The representation of death in Jacobo Regen’s poetry

Abstract

The study developed in these pages proposes two main objectives: on the one hand, to analyze which are the representations of death found in the poetry of the Argentinian writer Jacobo Regen and, on the other hand, to reconstruct and characterize the cultural subject present in the poetic production of this author. For this purpose, we selected a corpus of poems from his two most recognized books, Canción del angel y otros poemas (1971) and El vendedor de tierra (1984). In these books, the idea of ​​death can be traced at the phenotextual level of the poems through phonic, semantic, and also visuographic aspects. We based on previous studies about the discursive analysis of poetic texts (Bossi, 2001; Guzmán, 2013, 1992; García, 2015; Verdugo 1982), and the socio-critical perspective as a research method (Cros, 1997; 2011). This approach allow us to find a heterogeneous cultural subject, traversed by various ideologies that reveal the presence of multiple ways of representing death in the poetry of the studied author. Among these representations of death, we distinguish one that we call «microsemiotics of transit» which is being built throughout his literary production.