The unseeing witness: contemporary detective fiction in Central America
- Autores: Rodrigo Fuentes
- Localización: Chasqui: revista de literatura latinoamericana, ISSN 0145-8973, Vol. 47, Nº. 1, 2018, págs. 100-113
- Idioma: inglés
- Texto completo no disponible (Saber más ...)
-
Resumen
Contemporary fictional production in Central America finds itself at the crossroads of testimonio and the detective novel. The works of Horacio Castellanos Moya, Rodrigo Rey Rosa, and Rafael Menjivar Ochoa are emblematic of this current state of literary affairs. Each of these authors plays with the rhetorical strategies present in the testimonial form while simultaneously employing the narrative conventions which characterize detective fiction. The three novels analyzed here adopt and adapt such conventions in order to effectively challenge problematic assumptions of testimonio. The manner in which they achieve this is twofold. First, they do so by playing with the relationship between witnesses offering their accounts and the communities they allegedly speak for, a central aspect of testimonial narratives. Secondly, they reveal a morally complex, less pristine notion of the witness, and explore the processes that lend legitimacy and authority to their particular discursive practices.
