Alejandro Zambra’s multiple choices: comparative readings

Abstract

The article discusses the issue of the nonspecificity of the current narrative in the study of Múltipla escolha (2017), by Alejandro Zambra, reading it comparatively to some previous texts by the author and in dialogue with a text by Oswald de Andrade, from the Brazilian modernist tradition. The main theoretical framework starts with the dialogues developed by Florencia Garramuño – expanded art, (in)specificity of the literary and escape from the places of belonging – and Josefina Ludmer, and her theories on the concept of post-autonomous literature, to advance in reflections on Zambra’s hybrid writing. Balancing literary reading and theory, we will draw an overview of Zambra’s prose in a dialogical perspective with the modernist ideology. At the end of the article, we propose to understand Zambra’s prose within a poetics that reinvents and problematizes tradition, thus dialoguing with modern assumptions that, in a comparative example, we take to a work of Oswald de Andrade, a possible interlocutor.