Palabras prestadas: casos de escritura conceptual en América Latina

Abstract

At the beginning of the 2000s, in the United States, the idea of a «conceptual writing» began to be theorized, leading to a non-expressive literature, based on the intellectual rather than the emotional which places the concept of authorship off the center of the writing phenomenon. One of its main strategies is the appropriation and manipulation of other texts, which sets the original writing apart and exceeds any idea of copy, with the intention of reactivating and magnifying the source, thus expanding the definition of what literature entails.
Almost simultaneously, experiments of this kind appear in various Latin American countries, not necessarily in dialogue with them but using similar tactics.
This work is a first attempt to draw a map of what has been produced in this sense in Latin America, although it does not attempt an exhaustive panorama. After a brief examination of the origins of the movement, we proceed to an analysis of what can be seen as the first literary cases in the continent, and then –given the vastness of the material– we briefly examine books published in the last 20 years which fit in the framework of conceptual writing, sometimes even despite the intentions of their authors.