Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2000. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 259-265). Available also in a digital version from Dissertation Abstracts.

Informe de Seminario para optar al grado de Licenciado en Lengua y Literatura Hispánica. / En este trabajo pretendo transitar y dilucidar ciertas metáforas fundamentales del libro El cuarto mundo de la autora chilena Diamela Eltit. Antes me parece necesario hacer un pequeño recorrido por la biografía de la autora, para una mejor comprensión de este estudio.

Die Forschungsarbeit „Textualisierung des Körpers in der Prosa von Diamela Eltit“ besteht darin, eine Analyse von sieben literarischen Werken der chilenischen Schriftstellerin Diamela Eltit (1949*, Santiago de Chile) vorzunehmen, wobei der Fokus auf der Darstellung von Körperlichkeit liegt. Ihr schriftstellerisches Projekt begann im Jahr 1983, und ihre Arbeiten sind bis heute eine der anerkanntesten Leistungen der gegenwärtigen lateinamerikanischen Literatur. Die sieben betrachteten Werke, die sich durch vorwiegend narrative und experimentelle Prosa auszeichnen, wurden zwischen den Jahren 1983 und 2007 veröffentlicht. Der Analyse liegt die Annahme einer durchgehenden Textualisierung des Körpers in den Romanen der Autorin zugrunde, aus der sich eine metapoetische Reflexion des Körpers und der körperlichen Schmerzen ableiten lässt.

This thesis explores the relationship between literature and politics through a study of novels published by Diamela Eltit (1949-) and Alberto Fuguet (1964-) in the Chilean post-transition to democracy period (i.e.: after the year 2000). It attempts to demonstrate that Chilean post-transition to democracy literature foregrounds the socio-cultural legacies inherited from the dictatorship (1973-1990), which have been to a great extent endorsed by the Chilean neoliberal transition to democracy. This thesis considers the more recent narrative fiction published by these authors as representative of Chilean post-transition to democracy literature, that is, a literature that shares a politico-historical legacy inherited from the Chilean dictatorship, and highlights a social imaginary permeated by the contemporary neoliberal politico-cultural project imposed by the military and to a great extent endorsed by the transition to democracy. In doing so, this work focuses on questions related to the portrayal of contemporary Chilean society and the political status of women. Commitment in literature does not necessarily come from the author's subjectivity or intention, but from his or her study of society and the way in which s/he presents it. Literary commitment, whether overt or not, remains fundamental in the case of contemporary Chilean writers, who have inherited a neoliberal socio-cultural context imposed by a dictatorship, and who may deploy strategies to either disseminate, perpetuate or resist such a cultural model, creating new ones. Therefore, the values to which literature commits can be traced in the case of both the overtly politically committed author and the apparently apolitical one. This methodology allows us to reveal the way in which Eltit and FuguetÊ1⁄4s writing projects represent different but implicitly related views of Chilean society as well as two semi-canonical standpoints which are prominently representative of the twenty-first century Chilean literary sphere.

[pt] A tese acompanha as trajetórias de Diamela Eltit, João Gilberto Noll e Rodolfo Enrique Fogwill, realizando através do trabalho desses três escritores uma cartografia das questões estéticas e políticas que atravessam as últimas décadas. Seus projetos narrativos, tão diferentes entre si quanto pertinentes para nosso tempo, foram marcados por uma perda de sentido referente às crises da utopia revolucionária e vanguardista, que se torna visível na transição da ditadura à pós-ditadura. A partir dessa perda, surgirão algumas alternativas para uma literatura por vir: uma escrita performática, que coloca em jogo o corpo do próprio escritor para dar sentido aos trânsitos contemporâneos, no caso de Noll; uma escrita agonística, que faz da provocação cínica uma arma contra a apatia contemporânea, no de Fogwill; uma escrita resistente, que deixa ver os efeitos perversos do consenso neoliberal, no de Eltit. / [en] This thesis follows the paths of Diamela Eltit, João Gilberto Noll and Rodolfo Enrique Fogwill, charting, through their works, the territory of aesthetical and political questions of the last decades. The narrative projects of these writers, as distinct from each other as they are pertinent to our time, were marked by a loss of meaning that relates to the crisis of revolutionary and avant-garde utopias, which becomes visible in the transition from dictatorship to post- dictatorship. Taking this loss as a starting point, some alternatives for a literature to come will appear: a performatic writing, that puts in place the body of the writer himself to give sense to contemporary transits, in Noll´s case; an agonistic writing, that uses cynical provocation as a weapon against contemporary apathy, in Fogwill´s; a resistant writing, that allows us to see the perverse effects of the neoliberal consensus, in Eltit´s.

This dissertation looks at the representation and impact of gendered violence in the novel Pasos bajo el agua (1986) and in the short stories in Ofrenda de propia piel (2004) by Argentine author and former political prisoner Alicia Kozameh (b. 1953), as well as in Jamás el fuego nunca (2007) and Impuesto a la carne (2010), two novels by Chilean writer Diamela Eltit (b. 1949). By examining the particular expressions of physical and psychological pain in the aforementioned texts, I demonstrate that Kozameh and Eltit write the female body to simultaneously represent a corporeality that, until recently, has rarely been expressed in literature, and reconstruct a body that has been traumatized by state-sponsored violence and by what could be considered economic violence. Both of them denounce violence, torture, disappearances, exile, and indifference to justice as painful events that not only damage the spirits of the victims, but that are also inscribed upon the physical body. I also show how each author addresses the overlapping of individual and collective traumatic memories and how these are felt in the body as well. Finally, I argue that writing the materiality of the lived body, from its vulnerability to its resilience, provides for Kozameh and Eltit valuable insight into the ways in which female bodies are able to resist and reassess the meaning imposed on them by legally-endorsed and non-official systems of oppression. Their work thus has direct viii social relevance that goes beyond feminism's countering of male dominance and women's rights. Yet, I also show that they manifest their feminist commitment by using the voice and body of female subjects to incorporate marginalized Chilean and Argentine bodies into the linguistic realm in order to provide a fuller understanding of female corporeality in Latin America. / text