Sanchez Publishes Chapter
Jorge Sanchez, a student in our Hispanic Language & Literatures PhD program, has published a chapter from his dissertation. The piece is titled, “Mermaids, Werewolves, ‘Humanimals’ and Unnamable Monsters: A Review of Monsters in Contemporary Literature of the Latin American Southern Cone,” and will be published in the book Casas Tomadas: Monsters and Metaphors on the Periphery of Latin American Literature and Media.
Below is the abstract for the piece.
“Monsters, even though marginal characters that are seen as the “abnormal Other” in the arts, have become axial in contemporary literature, for they connote much more than what they typically denote. In other words, monsters can be read as metaphors of “something” that is more directly related to the reader and their interpretations than to the image itself. They are ambiguous beings and literary tropes capable of revealing extraliterary topics that are central to Latin American culture and society. Historically, from Fuentes’s Vlad to Donoso’s Boy, multiple monsters have allowed us to explore reality through the perspective of the Other, particularly in gothic, fantastic or uncanny literary genres. In this chapter I will consider contemporary literature of the Southern Cone to discuss various portrayals of the monster. Is monster as metaphor still an effective literary tool that prompts a new way of approaching life? Do these entities open space for criticizing normative ideologies of the human being and their world? What issues in our current society are unveiled and addressed through the presence of the monster in contemporary literature? These are some of the questions that will be dealt with by examining and analyzing the topics of local legends, androcentrism, sexual violence, entities who defy scientific categories, and anthropocentric knowledge in the short stories by authors such as Liliana Heker, Cristina Peri Rossi, Ana María Shua, Samanta Schweblin, Mariana Enriquez, Agustina Bazterrica, Vera Giaconi, Lina Meruane, and Luciano Lamberti.”