Resumen

RAMIREZ  DE RAMIREZ, Fanny  y  PEREZ SISTO, Edith. Social subalternity and the challenge of the otherness: the testomony, another form of literature. Letras [online]. 2008, vol.50, n.77, pp.104-158. ISSN 0459-1283.

The aim of this article on testimonial texts is to unveil the motives that generate, during the 6os and 70s, the emergence, consolidation and canonization of violence narrative, focused on the testimony of social subalternity, in order to point out changes in the literary canon that break the vision of the aesthetic fact. The following testimonies are analyzed: El Zurdo (Rafael Segundo González, 1946), Soy un delincuente (Brizuela, 1974), Pito de oro, (Posani, 1973), Biografía con destino. Internado del Consejo Venezola­no del Niño Antesala del delito cons­trucción de un extravío (Rodríguez, 1974) and Retén de Catia de Sebastián Aldana (1984). The testimony emerges as an alternative story that permits those individuals silenced or excluded from the “Official Story” to access the literate place, to come out of marginalization and to generate a countercultural discourse, whose main aim is to explain the counterstory and social (and political) subalternity in search for social denounce (in delinquents’ testimony). A testimony is a narration told in first person by a narrator who is also the protagonist (or the witness) of his/her own story. Its narrative unit is usually a “life” or a particularly significant experience (…), and it involves urgency or a communicative need derived from life experience charged with repression, poverty, exploitation, marginalization, crime, fight (Beverley, 1987:157). Consequently, this is a critical approximation to the phenomenon of social subalternity, and to an understanding of literature as a significant practice in which the text produces senses and sometimes stands in a divergent position with respect to the canon, in order to validate orality and political commitment facing social denounce as a weapon

Palabras clave : subalternity; countercultural discourse; testimony.