Romina Wainberg, a Klarman Fellow in Romance studies in the College of Arts and Sciences (A&S), is writing a book that explores how early Latin American novelists depicted the act of writing in their fiction, with a particular focus on fictional representations of the writing process. Among these, Wainberg zooms in on examples of what she calls “unproductive writing,” acts of writing in defiance of societies which tout a narrative of productivity and progress.

Credit: Chris Kitchen

“In the novels I examine, the protagonists – clerks, homemakers, enslaved peoples, former Indigenous leaders – use writing as a means to refuse productivity,” Wainberg said. “They pen in lieu of work – sometimes, to explicitly avoid working – and in defiance of social mandates that discourage them to write on the basis of their race, ethnicity, class and/or gender.”

Wainberg’s book project, “Against Productivity: Unproductive Writing in Early Latin American Fiction,” counters the dominant scholarly narrative which says that Latin American novels widely promoted and contributed to an era of production of national economies, national languages, national cultures and national literatures.

In the book, she writes about Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda’s novel “Sab” (Cuba, 1841); José de Alencar’s “The Guarani” (Brazil, 1857); Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis’s “The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas” (Brazil, 1881); and Teresa de la Parra’s “Iphigenia” (Venezuela, 1924).

Read the full story on the College of Arts and Sciences website.