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Chapter 20 - The Formal Turn in Latinx Literature and Criticism

from Part IV - Theoretical Turns

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 June 2025

William Orchard
Affiliation:
Queens College, CUNY
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Summary

This chapter traces the recent turn to form in Latinx literary studies. While the field has long privileged the historical in shaping debates and organizing Latinx cultural production, there is a growing group of scholars taking the formal as their point of departure by studying components that range from genre to word choice, from page layout to punctuation. Concerned less with the who, what, and where of literary texts, this new approach focuses more on how. That is, how our privileged objects of study – race and racism, community and coalition, gender and sexuality – are represented on and off the page. Linking these recent approaches to a longer tradition of queer Latinx performance studies, a branch of scholarship long attuned to the importance of gesture, corporality, and affect, this chapter models formal analysis by taking works by Carmen María Machado and Justin Torres as representative case studies.

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2025

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References

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