributes, including the blending of fact and fiction, their playful style, and the difficulties of representing/narrating absence. Comparative analysis of these works is rare, however, and while many studies analyse the cultural memories of children of disappeared parents, the experiences of other “children of the dictatorship” – such as the children of perpetrators or bystanders – are still underexamined. This chapter discusses a series of autofictions from Argentina, Brazil, and Chile of the so-called Literatura de hijos, a popular, albeit not problem-free, term. The issue of content (what to say about the past) is in these narratives directly related to concerns over form (how to say it). Thus, the chapter focuses on how post-dictatorship writers revisit and, more importantly, refashion literary genres – most notably childhood fables, detective stories, and the narratives of exile – simultaneously breathing new life into both the memory of the dictatorial years and the tools that we have to write about them.
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- Information
- Latin American Literature in Transition 1980–2018 , pp. 47 - 62Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2022