Form and Historicity of the Fantastic: Realistic Discontent and Spatial Depth in Liliana Colanzi

Authors

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.5195/bsj.2023.299

Keywords:

Latin American Fantastic Literature, Literary form, Smooth and Striated Space, Realist discontent, Liliana Colanzi

Abstract

In this paper I propose a double reading of Liliana Colanzi’s Nuestro mundo muerto (Almadía, 2016). First, through the study of the formal specificity of the short stories. For that pourpose, I draw from the characterization of her work from two different but complementary concepts: the global Latin-American fantastic fiction as part of the global new weird (Sanchiz y Bizzarri) and the literatures of the realistic discontent (Amatto). Then, after considering the literary form as the space of conflict between the work of art and its historicity (Eyers), I study how the short stories of Colanzi have a form that I suggest to call “interference”. In the second reading, I study the spatial dimension of Colanzi’s work from two axis: the territorial extension previously analyzed by González Almada as “textualization of territory” (“Territorialidades”) and the spatial stratification as the smooth and the striated, according to Deleuze and Guattari (Mil Mesetas). After underscore the richness of both axis, territoriality, and deepness, I analyze the short story “Nuestro mundo muerto” to read it as a speculation on temporality of the human and the non-human in the Late Capitalism crisis. In the intersection between form and space it will be possible to see the conflicting historicity.

Published

2023-11-30