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Inzaurralde, G. (2007)

La ciudad violenta y su memoria

Doctoral Thesis
The aim of this thesis is to explore in which way Latin American novels from the last decade of the twentieth century represent urban violence. These novele are: Plata quemada by Ricardo Piglia, La pesquisa by Juan José Saer and La virgen de los sicarios by Fernando Vallejo. All three display extreme forms of violence. Frequently, this violence seems to position itself at the edge of reason or at least at the edge of what Jacques Lacan would refer to as symbolic order. These novels are urban stories and are constructed according to the pattern of the classical genres of the modern city: the detective, the urban chronicle and the so-called non-fiction. At the core, the novels on violence seem to be telling the same story: the failure of the modern project in Latin America and in any case the decadence of an imaginary, understood as a series of shared images that consolidate the community. There is a decline in them, an adversity, an “anthropological...Show moreThe aim of this thesis is to explore in which way Latin American novels from the last decade of the twentieth century represent urban violence. These novele are: Plata quemada by Ricardo Piglia, La pesquisa by Juan José Saer and La virgen de los sicarios by Fernando Vallejo. All three display extreme forms of violence. Frequently, this violence seems to position itself at the edge of reason or at least at the edge of what Jacques Lacan would refer to as symbolic order. These novels are urban stories and are constructed according to the pattern of the classical genres of the modern city: the detective, the urban chronicle and the so-called non-fiction. At the core, the novels on violence seem to be telling the same story: the failure of the modern project in Latin America and in any case the decadence of an imaginary, understood as a series of shared images that consolidate the community. There is a decline in them, an adversity, an “anthropological machine” that has finally exhausted itself after a hundred years. The reader is obliged to look again and reconstruct these texts through which he discovers the scandal of everyday violence and history’s hell.Show less
City
Literature
Memory
Novels
Piglia
Saer
Vallejo
Violence
All authors
Inzaurralde, G.
Supervisor
Rodríguez-Carranza, L.
Qualification
Doctor (dr.)
Awarding Institution
Tuning instituut, (TCLA), Faculty of Humanities, Leiden University
Date
2007-09-11

Juridical information

Court
LEI Universiteit Leiden