Evil in the Written Word
Due Date: 01-15-2018
The topic of violence has been of significant importance in Spanish American literature. Brutal dictatorships, revolutionary wars, drug-related violence, and guerrilla warfare have left a strong imprint on contemporary Spanish American literature. However, there are few literary works presented through the point of view of the perpetrator of violence and told in his or her voice. Consequently, few studies investigate the construction of these voices and analyze the effect of this narrative design.
Contributions are invited for Evil in the Written Word: Violent Narrators in Contemporary Latin American Fiction, an edited volume on the voice of the perpetrator of violence in contemporary Spanish American literature. How are these voices constructed within different historical, political, and social contexts, and what responses do they evoke in readers? What are the ethical and aesthetic implications of this narrative design in the representation of violence? In what ways do these criminal narrators reaffirm or undermine the distinctions between the individual and the collective, the public and the private, fiction and reality, and oral and written discourse? How do these categories operate in the narrated violence and what relations do they establish among violence, power, ideology, and language? How is the first-person discourse codified and how does this codification pervade the ideology of the narration? These and other related questions serve as a starting point for the type of analysis proposed in this volume.
Proposals for original chapters in Spanish should be submitted by 15 October 2017 to one of the editors, Ana María Mutis (amutis@trinity.edu) or Margarita Jácome (mjacome@loyola.edu). Submissions must include the author’s information, the title of the essay, and a 300–500-word summary.