This dissertation focuses on the uses of photography and images in the literary works of Eduardo Lalo, Edgardo Rodríguez Juliá, Juan Luis Martínez and Diego Maquieira. Its main goal is to understand why contemporary authors strive to incorporate different forms of the visual into linguistic texts. I argue that in a world full of crisis and ruins (in the material and political realm, in language, in meaning), the image becomes a fruitful means of exploring aesthetic and conceptual problems that lead the viewer into new sensible experiences. My analysis gravitates around three main theoretical points: the role that is given to the spectator (Rancière); the technique of montage as a means of reaching a visual logic (Benjamin); and how this visual logic helps the viewer get immersed into a “syntax of feeling” (Nancy).
In the Introduction, I trace some precursors to the “differential” use of the image (Wagner) and through a theoretical discussion lay out the main concepts that will be developed in the following chapters.
In Chapter One, I trace the construction and evolution of Eduardo Lalo’s way of looking at and speaking about the city of San Juan through Rancière’s notion of the expansion of the distribution of the sensible. I later contrast that with Rodríguez Juliá’s use of the visual to show how the first author attempts to disarticulate and liberate the experience of the spectator, while the second one inadvertently dictates his viewing experience.
In Chapter Two, I explore how Benjamin’s posthumous Arcades Project establishes a dialogue with the work of Chilean poets Juan Luis Martínez and Diego Maquieira. By way of the montage (in textual quotes in the first and through intervened images in the latter), these poets destroy and later rebuild a sensorium from the scraps of culture, particularly through the “pensiveness of the image” (Rancière), that is, the effective intersection of one mediums logic within the other.
The insertion of photographs and images into texts thus create a space that is not exclusively dependent on the linguistic regime, but that leads to other, new ways of making sense of the present
