Recorrido literario por el Chile escindido: Aislamiento, segregación y miedo al Otro en la más reciente narrativa nacional (1965–2015)

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to analyze how the physical, economic, cultural and geosocial distance between citizens causes the emergence of internal borders in a deeply hierarchical society such as Chile, evidencing a series of factors that influence the course taken by the national narrative in the period between 1965 and 2015; among them: a) the dynamics of expansion and population growth that have interested the great Chilean cities in the last century; b) the continuous “encounter of differences” and “confrontations between diversities” that has characterized throughout the 20th century the functioning of the social structure in the large cities of the country; c) the diachronic evolution of the literary models of representation of these social dynamics of “challenge to otherness and the changes in the representation of the dynamics of “urban mixophobia”. To analyze those three aspects (literary representation of social interaction’s mechanisms; forms of separation between the alleged “normalized society” and the Other; changes in the fictional description of the imposition of an order to the “chaos of differences”), we will focus on writers who have reflected on this distance and perceived otherness as a potential danger: José Donoso, Jorge Edwards, Diego Muñoz Valenzuela and Andrea Jeftanovic.