Una experiencia centrípeta: construcción de la autoría, modernidad y espiritualismo en Hacia el Oriente, de Inés Echeverría Bello

Abstract

In recent years, it is possible to detect increasing interest for the consideration of the experience of travelling as a threshold, both in cultural studies, and literary-aesthetic studies. In this sense, travelling is related to postmodernity, globalization, decentering, and fragmentation of experience. Opposed to this view, the following article addresses the experience of travelling as denial of otherness, in the eyes of female Chilean Inés Echeverría Bello (Iris). In her book/travelling diary Hacia el Oriente (1905/1917) she visits the Holy Land searching for biblical landscapes and stories, which she rewrites in her text, but she also affirms a mode of spirituality which has been previously analyzed from a literary view by Bernardo Subercaseaux (1998; 2001). This spirituality seems to be conflicted with the modernizing features that the author finds in the places where she travels. The following analysis tackles Echeverría’s religious pilgrimage in relation to the production context of the author, and the connection between gender, religiousness and writing in a space and time which are intervened by values and transformation derived from modernization.