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Perifrasis. Rev. Lit. Teor. Crit. | eISSN 2145-9045 | ISSN 2145-8987

Strata and Narration: Contemporary Narrative Laboratories. On La compañía by Verónica Gerber Bicecci

No. 34 (2025-01-06)
  • Gabriel Giorgi
    New York University, Estados Unidos / Conicet, Argentina
https://doi.org/10.25025/perifrasis202516.34.06

Abstract

Many of the formal experimentations of contemporary Latin American narrative have
a common feature: the need to accommodate non-human agents and temporalities in the ways in which historical experience is configured. This is an aesthetic response to
an epoch —called the Anthropocene or Capitalocene— marked by the environmental
crisis and by planetary imaginaries in which the measure of the Human is challenged by non-anthropocentric perspectives and scales. Verónica Gerber Bicecci’s La compañía (2019) offers an formal and narrative laboratory for analyzing this transformation of our sensibility, fundamentally played out around the notion of “strata” and its challenge to stabilized narrative frameworks. The notion of strata makes it possible to challenge closed
narratives while situating juxtaposed temporalities that challenge anthropocentric
models of time.

Keywords: temporalities , posthumanism , strata , extractivism, Latin America , narration, Antropoceno, contemporary literature

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