Los libros y los cuadros. Sobre las estrategias del quehacer nacional en Gainza y Zambra

Abstract

In the context of the growing digital transformation, the perception of the national has been affected, in Latin America, by the evolution of the link between literature and nation sustained by written culture. The virtualization of archives and communications has questioned writing practices and their supports, shaking in its wake those links sustained by them. Within this framework, we propose to rethink the link between literature and nation based on different positioning strategies that writers implement to place themselves in the contemporary literary field. We will focus on two cases, that of María Gainza and that of Alejandro Zambra. On one hand, Gainza’s choice for pictorial art and paintings serves to decline the classic Argentine imperative of rewriting the 19th century. On the other hand, the tensions between poetry and narration present in Zambra’s work renew the articulations of a binomial that gravitates at the center of Chilean national literature. The analysis of these strategies accounts for the multiple perception of the national for generations that have fully traversed the arc of digital transformation.