ABSTRACT
This contribution discusses the literary construction of the precarious in two Chilean novels which focus on people’s vulnerability. Both novels work extensively with the figure of the wound. Hijo de ladrón [Son of a thief] (1951), by Manuel Rojas, and Lumpérica (1983), by Diamela Eltit, were written decades apart and choose different aesthetic and ethical models to approach precarity and vulnerability. In Hijo de ladrón, the narrative of the wound aims at making the reader share the sense of vulnerability via his or her own experience, prefiguring in a certain sense Butler’s concept of precariousness. Lumpérica, on the contrary, sets out to expose the initially unharmed protagonist to vulnerability, staging a ritual self-harming. Lobensteiner sees the creation of a stage in which the wound can be publicly displayed as a form of political commitment and stresses that Lumpérica is a reflection about the role played by literature in figurations of the precarious in the context of the Chilean military dictatorship.
