Abstract
The article proposes to explore the relationship between collective memories, archives, and literary writing through a comparative reading of the narrative procedures present in Horacio Castellanos Moya’s Insensatez and Nona Fernández’s La dimensión desconocida. In particular, it analyzes how both novels cite and re-elaborate testimonial archives and introduce aesthetic and political reflections on the narration of memory. First, a brief genealogy of testimonial writing in Latin America is reconstructed to determine the forms of generic re-elaboration that the novels by Castellanos Moya and Fernández execute. Second, the relationship between writing and memory proposed by each of the texts is analyzed. The conclusions present a reflection on the resignification of the testimonial word in both novels.