Displaced Memories

The Poetics of Trauma in Argentine Women's Writing

M. Edurne Portela

2009
202 pages
ISBN 9781611483277

Displaced Memories analyzes the representation of traumatic memories--political imprisonment, torture, survival, and exile--in the literary works of Alicia Kozameh, Alicia Partnoy, and Nora Strejilevich, survivors of Argentina's "Dirty War" (1976-1983). Beginning with an examination of the history of Argentina's last dictatorship, the conditions that led the authors to exile, and the contexts in which the texts were published, Portela provides the theoretical tools for the understanding of the narratives of trauma and displacement caused by political violence. The author proposes a theory that critiques post-structuralist paradigms of trauma, which present trauma as an unclaimed experience impossible to apprehend, as she argues for an analysis of the symbolic uses of language, presenting trauma as a claimed experience that can be brought into representation and therefore create the conditions of possibility for working through it.

Reviews

"An extremely useful reference work for undergraduate courses on Latin-American women's writing, as well as of significant interest to researchers in this area."--Fiona J. Mackintosh, BSS, 89 (2012)

About the author:

M. Edurne Portela (Ph.D., University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill) is an Assistant Professor of Spanish at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. Her scholarly and teaching interests are in the area of Contemporary Latin American and Spanish Peninsular Literary and Cultural Studies, with particular emphasis in the fields of Gender, Memory, and Transatlantic Studies. She has published several articles related to representations of memory and political violence in the works of Spanish and Argentinean women writers such as Dulce Chacón, Lidia Falcón, and Nora Strejilevich in Revista de Estudios Hispánicos, Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies, and Revista Iberoamericana. She is currently working on a second book on the politics of memory in contemporary Spain and Argentina.

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