The Morphology of Disease: Body and Illness in the Latin American Literatura Over the last Decades

Abstract

This article aims to make a brief overview of the transformations that the metaphor disease has undergone in the recent Latin American literature. We will explain the different allegorical implications that the disease embodies in Latin American literature during different historical stages. In the first years of the dictatorship, the disease constantly refers to the stigmatized conditions of social minorities. Throughout the democratic transition, the diseased body gains a more subversive connotation and a deterritorializing expansion that goes beyond the biopolitical control. In some novels during the last years of the 21st century, the disease achieves a kind of a transcendence that goes beyond ideological disputes and serves as a common denominator of being, highlighting the trend in the literary field towards the return of humanity.