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In the framework of a broader investigation into the imaginaries of the afterworld in present-day Argentine literature, this paper aims at addressing the ways in which Carlos Ríos's Cuaderno de Pripyat (2012) narrates the afterworld of an identifiable historical event, the Chernobyl disaster, creating further tension between the crisis itself and the possibility of a post-apocalyptic setting that brings a radical and immeasurable interruption into play. First, we analyze the ways in which this multiplication of temporalities affects the presentation of the testimonies collected in the story. Next, the paper focuses on the collage as a possible explicative key to the fragmentary composition of the story based on the tension between the rationality of that which remains and that of referential oversaturation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Antonio Di Benedetto (1922-1986), one of the most important Argentinean writers of the twentieth century, published in 1953 Mundo Animal, a volume of short stories in which the animal figure becomes fundamental, as its title makes explicit. Within vinthe fictional universe of the work, this figure is incarnated in the human and vice versa, suggesting that humanity, beyond its exclusive attributes-reason and language-, shares a broad common substratum with other living beings. This existential configuration not only provokes hesitations in the reader, but has also ontological implications, that is, it leads to questioning about meaning schemes and the human condition in these fantasticallegorical stories. The purpose of this paper is then to investigate and interpret Di Benedetto's fictionalization of these encounters and borders between the animal and the human, analyzing different textual manifestations of this question: the quid pro quo procedure, the non-human narrators, the animality of children, the relationship with psychic pathologies, the ontological proximity between the two worlds, the metaphor of the mirror, and the corporality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]