The body and the unburied past in 21st century Latin American fiction

Abstract

The paper proposes a reflection on the configuration of temporality in 21st century Latin American narratives that, directly or indirectly, fictionalize traumatic collective events. It starts from the hypothesis that, through a phantasmatic aesthetic, the past gains centrality as a temporal dimension that imposes itself on the present. The permanence of the past in the present is metaphorized, recurrently, by the presence of the absent, by the figurative presentation of the dead, highlighting the fate of the bodies, whether the tortured or disappeared bodies of the victims, or the degenerated bodies of those who remained on the side. of state violence. To develop this hypothesis, contemporary cinematographic and literary works will be put into dialogue, such as the films Aranha, by Andrés Wood, A Chorona, by Jayro Bustamante, and novels, such as Corpos intermináveis, by Cláudia Lage, e Degeneração, by Fernando Bonassi.