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Rosario's Fugitive Voice: Deciphering Rosario Tijeras's Ironic Challenge to the Notion of Literatura Sicaresca

This essay examines the use of irony in Jorge Franco Ramos's Rosario Tijeras in relationship to recent literary criticism. Frequently, the novel appears in this criticism as a realist narrative of a beautiful, working-class killer told from the perspective of her unrequited lover. In contrast, I argue that the novel portrays the narrator's failure to comprehend the choices that his alleged true love makes between sex work and murder. The novel provides insight into class difference in Colombian society and how discourse, fantasy, attraction, and aversion all play into the narrator's construction of his enigmatic heroine. At times, Rosario briefly reveals the narrator's posturing within the narrative and calls attention to the discursive obstacles that separate middle-class readers and slum residents.