Cultura y excepcion: Golpe de estado, medios visuales y literatura en Chile, 1973
Description
My dissertation, entitled 'Cultura y Excepcion: Golpe de estado, medios visuales y literatura en Chile, 1973', studies the conditions of production of avant-garde discourses in the Southern Cone in the context of the Cold War during the 1970s. It focuses on a period of intense cultural transformations in the Southern Cone, during which literary discourses played a leading role articulating political practices within an extremely polarized social scenario. Through close reading informed by selected fictional narratives, films, journal materials, artwork, and political discourses, I reconstruct the itineraries of literary and political avant-gardes, mainly in Chile after the irruption of the military coup After presenting an introduction which outlines the rhetorical and political implications of the avant-garde in the region, I study the Chilean cultural field under Salvador Allende's government (1970--73). I analyze representative authors, such as Pablo Neruda, Jose Donoso, Enrique Lihn, Hernan Valdes, and Ariel Dorfman, within a theoretical framework based on recent literary theory and criticism. The subsequent chapters deal with political discourses that dominated much of the narrative prose written during the 1970s Among the issues I explore are: militarization and literature in Chile; the complex relationship between fiction and testimony in Latin America literature; cultural notions of death and their collapse in the context of military coups. Supplementing the analysis of cultural fields with discussions from the period on mass culture, artistic theory, and sociology, my dissertation historicizes the complex visual and material culture of the 1970s Understanding the military's dictatorships as the instruments of a violent transition to a new social paradigm, I show how avant-garde was abruptly inscribed into a biopolitical space, in which life itself was an object of a systematic political intervention. This crucial period of radical militancy and unusual political violence, I argue, has been underestimated by current cultural and literary studies, whose center of attention have been rather the cultural field opened by the postdictatorship context in the region. This has led me to address recent debates over the status of literature in Latin America as well as the current philosophical discussion opened by thinkers such as Giorgio Agambem and Paul Virilio