New-Millennium Literature in Jujuy: A Kaleidoscopic Space

Abstract

This paper is framed within the research project “Literary Cartography of Northwestern Argentina in the 1990s and the New Century: Jujuy Station”, a complex inquiry not only because of the aesthetic, socio-cultural, and critical dimensions through which it seeks to delimit its object, but also because of the limited historical distance between literary production and its interpretive treatment, which entails certain risks in the analytical delimitation.

The context of the new century confronts aesthetic diversity, scriptural provocation, and the deconstruction of the “parochial” tradition with those artistic devices that the academy had consecrated as legitimate. It thus accounts for multiple poetics: from the printed format, where texture, image, and layout impose themselves upon the reign of writing through the proliferation of alternative editions, to the silhouettes of the digital environment, which establish a kind of virtual labyrinth.

The newest literary generation in Jujuy—those writers born after the dictatorship—designs an irregular, varied, and transitory literary stratum that demands, above all because of its generational difference, other logics of thought, new routes of access to information, innovative circuits of reading, and “rare” artistic filiations as fictional nutrients of the new century.

Different categories of Latin American and Argentine thought since the 1990s will serve as theoretical scaffolding for a discussion of the so-called post-theories, which insist on the persistence of heterogeneity interwoven around three nodal axes: discourse, subject, and representation. These debates appeal to the crisis of identity, the explosion of marginality, the vulnerability of representation, the rupture of discursive unity, the empire of everyday realism, and an art without metaphors. These disruptive marks will allow us to understand literary making from local subjectivities, in pursuit of a relocalization of the national literary system.

The research process therefore seeks to address recent generations of writers who draw a new map in Jujuy literature from diverse currents of national and Latin American criticism, with the purpose of offering contributions on new trends in regional literature and contributing to the interpretive lines of Argentine literature.