Unbecoming Nadie: Feminism and the Epistolary Form in María Lourdes Pallais’s Novel La carta (1996)

• Greg C. Severyn ^[1]
  1. [1] Susquehanna University

     Susquehanna University

     Borough of Selinsgrove, Estados Unidos

     
• Localización: A Contracorriente: Revista de Historia Social y Literatura en América Latina, ISSN-e 1548-7083, Vol. 18, Nº. 2, 2021 (Ejemplar dedicado a: Winter 2021), págs. 152-172
• Idioma: inglés
• Enlaces
  • Texto completo
• Resumen

  • The “post-war” period of the 1990s in Central America has been marked by disenchantment and re-appropriation of the testimonial form. In this article, I argue that María Lourdes Pallais’s novel La carta (1996) combines these narrative tendencies in order to criticize the Nicaraguan Sandinista revolutionary project while advancing an autonomous feminist ideology, a reading that is sustained by the work’s epistolary form. Through the analysis of the letter-writing genre, we thus gain access to an interpretation of the novel that reframes the protagonist, Claudette, as a voice that questions authority, knowledge, and manipulation as discursive tactics that maintain society’s hegemonic status quo rather than as a victim of patriarchal politics