Description
- Abstract:
- The Return of the Contemporary seeks to frame debates about the semantics of our present through a hemispheric analysis of Latin American and Caribbean literature and cultural production. I argue that literature and the arts serve as spaces through which to understand forced displacement of communities, social inequality, and environmental precariousness caused by the current state of global capitalism. The dissertation is organized around key concepts and critical discussions that frame the notion of the contemporary: the temporality of crisis, affect studies, queer temporalities, and the politics of memory and postmemory. The first chapter centers around dystopian fictions written in the wake of the 2001 socioeconomic collapse in Argentina and in the advent of migratory and environmental crisis in the Dominican Republic. It examines Pedro Mairal’s El año del desierto and Rita Indiana’s La mucama de Omicunlé, novels that register crisis by disorganizing narrative time and erasing the modern social contract. While the first chapter introduces the precarious conditions of neoliberal societies, the second chapter analyzes two eco-horror novels (Guadalupe Nettel’s El huésped and Samanta Schweblin’s Distancia de rescate) that enact the return of a repressed past in the form of the sustainable knowledge of indigenous communities in Mexico City and Argentina. The third chapter looks at another type of haunting: the specters of the last Southern Cone dictatorships as reflected in the work of two writers born in exile (A resistência by Brazilian writer Julián Fuks and Conjunto vacío by Mexican writer Verónica Gerber Bicecci). The last chapter turns to the backdrop of Chile’s problematic transition to democracy and Mexico’s neoliberal precariousness; it examines how Alejandro Zambra’s Bonsái, La vida privada de los árboles and Formas de volver a casa and Valeria Luiselli’s Los ingrávidos revisit national histories and aesthetic traditions to imagine the present otherwise, by creating points of departure for literature written in the beginning of the new millennium.
- Notes:
- Thesis (Ph. D.)--Brown University, 2020
Citation
Campisi, Nicolas,
"El retorno de lo contemporáneo: La novela latinoamericana en el fin de los tiempos"
(2020).
Hispanic Studies Theses and Dissertations.
Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library.
https://repository.library.brown.edu/studio/item/bdr:dpwv5wq5/
Relations
Collection:
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Hispanic Studies Theses and Dissertations
Theses and Dissertations for the Hispanic Studies department....