Laura Maldonado

Laura Maldonado holds a BA in Literary Studies from Pontificia Universidad Javeriana (Bogota, Colombia) with emphasis in creative writing; and an MA in English studies from Friedrich-Alexander-Universität (Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany) with emphasis in literature and culture. She has publications as a writer and as an academic editor. Her research interests include all literature covered by the umbrella term of the weird (narrativas de lo insólito), speculative fiction, narrative complexity, and Latin American literature of the 20th and 21st centuries.

Working title: The Eerie and the Supernatural: A Nexus for Family Dynamics in Latin American Fiction

The dissertation explores family dynamics in Latin American literature that are configured and portrayed through the lens of supernatural, magical, eerie, or uncanny events. It explores four main novels: “La casa de los espíritus” (1982) by Isabel Allende, “La casa junto al río” (1983) by Elena Garro, “Distancia de rescate” (2014) by Samanta Schweblin, and “Nuestra parte de noche” (2019) by Mariana Enríquez. This project aims to understand how Latin American literature uses magical or supernatural events to reveal structures of fear, inequality, violence, or trauma in family settings, thus configuring families as structures of danger and contention but also of protection and responsibility. In these narratives everything has multiple meanings: ghosts serve as reminders of unresolved trauma but are also protective and accompanying figures, family legacies are a source of danger but also an important and steady source for security, families are places of horror but also places of guardianship. Nevertheless, neither the novels nor the family dynamics presented in them limit themselves to exclusionary binaries. On the contrary, the novels break all possible dualisms in favor of a richer, more nuanced, and pluralistic expression of what it means to be part of a family.