Narratives of failure and impossibility: Dismantling silenced trauma in postdictatorial Argentina.

Delving into the legacy of Argentina's Proceso de reorganizacion nacional (1976-83), the dissertation explores how dictatorial manipulation of fear and patriotic inclinations continue to inform literary creations and recreations in Argentina. The project revolves around reflections on dictatorship-era dynamics in conversation with later novels to inspect how these texts reread that period. Highlighting reactions to dictatorial trauma that produce unstable national identities and melancholia in the protagonists, Juan Jose Saer's Lo imborrable, Rodolfo Fogwill's Los pichiciegos, Osvaldo Soriano's A sus plantas rendido un leon, and Carlos Gamerro's Las Islas point to a dictatorially-laden continuum within Argentina's redemocratized society. Literary studies, trauma theory, and cultural studies with an emphasis on Latin American theorists comprise the project's interdisciplinary framework. Commencing with an exploration of the dictatorship in its beginning years to establish the uncertainty produced, then turns to its decadence through an analysis of the 1982 Malvinas War, uncovering two temporally distinct approaches to the war and its aftermath. If, fostered by the latest incarnation of the democratic government's openness, Argentina has only recently commenced an open discussion about dictatorship-era abuses of power and the terror endured by the citizenry, discussion about the Malvinas War remains veiled in silence and shame. The war's significance rests in that, although intended as a means to relegitimize the Military Junta's position as Argentina's governing body, due to the military loss, instead had the effect of finally delegitimizing the dictatorship. A watershed event in Argentinean history, Malvinas became the catalyst for the eventual return to democracy. Through the lens of fiction, I examine narrative depictions of the dictatorship's continued effects on society through and beyond redemocratization, although socially and politically silenced. The project brings into focus how fictional narratives create and recreate Argentina through the production of novels that think the past through the present. By highlighting postdictatorial novels, the dissertation aims to underscore a continued distress produced by the uneasy silence surrounding the war and the dictatorship in general that persist into the present. The text investigates literary productions to reveals a continued anxiety centering on the construction of identity in spite of the nation.PhDLanguage, Literature and LinguisticsLatin American literatureUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/126572/2/3253415.pd