REPOSITORIES OF MEMORY AND LITERARY WRITING: DIARIES, MEMOIRS, BIOGRAPHIES, AUTOBIOGRAPHIES, AND PERIODICAL PUBLICATIONS
This symposium proposes to read diaries, memoirs, journals, and autobiographies by Spanish American writers not only as records of a life, but as the workshop where that life is thought through and literarily experienced before becoming a work, understanding autobiographical writing not as a minor or documentary genre, but as a laboratory where procedures, voices, and ideas are tested that later migrate into works of fiction, poetry, or essay. We are interested in observing how these texts — published in books, chapbooks, weeklies, or magazines — engage in dialogue with the creative writing of their own authors, and how each region of Spanish America has given a different shape to this exercise: from the intimate diary to the memoir of violence, displacement, or exile. We are likewise interested in the way in which, from the perspective of writings of the self, Spanish America can be read not as a homogeneous bloc, but as a territory of tensions and regional particularities. To this is added the work of critics and biographers whose role as architects of memory is important through their work with these archives and scattered materials, since they thereby construct the other part of literary memory: the part born of the study and writing about this type of literature.
