Piggish, angry and obscene: representations of the abject body in Latin American Literature of the ’90s

Abstract

This paper will analyze the representations of the body of the "Latin American" in two significant texts of Latin American literature of the twentieth century’s last decade: El asco. Thomas Bernhard en San Salvador (1997), by Horacio Castellanos Moya, and El Rey de la Habana (1999), by Pedro Juan Gutierrez. In no way this essay proposes a textual analysis of literature: these books will serve to find new corporality representations in the social world of globalized neoliberal era. Literature will enable to discover new concepcions of the body, new identities and subjectivities, a new imagery of a Latin American body represented as the one of an animal. We will folllow the paths of this bodys through their territories to finally find this abject body of literature in all the art of the period, relate the obscenity and violence of these bodies with the one that televisión promotes and finally see the strong political implications of this kind of literature that refuses to be described as a political one.