200 | 31, pp. 187-205 | doxa.comunicación

July-December of 2020

Literary resources used by Leila Guerriero in her journalistic profiles

ISSN: 1696-019X / e-ISSN: 2386-3978

words with etymological relatedness or casual phonic similarity), derivation (he use of words derived from the same root), wordplay, and all phenomena related to phonetics. This is one of the characteristics in which the influence of her poetic readings can be clearly perceived. We will now see an example of Guillermo Kuitca. Un artista del mundo inmóvil (Guillermo Kuitca. An artist from a motionless world):

There is a hotel room, there is a window, there is a duvet turning red in the evening light. There is a city called Columbus, in the American state of Ohio, and in the room, there is a man who writes... (2013: 77).

In this fragment of Guillermo Kuitca’s profile there are several alliterations: “there is, room, man, Ohio”; “room, window”; and “duvet, red, sunset”. In addition, there is also parallelism: the word “there is” is repeated five times in three lines with the identical grammatical structure.

According to logical analysis, it is common that not all the elements that would appear in the sentence are explicit. This procedure can be described as elliptical (Domínguez Caparrós, 1985: 57). Guerriero uses a wide range of ellipsis figures, such as the asyndeton, or lack of union between two or more members, and the parataxis, which is a preference for coordination over subordination. At the same time, she also uses figures that make the sentence look enhanced, such as the polysyndeton, which consists of coordinating several linguistic elements with ample conjunctions (1985: 60).

The ellipsis figures in Guerriero’s texts have an effect similar to that of rushing: they increase the speed and give the text a hectic rhythm. Following is an example of asyndeton in Guillermo Kuitca. Un artista del mundo inmóvil (Guillermo Kuitca. An artist from a motionless world):

In all of them, there are empty beds, baby carriages rolling down the frightening stairs in clear reference to the Acorazado Potemkin (Battleship Potemkin), as well as beds where children sleep on the verge of being crushed by a mother’s beatings, reclining chairs, tiny human figures surrounded by walls the size of tsunami waves, couples entangled in sterile mating (2013: 81-82).

Other figures used by the journalist are those related to the element order of the sentence or of the concordance. Among them are the anacolouthon, which is a break in concordance in a given period; the free indirect style is a kind of anacolouthon, due to the fact that while the construction preserves the verbal forms and persons of the indirect style, the word order and tone are those of the direct style (Domínguez Caparrós, 1985: 63). The following is an example of a mixture of the direct and indirect style from Guillermo Kuitca. Un artista del mundo inmóvil (Guillermo Kuitca. An artist from a motionless world):

He wears a light jumper, wide trousers, and short hair. The voice is very soft and distant when he says to look at who has arrived.

–Look who has arrived (2013: 78)

Figures that have to do with meaning are also common. In other words, we are referring to tropes, such as the metaphor, oxymoron, antithesis, comparison, and metonymy-synecdoche. The metaphor is one of the literary resources used most by Guerriero. An example is provided in the profile entitled Guillermo Kuitca. Un artista del mundo inmóvil (Guillermo Kuitca. An artist from a motionless world), when Guerriero describes what is on his shelves: “objects left behind by a careless tide” (2013: 80). Consider the profile of Hebe Uhart. La escritora oculta (Hebe Uhart. The hidden writer) (2013: 286-