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Typescript, etc. / Digitized by Kansas State University Libraries

This thesis creates a gendered typology of women’s testimonio that foregrounds the Cold War context of the genre. This new perspective reveals that contrary to the assertions of some critics, the texts struggle to convey a unitary propagandic message. Rather, their prime purpose is to counter hegemonic discourse. Yet, far from being unliterary or impersonal, they impart much personal information using a diversity of stylistic devices. The testimonios challenge the profoundly gendered national security discourse of their own governments and the US. The argument that brutal counter-insurgency tactics, widespread incarceration and torture, were necessary to combat “communist-inspired” insurgency is invalidated by these testimonios which replace dichotomising and reductionist Cold War propaganda with accounts of the local, subjective and personal reasons for political involvement. The texts disclose the potentially traumatising lived consequences of US foreign policy and national security strategies to reveal their disproportionate and excessive nature. However, the testimonialistas’ sense of a greater purpose, collective identity and belonging to a wider community enables them to remain resilient in spite of adverse experiences. Despite their loyalty to utopian and egalitarian ideals, sexism from within leftist movements and governments is exposed and denounced by the female protagonists as patriarchal institutions, traditions and gendered identities are consistently undermined. Latin American women, as guerrilleras, organisers and members of peasant and indigenous communities, present themselves as defiant protagonists who, aside from the male-dominated master narratives of the superpowers, demonstrate the strength of their political agency, psychological resilience and ideological convictions.

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This thesis proposes to read Argentine postdictatorship fictions of the 1980s–2000s not, as has frequently been the case, from the point of view of mourning, memory and defeat but from a more positive perspective oriented towards the reconstruction of a fuller national history and identity. As in Borges’s “Pierre Menard”, the argument is essentially a critical hermeneutic one: it is based on a dynamic rather than static thinking of history and textuality that seeks to open up the reading of texts to the present rather than leave their interpretation statically closed off in the past. The social, political, and economic crisis known as “the Argentinazo” (December 2001), the annulment of the Amnesty Laws in August 2003, and the politics of memory and human rights that ensued thereafter provide in this thesis a distinct historical context from which to rethink both “early” (1980s/1990s) and “new” (post–2001) postdictatorial literature. My suggestion all along is that the linkage of literature, artistic and activist cultural politics, including a politicised reading of literature, will necessarily have as its aim the formation of a popular or collective critical consciousness. Overall the main contributions of this thesis are twofold. Firstly, the interpretation of postdictatorial fictions from a pedagogico-political perspective makes the textual analysis of these fictions new and original in their own right. And secondly, this research demonstrates that postdictatorial fictions constitute a cultural reservoir or a cultural archive of historical resistance, dissent, and human rights struggles from which it is hoped present and future generations can learn to live more democratically.

In the field of speech-language pathology, there is an increasing need for valid and appropriate assessment measures for Spanish-speaking students that can reliably be given by examiners with a wide range of Spanish knowledge and scoring experience. In order to determine the level of detail needed to reliably score a standardized measure of Spanish narrative ability, 15 participants, ranging in Spanish proficiency and experience levels, scored six samples of the experimental version of the Test of Narrative Language-Spanish (TNL-Spanish). Consistency and accuracy of scores were compared with Spanish proficiency levels, comfort levels, and presentation method (written transcript and audio-recorded samples). Results indicated no significant effect for any factor, indicating that examiners of varying levels of Spanish proficiency and experience level can reliably and efficiently score an assessment in Spanish when provided with clear and specific scoring procedures and information regarding the kinds of errors present in language disorders in Spanish. / text

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