Diego Maquieira and “the marketplace speech” carnival

Abstract

This essay explores Diego Maquieira’s carnavalesque style which critics have called “marketplace speech.” Specifically, the essay examines Maquieira’s La Tirana, and the Sea Harrier in association with the idea of carnival developed by the Russian theorist Mijaíl Bajtín. The main purpose is to study this “marketplace speech” as a form of intertextual writing build with fragments, patches, mixtures, citations, and expropriations of refined and popular languages, in which the objective is the creation of a polyphonic spectacle where the author acts as a Scriptor ludens. The Scriptor ludens in this case is a ludic arranger of personal and borrowed materials who “plays” at hiding and revealing himself through the different verbal masks that he has created for the texts.