Fernando Vallejo: The Complete Writer
Marcelo Rioseco
 
Currently I am preparing what will be the first critical study on Colombian writer Fernando Vallejo´s complete oeuvre. Fernando Vallejo is one of the most highly acclaimed and controversial writers in Latin America today. In his literary oeuvre he questions traditional values and ideas that have been foundational in the construction of contemporary Latin American society. The purpose of my work is to demonstrate that Vallejo´s iconoclastic discourse does not belong exclusively to literature about social complexities. On the contrary, this discourse belongs to a “lettered intellectual” who while peripheral occupies a central and privileged position within the Latin American literary community.  I argue that Vallejo´s writings reaffirm the lettered city discourse through what could be described as the discourse of the "grammarian," term that Vallejo himself applies to the writer who organizes the universe of words.