Narrar el descontento a través de lo inusual: una mirada a Los intrusos de Alma Mancilla: Alma Mancilla Los intrusos. Guadalajara: Universidad de Guadalajara, 2022.

Lorena García-Contreras

doi:10.22201/fesa.26832917e.2025.6.3.439

Authors

Lorena García-Contreras National Autonomous University of Mexico. Facultad de Estudios Superiores Acatlán (MX) https://orcid.org/0009-0000-9957-2065

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.22201/fesa.26832917e.2025.6.3.439

Keywords:

Fantasy genre, Narrative of the unusual, Realist literature of discontent, 21st-century Latin American women writers

Abstract

Los intrusos (2022) –a collection of eight short stories by Mexican author Alma Mancilla– presents anomalous situations, unsettling presences, and unrealities that place the work at the border between the fantastic and the unusual. This review offers several interpretative approaches, drawing on the theoretical frameworks of Carmen Alemany Bay and Alejandra Amatto, developed in their studies on 21st-century Latin American women writers. The goal is to link these stories to what is known as the “narrative of the unusual” and the “literatures of discontent,” which challenge the paradigm of realism. The review also highlights certain textual strategies –such as ambiguity in language, the handling of narrative clues, genre hybridity, and dialogue with Gothic motifs– used to encode experiences of marginality, patriarchal violence, and social exclusion.

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Author Biography

Lorena García-Contreras, National Autonomous University of Mexico. Facultad de Estudios Superiores Acatlán

Bachelor’s degree in Hispanic Language and Literature and a Master’s in Latin American Literature from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM). She has worked as an educator for over a decade at various academic levels. She is currently in charge of several courses related to literature and its connection with other disciplines—such as journalism at the Facultad de Estudios Superiores Acatlán (UNAM), and psychoanalysis at private institutions.

Her research interests focus on contemporary Latin American women writers of the unusual, a subject on which she has given lectures, teacher training courses, and participated in interviews for media outlets, including TV UNAM. She is also a member of the research seminar "«El extraño cortejo de otro mundo». Narrativas fantásticas y poéticas de la otredad".

References

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