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Subconference:
The
Urban Space as Text
Subconferencia:
El
Espacio Urbano como Texto |
» Special Session:
Texting the City: Textual
Reconstructions of Latin American Urban Spaces
Accepting that the Latin American city exists in
a material form outside the literary text, this panel will examine the
representation of Latin American urban life though the textualization of
the city and the discourses that order that material space.
Our investigations look at the ways in which
Latin American writers respond to historic hegemonies and authorities
through their own textual reconstructions of the Latin American urban
space. Through our analyses of the literary works of Julio Cortázar
(Argentina), Rita Indiana Hernández (Republica Dominicana), Eudardo Lalo
(Puerto Rico), and Pedro Lemebel (Chile), we locate the textual spaces in
which the city emerges as a new (social, economic, political, and even
geographical) construct.
Just as we argue that the works of these writers
allow us to see a new city constructed as text, they equally force us to
explore the phantasmagoric spaces within the material city from which
these textual reconfigurations emerge.
Our panel seeks out the spaces in the
city-as-text and in the text-as-city in which fantasy reorganizes reality
and produces community and identity. Because the possibility of
political representation is a fiction for many Latin American urban
dwellers, we hope to show that within a textually constructed city,
fiction perhaps becomes the possibility of political representation.
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