Estados Unidos
A reading of Ariel Dorfman’s “Death and the Maiden,” Horacio Castellanos Moya’s Senselessness, and Rodrigo Rey Rosa’s El material humano in the context of the contemporary Latin American literature of human rights. It is argued that these texts do not directly respond to certain typologies proposed outside the field of Latin American studies, and that an appropriate method to delve into the relation between fiction and the discourse of human rights is to analyze texts that “quote” the reports of the commissions of truth and reconciliation. This method has the added advantage of locating the human righst issues and their literary representation in a concrete historical framework.