Revista Letral

This special issue, edited by Sofía Forchieri and Eva Van Hoey, brings together a collection of essays that reassert the value of formal analysis as a privileged approach for understanding the work of contemporary Latin American women writers. Challenging diagnoses that characterize contemporary artistic production as defined by immediacy, didacticism, or aesthetic homogenization, the editors draw attention to formal practices that, from within situated contexts, explore alternative ways of engaging with the world. The contributions share the premise that formal experimentation with genre, language, and medium is not a sphere separate from politics but rather constitutes a space in which new ways of perceiving, imagining, and interpreting contemporary experience are forged.

The eight essays included in this special issue examine, from diverse critical perspectives, the intersections of aesthetics, ethics, and politics in the work of recent Latin American women writers. Through analyses of narrative techniques, formal structures, paratextual strategies, and generic configurations, they address issues such as the representation of violence, feminisms, literary tradition, the international circulation of texts, and aesthetic genealogies among women writers. Taken together, the contributions advocate a renewed formalism that understands form as inseparable from both content and historical context, highlighting literature’s capacity to challenge dominant interpretive frameworks and to open up new possibilities for knowledge. By placing the writers’ aesthetic practices at the center of critical debate and highlighting their potential to transform our ways of reading and understanding the present, the special issue makes a significant contribution both to studies of contemporary Latin American literature and to feminist criticism.