Early Career Fellow in Research Area 1: "Competing Communities"

May 2022 – April 2023

Knowing and Making: The Critical Writings of Poets in Latin American Neo-Baroque

This project aims to analyse the figure of the poet-critic in Latin American Neo-Baroque writers who have produced, along with their literary work, a sustained critical activity in books, essays, prologues and reviews, during the past decades. The critical writings of poets, signed by multiple tensions between their own poetics and the literature they choose to discuss, reveal the genealogies, disputes and temporal entanglements that traverse the fields of poetry and criticism.

The approach for this project is both historical and theoretical, centred on the debates around language, form and tradition in the critical works of Latin American Neo-Baroque poets. In “The Baroque and the Neo-Baroque” (1972), Cuban writer Severo Sarduy defines neo-baroque poetry through its work with signifiers: elision, surface, the phonic aspect of language, associative games, alliteration and parody. As a writing community, the Neo-Baroque eludes the categories of nation and period. With Lezama Lima and Sarduy in Cuba, Milán and Echavarren in Uruguay, de Campos in Brazil, Perlonguer and Carrera in Argentina, to mention just a few, the Neo-Baroque spread through Latin America across several decades, interacting with the existing traditions, national literatures and cultures. As poet-critic Arturo Carrera states: “the Neo-Baroque was not a movement, it was a nomination. It was not founded. […] Rather, there was a fleeting dispersion, an imprint that still resists all fixity.” (2007)

In Latin American Neo-Baroque, it was the poets themselves that developed concepts, reading protocols and methodological tools to address the kind of poetic language they were creating. Through the figure of the poet-critic, this project highlights the complex links between literature, theory and criticism.

Ana Rocío Jouli (1991, Santa Rosa) is an Argentinean writer and researcher. She holds a Master’s degree in Creative Writing from the National University of Tres de Febrero, and a PhD in Literature from the National University of La Plata. Her project at the Cluster expands from her doctoral thesis "Genealogy and Images of the Self in the Critical Writings of Contemporary Argentinean Poets”.

Author of the poetry collections Los pacientes (La Bola, 2017), Constelaciones (Erizo, 2016), Tarde (La Bola, 2015), Los viajes (NIEVE, 2015) and Baúles, puentes y jardines (Morosophos, 2011), her work has been included in numerous anthologies such as Literatura del más acá (2021, Ediciones Bonaerenses), Poesía al alcance de la mano (Ministerio de Educación GCBA, 2020), Poesía (La Comuna, 2019), Rumiar (Rumiar Buenos Aires, 2018), Australes & Peligrosas (Cohuiná Cartonera, México, 2018), Jardín 16 (Minibús Ediciones, 2016), and Pablo Neruda National Poetry Contest (Editorial UNC, 2016).

She has conducted research stays at CLAS Center for Latin American Studies (2019, University of Copenhagen, Denmark), Bergische Universität Wuppertal (2018, Germany), McGill University (2017, Montreal, Canada) and IDEA Institute for Advanced Research (2016, Santiago de Chile).