ABSTRACT
Fiction writers move to the essay in search of a discursive form that allows them to assume a subjective enunciation stripped of the masks of the narrator and of the character. This position favors the investigation of their literary practices, the poetic singularities that define them, the traditions in which they recognize themselves, the interventions on the public scene that they perform. The essay, therefore, emerges as a privileged discursive space to advance the debate on the meanings that would define Latin American literature in the Western cartography of the last decades. This paper proposes to explore the ways the essay takes on as a discursive strategy that, from the 1970s to the present day, has operated critically on the disarticulation of an ideologized notion of Latin American literature that subjected it to functions of cultural representativeness. The paper addresses, in particular, essays by the Argentine Hector Libertella and the Mexican Jorge Volpi.
latin-american literature; essay; Héctor Libertella; Jorge Volpi; cultural identity