APPELLATIVE FORMS AND FRAGMENTATION OF THE SELF IN HISPANIC AMERICAN AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL WRITING

Abstract

This article examines how textual, paratextual, and editorial arrangements guide autobiographical readings of twentieth- and twenty-first-century Hispanic American works. It aims to describe the operations connecting authorship attribution with a presence distributed across voices, materials, and moments of reading. It offers a comparative reflection on works by Roberto Arlt, Felisberto Hernández, Julio Torri, Reinaldo Arenas, Roberto Bolaño, and Cristina Rivera Garza, in dialogue with scholarship on life writing and reception theory. The analysis distinguishes signatures and publication media, literary and editorial assemblage, dates, shifts in authorship, and documentary assemblage. The comparison suggests that these arrangements guide attribution and retrospective interpretation without guaranteeing identity between author, narrator, and character. Fragmentation of the self is understood as a historical and textual distribution whose interpretation depends on editorial mediation and possibilities of reading.