Contornos en negativo: Reescrituras posdictatoriales del siglo XIX (Argentina, Chile y Uruguay)
This dissertation focuses on how contemporary Southern Cone fiction responds to the post-dictatorial symbolic crisis by articulating a new political praxis based upon the intertwining of historical and aesthetic discourses. It thus addresses the link between narrative, historiography and politics in recent Argentinian, Chilean and Uruguayan texts that have not received major critical attention, probably because they do not fit into contemporary critical categories. The analysis seeks to go beyond the hegemonic debates on post-dictatorship —mostly represented by scholars such us Idelber Avelar, Francine Masiello, Nelly Richard and Alberto Moreiras, among others— which seem trapped in a number of recurrent topics and concepts —mourning, memory, post-memory, horror, allegory— that erase their critical potential and obliterate other possibilities. Breaking with this pattern, my work explores a dimension that has often been overlooked: the contemporary representation of the nineteenth century. I test the hypothesis that, in contemporary Southern Cone literature, the fictional re-writing of the nineteenth century (the foundational moment of nation, narration and intellectuals in Latin America) attempts to outline new ethical models for the intellectual, to solve the representational crisis through a reformulation of realism and to frame a specific political role for literary practice. My perspective owes considerably to a number of thinkers within the Marxist tradition —especially Walter Benjamin, Gyorgy Lukacs and Fredric Jameson— and intends to contribute to some of their major discussion topics, above all the relation between history and aesthetics and the dichotomy allegory/realism.