The Untimely Present

Postdictatorial Latin American Fiction and the Task of Mourning

Autor: Avelar, Idelber
Editor: Duke University Press
Col·lecció: Post-Contemporary Interventions
ISBN: 9780822323815
eISBN Pdf: 9780822398776
Lloc de publicació: Durham , United States
Any de publicació digital: 1999
Mes: Desembre
Pàgines: 312
DDC: 863
Idioma: Anglés

Descripció

The Untimely Present examines the fiction produced in the aftermath of the recent Latin American dictatorships, particularly those in Argentina, Brazil, and Chile. Idelber Avelar argues that through their legacy of social trauma and obliteration of history, these military regimes gave rise to unique and revealing practices of mourning that pervade the literature of this region. The theory of postdictatorial writing developed here is informed by a rereading of the links between mourning and mimesis in Plato, Nietzsche’s notion of the untimely, Benjamin’s theory of allegory, and psychoanalytic / deconstructive conceptions of mourning.

Avelar starts by offering new readings of works produced before the dictatorship era, in what is often considered the boom of Latin American fiction. Distancing himself from previous celebratory interpretations, he understands the boom as a manifestation of mourning for literature’s declining aura. Against this background, Avelar offers a reassessment of testimonial forms, social scientific theories of authoritarianism, current transformations undergone by the university, and an analysis of a number of novels by some of today’s foremost Latin American writers—such as Ricardo Piglia, Silviano Santiago, Diamela Eltit, João Gilberto Noll, and Tununa Mercado. Avelar shows how the ‘untimely’ quality of these narratives is related to the position of literature itself, a mode of expression threatened with obsolescence.

This book will appeal to scholars and students of Latin American literature and politics, cultural studies, and comparative literature, as well as to all those interested in the role of literature in postmodernity.

Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Allegory and Mourning in Postdictatorship
1. Oedipus in Post-Auratic Times: Modernization and Mourning in the Spanish American Boom
2. The Genealogy of a Defeat: Latin American Culture under Dictatorship
3. Countertraditions: The Allegorical Rewriting of the Past
4. Encrypting Restitution: A Detective Story in the City of the Dead
5. Pastiche, Repetition, and the Angel of History's Forged Signature
6. Overcodification of the Margins: Figures of the Eternal Return and the Apocalypse
7. Bildungsroman at a Standstill, or the Weakening of Storytelling
8. The Unmourned Dead and the Promise of Restitution
Afterword: Postdictatorship and Postmodernity
Notes
Works Cited
Index