Nuevos Horizontes Memorísticos En La Literatura Infantil Y Juvenil Contemporánea. [New Memory Horizons In Contemporary Children’s And Young Adult Literature] ed. by Laura Guerrero Guadarrama, Cutzi L. M. Quezada and Alejandro Vergil Salgado (review)

Reviewed by: Nuevos Horizontes Memorísticos En La Literatura Infantil Y Juvenil Contemporánea. [New Memory Horizons In Contemporary Children’s And Young Adult Literature] ed. by Laura Guerrero Guadarrama, Cutzi L. M. Quezada and Alejandro Vergil Salgado Angela Patricia Melo Arévalo NUEVOS HORIZONTES MEMORÍSTICOS EN LA LITERATURA INFANTIL Y JUVENIL CONTEMPORÁNEA. [NEW MEMORY HORIZONS IN CONTEMPORARY CHILDREN’S AND YOUNG ADULT LITERATURE] Edited by Laura Guerrero Guadarrama, Cutzi L. M. Quezada, and Alejandro Vergil Salgado. Series: Colección Hermes. Textofilia, 2022, 202 pages. ISBN: 978-607-8713-99-8 The production of children’s literature in Latin America has had prominent development in the last decades. Within this landscape, a body of works exploring historical, cultural, and personal memory has gained considerable attention. The current volume offers a critical revision of children’s and YA literature mostly from Latin America and Spain addressing memoirs and forms of memory. The publication of this book was supported by the Mexican Sectoral Fund for Research in Education and the National Council of Science and Technology (SEP-CONACYT 2018). The collection’s theme delves into the notion of neo-subversion in children’s literature, a term coined by Laura Guerrero Guadarrama, the book’s co-editor, and defined in the introduction to this volume as “the destabilizing and questioning turn of the paradigms that have been created about childhood and youth, as well as about their literature” (8). In her classification of neo-subversive literature, Guerrero introduces the modality of the “recovery of memory,” which disrupts the idea of official history and the notion of the narrator as a privileged figure by allowing anyone to take over the narrator’s voice. In this context, the volume holds seven individual essays that provide critical reflections on the topic of memory from diverse theoretical perspectives, ranging from classical sources, such as Aristotle or St. Augustine, to more contemporary theorists from various disciplines, including cultural studies, philosophy, and sociology. This collection not only brings together experienced researchers with emerging scholars, but their contributions also address a wide range of objects of study such as picturebooks, graphic novels, children’s theater, and oral narratives, among others. In the first essay, Gloria María Prado Garduño engages in a hermeneutic analysis of the YA novel 3934 Kilómetros, an immigrant’s autobiographical fiction written by the Mexican author Juan Carlos Quezadas. Prado’s chapter is guided by Paul Ricoeur’s ideas about memory, particularly its relationship with fiction, and imagination. Her analysis underscores the articulation of multiple temporal and narrative planes as well as the role of typography to differentiate forms of memory presented in the novel. Following the theme of this volume, Evelyn Arizpe and Valentina Rivera explore four Latin American picturebooks that reflect dictatorships and post-dictatorship contexts. Through their visual and textual analysis, the authors highlight the ideological and radical component [End Page 67] of children’s literature while exploring the configuration of cultural memory and the diverse ways of remembering experiences. Similarly, Celia Vázquez García’s study focuses on children’s literature about the Spanish Civil War from the viewpoint of the debate surrounding the representation of the past. In contrast, José Manuel de Amo Sánchez-Fortún and Raquel Fernández Cobo examine the graphic novel adaptation of La Ciudad Ausente by Ricardo Piglia. Their study takes up Linda Hutcheon’s and Gunther Kress’s perspectives to discuss how the graphic novel remediates the self-referential and self-conscious complexity of Piglia’s work. The essay outlines the pedagogical potential of this novel and vindicates multi-modal aesthetic manifestations in the space of the literary canon. While Gloria Ignacia Vergara’s chapter addresses mechanisms of imagination and memory in the stories of youth by older adults, Nadxeli Yrízar Carrillo’s essay discusses Pacamambo, a play for children about death by Lebanese Canadian playwright Wajdi Mouawad. For Yrízar, Mouawad’s proposal suggests that “we can decide the way we narrate the world in order to face its tragic destiny and that children are capable of experiencing it differently from adults” (150). Through her analysis, she sustains that Pacamambo constitutes an open space for children to...

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