Occupy Literature. Writing from the Fourth World

Abstract

My article analyzes the literary geopolitics of El cuarto mundo (1988), the third novel by Chilean writer Diamela Eltit. I approach the various operations that Eltit carries out –from the radicalization of disease to the transformation of the sick and monstrous body– as counter-offensives that reconcile the poles of the aesthetic-political vector. I read El cuarto mundo as a turn in Eltit’s poetics, one situated in a regional discussion that questions the role of literature and its politicity by going beyond allegory and the figuration of Chile as an aesthetic-political sign. I examine Eltit’s careful reading of the new global order and her understanding of literary authorship as an infirmity in the face of the ruling class’s abandonment of literary pursuits in recent decades.