Project: "Urban Figurations in Latin America. Views of the City in the 21st Century"

Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Ottmar Ette

The inclusion of cities in literary discourse responds, in many occasions, to the need to understand and apprehend reality while facing urban expansion, acceleration of life, ecological problems, homogenization and globalization. These indeed are some of the issues that literature explores, in an eagerness to analyze the present and build meanings around it. This project seeks to study different Latin American novels where is possible to find, on one hand, the concern about the future of the city, manifested in the projection of the times to come, and in the recovery and revision of urban memory; and, on the other, the construction of new senses that allow us to think about the city both in its present and in its possibility of transcendence. If the strategies to know and understand the city have been overcome, the analyzed novels have decided to build their urban routes from memory and texts. The novels read the factual and literary history of their urban settings, and build a dialogue space that updates other images and conceptions of the world. They conceived writing as the staging of a polyphonic dialogue. Analyzing the exchanges between the texts, in order to trace a tradition that has thought and produced the cities from our latitudes in the last thirty years, allows us to glimpse the not only aesthetic but political positions of our writers, because building the city implies taking a position in front of this and grant, if not solutions, possible responses to the chaos and ruin of both the present and the future.