Perturbar el orden de sentido: los viajes polacos de Eduardo Halfon

Abstract

ABSTRACT The paper focuses on the short stories by the Guatemalan author Eduardo Halfon, a third-generation Holocaust > writer; these stories are analyzed as a particular case of “world literature” as defined by David Damrosch. Halfon’s travel writings to Poland are thus interpreted according to the host (Polish) culture’s values and needs. First, the study concentrates on how Halfon’s travel accounts to Warsaw question and interact with the changing historical narratives about the Poles as “implicated subjects”, witnesses and accomplices in the Shoah. Secondly, the analysis deals with the Halfon’s narrative experiences in the provincial city of Lodz, his grandfather’s birthplace, where the crystalized discourses about the past are altered by inverting roles of victims and perpetrators and introducing other possible interpretative approaches (based on cultural implication of emotions and theories of the gaze).