After the 1973 coup d’état in Chile, the country’s literature underwent a process of transformation that prompted a redefinition of concepts such as, among other things, the roles of writers and readers as well as their limits and involvement in “writing” (l’écriture). In her essay “La redefinición del contrato simbólico entre escritor y lector: La nueva novela de Juan Luis Martínez” (The Redefinition of the Symbolic Contract Between Writer and Reader: La Nueva Novela by Juan Luis Martínez), Eugenia Brito analyzes Martínez’s book-object La nueva novela (The New Novel) (1985) through the prism of these new criteria. In the 1980s, Brito suggested that the novelist was beginning to explore a variety of directions that literature might take and question the place of the reader, the narrative, and the documents involved. In La nueva novela, according to Brito, Martínez showed that literature generates its own rules and is also able to reconstruct history. It therefore resorts to using quotes or citations, archival materials, and the rewriting of sundry documents, even as it researches new ways in which to involve the reader in the “writing.”
   

In “La redefinición del contrato simbólico entre escritor y lector: La nueva novela de Juan Luis Martínez” (The Redefinition of the Symbolic Contract Between Writer and Reader: La Nueva Novela by Juan Luis Martínez), a key chapter in Eugenia Brito’s book Campos minados (literatura post-golpe en Chile) (Minefields [Post-Coup Literature in Chile]) (1990), the author discusses one of the most important works by the poet and graphic artist Juan Luis Martínez (1942–1993). In her book, Brito compiles and critically reviews works by Chilean writers that were produced during the decade following the coup d’état. These writers include Martínez, Raúl Zurita, Diego Maquieira, Diamela Eltit, Gonzalo Muñoz, Antonio Gil, Carla Grandi, Carmen Berenguer, and Soledad Fariña. The basic premise of the book is that this generation’s “writing” is characterized by its critical and reflexive nature and its “resistance” to the oppressive dictatorial circumstances in which its members were writing. The list of literary works submitted by the author includes a number of books and publications that were relentlessly critical of those oppressive conditions. As seen from that perspective, La nueva novela (The New Novel) (Martínez’s first book) stood out for its experimental approach and visual originality and for introducing a new kind of “writing.” These works appeared at a time when a number of trends were emerging in France, such as (post)structuralism, semiotics, and an elementary concept of communication (“l’écriture”) that represented language via the application of signs on a variety of supports. Since 1953, Le Degré zero de l’écriture (Writing Degree Zero) by Roland Barthes, challenged the illusion of producing a neutral form of writing and, instead, called for a visual discourse to shape our view of the world.   

A year after La nueva novela was published, Juan Luis Martínez published his second and final book, La poesía chilena (Chilean Poetry) (1978). In both works he emphasized the value of books as objects and shed light on the relationships that can be forged between a visual form of expression and writing. His works are considered essential reading for an understanding of Chilean literature in the 1980s, in which intertextuality and citations are frequently used as examples of a destabilizing inventiveness.