Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 64-10, Section: A, page: 3702.

Director: Josefina Ludmer.

Estetica de la pobreza en la literature latinoamericana studies the emergence of a new aesthetics in late twentieth-century Latin American literature and culture. Focusing on the literary and cultural production in Argentina, Chile and Ecuador from 1990 to the present, I discuss the appearance and characteristics of an "aesthetics of poverty," by rearticulating the relations between literature and politics. I am interested in the new time and spaces that are excluded from the spectacular and triumphalistic discourses of globalization.

I interrogate this aesthetic from four different perspectives, by combining literary analysis, political economy, and historical and cultural critique. First, I consider the 'voice of the poor,' where I problematize the poor's ability to speak as well as the difficulty of others to hear those voices. Next, I analyze the construction of the subject of poverty and its relation to the geographies he/she dwells in, thus giving shape to a new 'bio-geography' of urban misery. Third, using Paul Virilio's body of work as starting point, I propose the existence of poverty's own velocity in direct opposition to hegemonic velocity and, at the same time, interacting dialectically with it. This alternative velocity creates a new time-space that is at the margins of global velocity and simultaneously allows its existence. Lastly, I show the various ways in which this aesthetic of poverty both engages with and is modified by the market. Here, I elaborate the category of an 'allegorical market,' which permits us to observe the functioning of the market not only as a mere economic entity but also as a much broader apparatus.

Finally, I relate this aesthetic to a broader literary and cultural tradition that links literature and politics. I establish connections with the picaresca and especially with the realismo social from the first half of the past century. I left open the question if we are facing a new kind of realism or if it is impossible to talk about a realism.