Filiations and literary footprints in three contemporary novels: El pinar de Segismundo, Oscurana, and Memorias de Andrés Chiliquinga

Abstract

This essay analyzes three contemporary Ecuadorian novels –El pinar de Segismundo (2008), by Eliécer Cárdenas, Oscurana (2011), by Luis Carlos Mussó, Memorias de Andrés Chiliquinga (2013), by Carlos Arcos–, in the effort to recognize in them a lucid and ludic dialogue with its own tradition. These novels are built within a network of relationships and references to other texts, where literature becomes a source and archive of new writings. This archive is subjected to multiple mechanisms of appropriation and reminiscence, in a game of allusions and quotations that produce a writing of broad intertextual resonances. The selected corpus shows not only a kind of rewriting of tradition, but also proposes a work with memory: it transports to the contemporary scene footprints of a literary past, from an explicit affective filiation.