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Mass Media, “Realismo Villero” And “El Sueño Argentino”: The Return To Literature In Gabriela Cabezón Cámara’S La Virgen Cabeza (2009), Stephen Buttes

Stephen M Buttes

This paper begins by developing the concept of "de-fictionalization," which the Argentine author Roberto Arlt develops in his newspaper columns about the Paraná Delta region of Argentina. Bringing this concept to bear on Gabriela Cabezón Cámara's recent novel La virgen cabeza, which narrates the story of contemporary Delta residents living in a villa miseria or shantytown near San Isidro, I suggest that the notion of de-fictionalization is crucial to the primary critical reception of the novel, which has highlighted an interest in biopolitics. These biopolitical approaches tend to foreground what they understand as the novel's postmodernist techniques such as pastiche, …