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Después de la interdicción: la poesía y la recuperación de la palabra en la posdictadura sudamericana (1980-2005)

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Abstract:
This thesis examines the language of six poets from the Southern Cone and Peru, in the context of a post-dictatorial predicament characterized by the unresolved question of the "disappeared", a juridical category originally used as a political euphemism by the Military governments in the Southern Cone to avoid declaring the missing as dead.While previous scholarship has explored how language resisted the censorship imposed by the authoritarian regimes in these countries, my research focuses on what happens to language in the wake of the prohibition to speak. Particularly, this dissertation focuses on the way poetry becomes especially powerful not only in exposing the euphemistic nature of the inherited dictatorial language, but also in manipulating this language up to the point of transforming it. Through the deliberate inclusion of a bizarre lexicon that disrupts common speech, these poets develop a dysfunctional language that interrogates and transforms the repressive euphemistic rhetoric inherited from these authoritarian regimes. Particularly, by means of a performative poetics in which the act of writing corresponds to the act of making visible, the poetic voices in these texts challenge the elusive treatment of the past, and of language itself, in these societies. The poets studied are Washington Cucurto (the books La máquina de hacer paraguayitos and Como un paraguayo ebrio y celoso de su hermana), Arturo Carrera (the books Arturo y yo and Children's Corner), Marosa di Giorgio (the book La falena), Róger Santiváñez's (the book Symbol), Clemente Padín (the book La poesía es la poesía and the performance Memorial América Latina), and Cecilia Vicuña (the book Instan and the performance Caleu está soñando). My dissertation ultimately shows the need to return to poetry as a way to understand the specific politics of our use of language and our relationship to history. It thus suggests that the practice of reading poetry needs to be rethought from an interdisciplinary perspective, establishing the ways in which poetic discourse can contribute to a more complex understanding of societies' past and present.
Notes:
Thesis (Ph.D. -- Brown University (2011)

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Citation

Goldman, Silvia, "Después de la interdicción: la poesía y la recuperación de la palabra en la posdictadura sudamericana (1980-2005)" (2011). Hispanic Studies Theses and Dissertations. Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library. https://doi.org/10.7301/Z0W37TKC

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