The Medicalization of the Body Politic in Contemporary Argentine Fiction

203 p.Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2002.This dissertation examines the relationship between medicine, literature and film during and after Argentina's "Dirty War" (1976--1983). It presents an analysis of novels by Marta Traba, Ana Maria Shua, Marta Lynch, and Tununa Mercado, and others, and films by Eliseo Subiela, Luis Puenzo, and Marco Bechis and others. Through this analysis it shows how Argentina's long tradition of medicalization is depicted and criticized. I conclude that in response to the totalizing discourse of medicine used by the military, novels and films re-appropriate its uses and metaphors, thereby subverting official versions of history. The interdisciplinary topic of this dissertation has implications not only in the humanities and social sciences, but reaches beyond Argentine literature and contributes to an understanding of other societies in their transition to democracy.U of I OnlyRestricted to the U of I community idenfinitely during batch ingest of legacy ETD