Author identifications. Mansilla-style strategies in the writing of María Moreno

Abstract

This work aims to approach and analyze the authorial self-figuration strategies displayed in Black Out (2017) by María Moreno. For that purpose, the themes (such as circulation around the famous Buenos Aires pubs of the ’60s and ’70s, alcohol consumption, and the constructions of fellow writers’ profiles) and linguistic fields (the tale, the journal, the chronicle) are going to be recalled as they allow a particular “writing of the self” and, with it, the construction of an authorial voice. But particularly, the primary focus is on the identifying structure that Moreno deploys around Lucio V. Mansilla’s role and his play An Excursion of the Ranquel Indians (1870). By
writing herself with Mansilla and his remarks as an authorial and scriptural reference, not only does Moreno manage, in what she claims to be “the book of the boys”, to rebuild her insertion into a world of difficult access (the newsrooms and the tables of masculist pubs), but also to twist the representation of the beverage as an exclusively male abode to let a whole community of women that have been part of her life and her literature experiences enter the story.