What is Anti-Literature?

Abstract

Anti-Literature by Adam Shellhorse offers a “broad-based discussion” on literature of modern Argentina and Brazil, taking into consideration the historical, cultural, political and social processes in Latin America and their influence on the creative processes of experimental texts (4). By examining how texts engage with the European colonial legacy and with their own conditions of production, expressing “original life-words of its autochthonous peoples” (5), the author proposes new approaches to what he describes as an anti-literature, i.e., the “multidisciplinary, minoritarian, and multimedial ‘body’ of writing that produces and affects (…) new modes of perception” (7). These new modes of perception, which create a new perspective for literary studies, evolve side-by-side with “urgent debates in Latin America studies and literary and filmic production: sub-alternity, feminine writing, post-hegemony, concretism, affect, experimental poetics, marranismo, and the politics of aesthetics” (8).