Margarita Saona (Ph.D. Columbia University)
Assistant Professor of Spanish
(312) 996-5222
saona@uic.edu
Courses
Click here for CV.


My main interest is contemporary Latin American literature, especially the narrative from the second half of the twentieth century to the present.

I am currently completing a book on national identity in Latin American novels from the second half of the twentieth century. My study investigates the formulation of the categories of family and nation in authors such as Carmen Boullosa, Julio Cortázar, Gabriel García Márquez, and Cristina Peri Rossi. Contemporary Latin American fiction, in my view, moves from the creation of nationhood based on the family to the complex attempts to liberate newly created subjects, without the subordination of hierarchy or historical past implicit in family and nation.

In the course of my latest research I have encountered some intriguing questions about the ways Latin American women writers
formulate utopia (or dystopia) at the end of the millennium. The most recent works I am including in my current project are
reformulating (or abandoning altogether) the notions of family and nation, and in my next book I plan to explore contemporary texts that are dealing with new social constructions. The problematization of the boundaries between self and others would, according to some theories on feminist utopias, allow women to create new visions of the perfect society. My new project contends that new novels by Latin American authors challenge established gender roles, without the essentialism that equates utopia with the maternal body frequent among feminist utopias.

These research topics are reflected in my teaching, from introductory classes in Latin American Women Writers to Graduate Seminars on the Question of Gender and Genre in Latin America.