Barrios1
Belkis Barrios
Statement of Research Interests
My research interests are firmly rooted in the Latin American narrative and cinema of the Twenty First century. They also extend to the larger field of contemporary Latin American literature and are informed by the disciplines of postmodern theory and criticism, literary theory, and transatlantic studies. In my dissertation, "Hispanic Literature and Film of the Twenty-First Century: Diaspora and Disillusion in the latest versions of the Bildungsroman," I explore a pattern in certain works by young Hispanic authors and filmmakers, both from Latin America and Spain. In identifying this trend, I envisioned the need to propose an updated theoretical approach concerning the most recent development of the Bildungsroman genre in Spanish-speaking regions. A good number of artistic expressions produced during the last two decades tell us stories about young characters with an attitude of hopelessness towards their societies and their roles within them, drawing attention to a set of distinctive ways in which this generation perceives itself, the historical moment it is experiencing, and its future. In order to examine this particular condition concerning the postmodern, twenty-first century fictional subject, I study a selection of Latin American and Spanish novels and films that have received little critical attention to date, including the novels El príncipe de los caimanes (2006, Santiago Roncagliolo, Peru), La ciudad feliz (2009, Elvira Navarro, Spain), and Blue Label/Etiqueta azul (2010, Eduardo Sánchez Rugeles, Venezuela). I also explore the films Nadar solo (2003, Ezequiel Acuña, Argentina), Princesas (2005, Fernando León de Aranoa, Spain), and El pejesapo (2007, José Luis Sepúlveda, Chile).
In a classical sense, the Bildungsroman or novel of development is a model rooted in a nineteenth-century European literary tradition, informed by Romantic and Enlightenment though. It is thus a genre that takes as its basic plot line the self-education and self-realization of the protagonists, who are often depicted as dissatisfied, young individualswho undertake a journey in quest of personal growth, maturity, and integration to their respective societies, which they manage to attain in the end. When the aesthetic traits of the classic Bildungsroman genre are combined with those of the postmodern "coming of age" fictions written in our era, a new and very different genre inevitably emerges, one where the protagonists rarely accomplish integration. I argue that this is because there is a major shift in the postmodern period that puts into question issues of self-formation, knowledge, consciousness, and the possibility to reach full maturity. Postmodern fictions tend to focus on the notion of chaos, and point to a profound doubt about the possibility to capture reality. Authors and filmmakers suggest in their works that even they, themselves, are not able to apprehend or comprehend the world that they attempt to represent. The new genre that I propose, an "updated" Bildungsroman informed by postmodern view, urges us to think of questions such as: how could literary characters in Hispanic Twenty-First century narrative and cinema attain self-knowledge and integration if they have great difficulty making sense of their world? How do they experience the world? Is there a road that would lead them (and their artistic creators) to restore the possibility to narrate experience? How does the literary critic reconcile the generalized sense of disappointment in these narratives with the act of faith expressed by continuing to live and struggle, to write and create?
I beganto shape my research on these topics as I was awarded the SSHRC-Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council M.A. Scholarship, for 2010-2011. Back then, I had the opportunity to share part of my research in 2011 at the 4th Latin America Research Group Workshop, University of Victoria, where I presented a paper titled “La ‘decadencia’ venezolana desde la estética postmoderna de Transilvania Unplugged, de Eduardo Sánchez Rugeles,” a Venezuelan author who lives and writes in Spain. In 2014, as a doctoral student at Vanderbilt University, I was awarded the Miguel Enguídanos Graduate Student Award for Excellence in Research by the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, for my essay titled "Continuities and ruptures in Latin American Modernism and Postmodernism". In this paper, I argue that many young characters represented in Twenty-First century works show a certain kind of heroism (including the desire to continue to write and narrate their world) in the face of all negative aspects of postmodern life. This point of view providesinteresting connections with the optimistic side of Latin American modernism, a movement whose poets and writers envisioned restoration and hope through language and artistic creation.
Modernism and literary postmodernity are also connected through their shared concerns about the balance between the national and the global, and between the local and the universal. These tensions have had a long-term historical impact in the sociocultural and aesthetic realms during the two centuries following the Independence wars in Latin America.In the Twenty-First century, however, the forces of globalization that hide behind a certain language of nationalism affect everything from economics to literature, undermining efforts toward stability and unity. Currently I am working on an article in which I explore to what degree contemporary authors and filmmakers seek to reveal these hidden forces, the harm that they might do, and to what degree they hope to resurrect the national dreams of the nineteenth century. What is the relationship between these dreams of national unity and the hopes for personal salvation—whether it is tied to physical safety and security, financial stability, intellectual awakening, or artistic success?One of the key effects of globalization is the "transnationalization" of cultural productions, and the subsequent erasure of distinctive traits pertaining to the local and the national. In comparing recent works produced in Latin America and Spain,I focus on pressing questions such as: is the fictional experience of the Latin American diaspora much different from that of other migrating groups in the twenty-first century? Does a literary hero necessarily have to be a migrating subject in order to feel uprooted, or can he feel displaced in his very own place of origin?
All in all, my research systematizes a comparative approach across literary periods and across national / territorial boundaries. The connectionsamongrecent works allow me to reflect on the development of the Bildungsroman in this day and age, not only in terms of what it might be revealing about the ways in which this generation views their society and its role within it, but also in what it is telling us about the state of literature and film as art in a globalized, commodified world. Are Twenty-First century characters and authors merely passive, pessimistic witnesses of an irreversible socio-cultural decay or do they still see themselves, and literature /cinema as transformative agents even within their apparently limited action scopes? Is the hero’s apparent impossibility of integration a formal strategy pointing to the impossibility of literary fiction to effectively represent identity quests in a globalized world, where the neoliberal market seems to be the ultimate discursive form?
My research offers an important contribution to the existing body of work on emergent Hispanic literature, film and diaspora. Not only does my analysis of these works shed light, in an ample sense, on the current social realities and still unresolved individual concerns of migrating subjects in the globalized world—in which I must include myself, being a Venezuelan who moved to Canada, and later to the United States—but it also suggests new possible agendas for research and literary criticism. In this sense, I envision significant changes in the ways these new characters, beyond the acknowledgement of their disintegrated identities, attempt to reformulate their particular vision of their nations, as well as a different way to question their sense of belonging to their respective places of origin, not only from a territorial point of view, but also from an active and productive redemption of their historical and cultural traditions.
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