Baroque Fictions or Metafictions? Coincidences and Boundaries Between Concepts to Think About Latin American Narratives

Abstract

Linked to the Spanish Golden Age, to the Hispanic tradition and the America’s colonization, baroque was a solid conceptual category to analyze artistic and literary practices by the end of the 20^th Century. More recently, Carlos Gamerro tries to create a distinction between a baroque writing and what he calls “baroque fictions”: the former responds to some characteristics on the phrasal level, and the latter refers to narrative structures. However, this link between fictional and referential levels, the construction of mirrored levels, and the tensions between sing and reference or art and life are features related to another conceptual category well known in the 80’s and 90’s and that seems to have entered today into the literary theory vocabulary: metafiction. It is a concept related to modern literature and procedures that exhibit or reveal the artificial nature of literary fictions, to question what we consider real or fictive. This article explores how is the tension between these two categories, how relevant they are today in literary studies and what critical distance can we stablish in front of them in our contemporary literary and critical context.