Benengeli 2023. International Week for Literature in Spanish
While it is often assumed that modern storytelling emerged as stories of characters who were unfamiliar with heroism and felt distant from embodying the virtues of a people as with the epics of old, a variety of proposals in Spanish narrative seem to nod to certain aspects of this literary tradition.
From an ironic perspective, from a possible rewriting, from nostalgia and an unfulfilled need to tell stories that establish and explain a collective reality marked by heroes, can it be said that some contemporary voices are attempting to redefine the status of the epic in the face of prosaic reality?
The epic, as rejection, as yearning, as re-elaboration or misunderstanding, as a necessity, is today shadow intuited within literary fictions in our language, which is why this new encounter seeks to understand the way in which a significant number of authors confront, evade, or distance themselves from this type of literary expression that television or film fictions, video games, and sports chronicles seem to face more clearly.
More than sixty authors from Spain, Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Costa Rica, Colombia, Cuba, Ecuador, Guatemala, Equatorial Guinea, Mexico, Panama, Puerto Rico, and Venezuela will engage in dialogue with writers from Australia, Belgium, Morocco, and the United Kingdom with the intention of assessing whether the epic is constrained to the past or whether there is evidence of a metamorphosis with aesthetic consequences.
Benengeli 2023, the only Spanish literary festival that spans and travels across all five continents, returns to shed light on this question, around which Jorge Luis Borges expressed a curious prediction in the late 1960s: "since the future contains many things—perhaps the future contains all things—I think the epic will return to us."
