Historias de locuras en la literatura chilena del siglo XIX, o la modernidad y sus vicisitudes

• Main Author: Andrea Kottow
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Centre de Recherches sur les Mondes Américains 2014-06-01
• Series: Nuevo mundo - Mundos Nuevos
• Subjects: Madness; Chilean Literature; Modernity; Modernization
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/nuevomundo/66914

This article explores the figure of madness as it appears in a corpus of literary texts written in 19th century Chile: Mariluán by A. Blest Gana, Diario de una loca, by J.V. Lastarria, Juana Lucero by Augusto D’Halmar, El loco Estero, by A. Blest Gana. The image of unreason as resistance, discontent and/or uneasiness enmeshed in modern ideology will be explored. Proposing an epistemological and ideological overlap in literature understood as writing and political practices in the illustrated visions of 19th century Chile, madness as a model of dissidence will be studied, questioning the project of modernization, signifying madness as an ungovernable residue of the rationality pursued by the national organism. The bodies of mad protagonists of the literary works analysed, crack the national body, thus putting to question the republican ideology and requiring a revision of the problematic installation of modernity.