I, cinematic: Cecilia Szperling and her childhood vignettes

Abstract

Taking a feminist look at Argentine literature implies retracing a path built on a dynamic of readings and re-appropriations, of deviated citations, of silences and some oversights. It is already a fact that feminism has occupied a leading role in a present where literature and women writers occupy the streets and public spaces. In this scenario, emerges this text with a tendency to miniaturization. It serves the purpose of asking once again who writes the canon, understood as selective and hierarchy-making system. Cecilia Szperling’s "autobiographical fable", La máquina de proyectar sueños (2006), is a breviary of childhood vignettes, rooted in a tradition including several examples, but mainly Norah Lange’s Cuadernos de infancia (1937). This analysis concentrates on two elements: on the one hand, the construction of a counter-canonical “library” from which other minority voices are legitimized (women and feminized subjects, children); on the other, the use of audiovisual devices as an inseparable element for the construction of both individual and collective memory.