Romance Languages Theses and Dissertations

Permanent URI for this collection

https://hdl.handle.net/1794/6209

Browse

Browsing Romance Languages Theses and Dissertations by Subject "Argentina"

Now showing 1 - 2 of 2
  • Thumbnail Image
    ItemOpen Access
    Memorias de la traición y la traición de la memoria: narrativas de la traición en Chile y Argentina
    (University of Oregon, 2024-01-09) Vidal, Yosa; Enjuto Rangel, Cecilia
    My dissertation questions the current cultural boom of fictional and non-fictional works on the politics of memory, characterized by a Manichaean rhetoric of heroes versus enemies, heroes versus traitors. I argue that representations of betrayal, often evoking terrible forms of torture and suffering, allow us to critique a patriarchal and epic vision of the traumatic past in the Global South. In dialogue with literary theorists (Longoni, Ruiz, Sarlo, Avelar) and philosophers (Adorno, Benjamin, JM Bernstein, Derrida), my dissertation opens a conceptual space to imagine what it means to be a political actor in a political and economic system that benefits from such violence. My project contributes to the field of Latin American Memory Studies by analyzing three texts which have been overlooked by scholars: Marcia Merino’s autobiographical testimony (Chile, 1993); the graphic novel Perramus by Juan Sasturain and Alberto Breccia (Argentina, 1985); and Enrique Lihn’s play, Dialogues of the Disappeared (Chile, 2018). The Ontology of the Traitor (first chapter) studies the specificity and the effects of incarnating the body of a traitor. The Epistemology of Betrayal (second chapter) explores how betrayal is the spark of a journey that produces (or fails to produce) knowledge, and The Dialectic of Betrayal (third chapter) examines how a conversation about treason exposes both sides of an opposition that does not end in a conciliatory conclusion. These are paths to illuminate three disturbing and controversial texts, that raise uncanny questions about state sponsored violence, and challenge consensus politics of neoliberal democracies of the Southern Cone. 
  • Thumbnail Image
    ItemOpen Access
    Un campo intelectual en tensión. El otro Borges
    (University of Oregon, 2024-12-19) Peñalosa Montero, Marina; García-Caro, Pedro
    In An Intellectual Field in Tension. The Other Borges, I focus on the intellectual role of Jorge Luis Borges to explore how the author's lectures shaped Borges as a canonical Argentine writer, through the global evolution of his role in the intellectual field. The project seeks to address Borges' efforts to occupy a privileged position in the public sphere in the microcosm of the cultural field. I analyze the context of the cultural events from the 1920s to the late 1980s in Argentina through the lenses of literary analysis and cultural sociology. The role of intellectuals was as crucial to the State as a nation-building strategy as it was for the politicians, professors, writers… that occupied the cultural field of the city. The promotion of cultural and literary events was marked by an influence of European modernism that gave the intellectuals the space for promotion, dissemination, and later, a powerful position inside the cultural field. In the case of Borges, we can also find elements that help us understand Borges' lectures as a paradigm of a narrative genre in the River Plate. As the national writer for Argentina, Borges gave talks and lectures in an international setting. The talks were published first in the newspapers and later as books, switching the direction of the text from the public audience to an intentional reader. This work responds to the questions: what is the context of those first in-person events in terms of social power? How did the institutions switch the mode of the discourse to spread Borges' ideas internationally?