Chapter 8 - Paraliterature

Summary

This chapter traces a path from the literary canonization of traditional forms of paraliterature, such as detective fiction and science fiction, to Latin American authors’ recent engagement with extraliterary reading practices. It also expands the definition of paraliterature to include widely disseminated informational and regulatory texts not typically considered literary, such as encyclopedias and state-administered exams, and examines paraliterature’s intersections with the avant-garde. Using a theoretical framework centered on Latin American ideas of engaged and “postautonomous” literature, this chapter first examines the embrace of popular categories of genre fiction by literary writers and then turns to autofictional, testimonial, and pseudo-referential works that cross boundaries between literature and the real. Through works from canonical authors such as Roberto Bolaño, Horacio Castellanos Moya, and Diamela Eltit, as well as younger writers such as Verónica Stigger, Ricardo Lísias, and Ena Lucía Portela, this chapter addresses ways in which contemporary fiction and poetry intersect with their sociopolitical contexts and call into question the limits and purposes of literary writing and reading practices.