Role: Lecturer in Hispanic Studies
School: Literature and Languages
Department: Languages and Culture
Theme: Literature and Film
Expertise: My research centres on the politics of fiction, with especial attention to the political status of women. My approach acknowledges a dynamic dialogue between fiction, ideology, and a certain social imaginary, and it incorporates historical, political, and cultural perspectives. I am interested in an analysis of fiction that recognises its socio-historical connections but is also centred on a close reading of form (narrative and film).
About me: On literature, I’m currently working on a monograph that examines the more recent narrative fiction of the Chilean writer Diamela Eltit (1949-), which offers a socio-political reading of the literary strategies that her work employs to dialogue with the Chilean post-transition context. Considering symbolically the start of the new millennium as a decisive time when the dictatorship’s politico-cultural neoliberal project is validated by the Chilean democratic forces, Eltit’s literature published around this period does not only carry the historical and political legacy of the dictatorship, but re-builds it upon the grounds of a social imaginary permeated by a neoliberal cultural project imposed by the dictatorship and reaffirmed by the Chilean democracy. On film, I’m developing the project ‘Women, Film and Sororidad: A Reading of the Socio-Political Relationship between Women in Latin America’, which examines the politics of film through a study of representations of the ethical, political, and practical relationship between women in Latin American fiction film. The project has an interdisciplinary approach that combines perspectives from political philosophy, gender studies, and Latin American cultural and film studies. Some of my published work include: Literature and Society in the Chilean Post-Transition. The Politics of Diamela Eltit’s Narrative Form. Routledge Studies in Latin American and Iberian Literatures, forthcoming 2025. ‘A Failed Link between Chilean Workers’ Subversive Past and Submissive Present in Diamela Eltit’s Mano de obra’. Latin American Research Review, 56:3, 2021, pp. 655-667 doi.org/10.25222/larr.1090 ‘A Play Between Fiction and Non-Fiction: Retelling a Story on Exile and Disappearance in Missing (una investigación) by Alberto Fuguet’. Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, 98.2, 2021, pp. 195-212 doi.org/10.3828/bhs.2021.12
Weblink: https://www.reading.ac.uk/languages-cultures/staff/denisse-lazo-gonzalez
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