Autobiographical Writing in Latin America

Autobiography has never been foreign to Latin American literature. However, during the twentieth century, the production of autobiographical writing has only intensified. Since the beginning of the 1990s, Latin American writings of the self (autobiographies, journals, memoirs) have emerged as a rich and varied corpus of Latin American literature, both for the quantity of texts and for reasons of aesthetic relevance.

How can this development be explained? What change, if any, has taken place that can explain this narrative inflection? To what drives or cultural logics does it respond? Responding to these questions can be difficult since the relations between society and artistic production are far from mechanical; there are diverse cultural mediations at stake. Even so, in what follows I will attempt to set forth some considerations that might help to clarify the situation.

Autobiographical Writing in Latin America: Folds of the Self is intended to fill a void. With the exception of this book’s antecedent, At Face Value: Autobiographical Writing in Spanish America (1991), by Sylvia Molloy, there are no similar publications in existence. Molloy’s foundational text studies a distinct period (the 19th and early 20th centuries), as well as a different set of authors than the five analyzed in my book. Latin American autobiographies, memoirs and journals

This study examines the diversity of narrative strategies utilized by these authors to design their “written life,” not only with respect to the future (that is, to History), but rather in terms of their own present, deliberately inserting themselves into their societies. In conclusion, this book’s novelty and innovation lies in its examination of a corpus that has never before been systematically studied.

Autobiographical Writing in Latin America: Folds of the Self proposes a reflection on contemporary Spanish American autobiographical discourse through four essays. It examines the Spanish American autobiographical discourse in terms of the invalidation or problematization of the great metanarratives of progress and liberation, the debilitation of the political, the emergence of marginal and marginalized subjectivities, an increased ecological consciousness, the climax of a social trend towards the visual and the spatial, as well as the vindication of intimism and the value of sensitivity and everyday socialities. 

This book is primarily intended for academics specializing in the canonical authors studied (José Agustín, Reinaldo Arenas, José Donoso, Salvador Elizondo, Gabriel García Márquez, Carlos Monsiváis, Mario Vargas Llosa, just to name the more famous ones). Secondary audiences include specialists in autobiographies and memoirs, and historians, sociologists and cultural critics studying Spanish America.

*The 2017 Premio Iberoamericano Award Committee of the Latin American Studies Association awarded an honorable mention to Pliegues del yo: Cuatro estudios sobre escritura autobiográfica en Hispanoamérica, the Spanish version of this book.

This book is in the Cambria Latin American Literatures and Cultures Series headed by Román de la Campa, the Edwin B. and Lenore R. Williams Professor of Romance Languages at the University of Pennsylvania.