Melancolia y resistencia en la literatura y el cine argentinos de la posdictadura (Spanish text).

摘要

This dissertation scrutinizes Argentinian literary and cinematic texts from the 1980s and 1990s with the objective of examining the traumatic weight that the Proceso de reorganización national (the Argentine dictatorship between 1976 and 1983) and the subsequent neoliberalization of the country throughout the 1990s exerted on left-wing cultural production. What I term a relentless “melancholization” of progressive cultural movements—the effect of the brutal disappearance of the bodies of their militants and their sympathizers, but eventually also their goals, ideals and utopias—is turned into the springboard of a new kind of activism. The “melancholic” founders of this new militancy are the Madres de Plaza de Mayo and their off-spring, HIJOS de Plaza de Mayo. Based on the cultural theories of, among others, Idelber Avelar, Judith Butler, Sigmund Freud, Fredric Jameson, León Rozitchner, and Paul Virilio, the dictatorship and its unprecedented forms of state terrorism are understood, not as an excessive exception to postmodernity and the neoliberal world order, but rather as their inauguration in the Southern Cone. The market-driven aesthetics of cinematic and literary production of the 1980 and 90s (the “aesthetics of disappearance” in Virilio's terms) are seen as a direct corollary of the political shifts imposed by the proceso and completed during the 1990 at the hands of president Menem. The dissertation scrutinizes works that postdate the trauma of defeat, and addresses the protagonism of new aesthetic and political strategies that emerge out of the ruins of the revolutionary culture of the 1970s, and that incorporate the disappeared culture melancholically. These visual and textual products aesthetically undermine the hegemonic project of neoliberal postmodernity. The readings of the thesis draw on works by Alejandro Agresti, Fernando Birri, Martín Caparrós, Nicolás Casullo, Leonardo Favio, Griselda Gambaro, Jeanine Meerapfel, Néstor Perlongher, Juan José Saer, and Pino Solanas. It is informed by theoretical debates on mourning and melancholia in Argentina, the United States and Europe.