Performative reflexive realism in the contemporary Latin American novel: female authorship beyond “A room of one’s own”

Abstract

Based on the novels Temporada de huracanaes (2017), by Mexican writer Fernanda Melchor and Enterre seus mortos (2018), by Ana Paula Maia, this article intended to reflect on the incidence and the connotations assumed by the performative reflexive realism — denominated by Ravetti (2019) as “Bolaño paradigm” — in the Latin American contemporary novels of female authorship. In the narratives of Melchor and Maia, the hyperbolic violence and the overlapping/serialization of brutalities point to a melancholy of the future of anti-epic dimensions, features that are repeatedly present in the Latin American contemporary novels. Oriented to the cited tendency, the novels of both the Mexican and the Brazilian writer reveal critical perspectives that are built from themes and approaches distanced not only from “A room of one’s own” (Woolf, 2014) and from the easiness of a codified realism, but also from didactic pretensions. Reflecting upon the authorship choices that are responsible for such deslocations, as well as about the possibility that the referred strategies can add another shade to the recent novelistic manifestations are among the matters approached in this text.