FRAGMENTARY WRITINGS IN LATIN-AMERICAN LITERATURE

Abstract

This article proposes an inquiry into the fragmentary writings frequented by authors from Latin America in the 20th and 21st centuries. These are writing practices that are configured in the transit between notes, chronicles, diaries and essays, in a discursive movement that tends to erase the distinctions between literature and life. Even though fragmentation is recognizable as a critical discursive strategy of a literary modernity that, as Jacques Rancière says, made the corrosion of the concept of literature its foundation, it is worth asking the question about the inflections it takes on nowadays when literature seems to abandon its specific forums and, in a movement of identification with experience and the world, call aesthetic autonomy into question. In dialogue with a theoretical reflection on fragmentary writings, which includes contributions from Lacoue-Labarthe, Nancy, Barthes, Blanchot and Rancière, the article traces a path through fragmentary writings from Latin America that calls on the names of Macedonio Fernández, Ricardo Piglia, Salvador Elizondo, Mario Levrero, among other authors.