My dissertation explores the politics of mourning in post-dictatorship Chile from a feminist perspective. Consequently, it is concerned with the possibilities of remembrance after a political demise: what and how to remember, how to reckon with the dead and the disappeared bodies, is there an ethical approach to the past that will defy the post-dictatorial politics of oblivion? In order to answer these interrogations I analyze the work of two of the most influential Chilean feminist artists of the past five decades, Cecilia Vicuña and Diamela Eltit, rarely studied in tandem. My dissertation wishes to contribute to Latin American post-dictatorial and cultural studies by addressing a critical void in the work of memory, that is, a comparative feminist approach that includes other aesthetic practices such as painting, sculpture, and art installations. On the other hand, my project wishes to contest the critic’s predominant melancholic approach to the work of mourning who conceive of literature as unable to transmit experience and thus as a failure. I argue that the critics in resourcing to Walter Benjamin’s rhetoric of mourning have performed a reductive reading of his theory of allegory and hence have not offered a possibility of imagining the future otherwise. If allegory is the privileged figure in times of horror it is allegory which must be reconceived as a critical tool to address the past. I argue that both Eltit and Vicuña, through their different aesthetic media, re-signify allegory as an interpretative and creative modality to re-enact the work of mourning. In their search for the disappeared body they unearth a deeper layer of disappearance, the female body, as the biopolitical support to Chilean national history.
Subject (authority = RUETD)
Topic
Spanish
RelatedItem (type = host)
TitleInfo
Title
Rutgers University Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Identifier (type = RULIB)
ETD
Identifier
ETD_4636
PhysicalDescription
Form (authority = gmd)
electronic resource
InternetMediaType
application/pdf
InternetMediaType
text/xml
Extent
xxii, 204 p. : ill.
Note (type = degree)
Ph.D.
Note (type = bibliography)
Includes bibliographical references
Note (type = statement of responsibility)
by Carolina Andrea Díaz Zapata
Subject
Name (authority = LC-NAF)
NamePart (type = personal)
Eltit, Diamela,--1949-Criticism and interpretation
Rutgers University. Graduate School - New Brunswick
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License
Name
Author Agreement License
Detail
I hereby grant to the Rutgers University Libraries and to my school the non-exclusive right to archive, reproduce and distribute my thesis or dissertation, in whole or in part, and/or my abstract, in whole or in part, in and from an electronic format, subject to the release date subsequently stipulated in this submittal form and approved by my school. I represent and stipulate that the thesis or dissertation and its abstract are my original work, that they do not infringe or violate any rights of others, and that I make these grants as the sole owner of the rights to my thesis or dissertation and its abstract. I represent that I have obtained written permissions, when necessary, from the owner(s) of each third party copyrighted matter to be included in my thesis or dissertation and will supply copies of such upon request by my school. I acknowledge that RU ETD and my school will not distribute my thesis or dissertation or its abstract if, in their reasonable judgment, they believe all such rights have not been secured. I acknowledge that I retain ownership rights to the copyright of my work. I also retain the right to use all or part of this thesis or dissertation in future works, such as articles or books.