Violence in Argentine Literature and Film (1989–2005) (review (original) (raw)

Violence in Literature: The romance of violence in Latin America

SOCIOLOGIES IN DIALOGUE, 2020

The purpose of this essay is to analyse what could be seen as a transformation of a genre of fiction, the novel of violence. In sociological tradition, various authors have chosen the detective novel as a research object to explain modernity. This sociological tradition in studies of detective fiction allows us to suggest the emergence of another form of romance, the novel of violence, in the last thirty years. In México, the latest works of Carlos Fuentes (México, 1928-2012) belong to this genre of novels. Also, Elmer Mendoza (México, 1949-) who write about the detective and the organised crime. In the novels of violence, crime and solution are secondary, because violence is seen as a structuring element of social reality. New forms of murders arise: violent crimes, international drug trafficking, sexual abuse and violence, rape, corruption, and torture. These forms appear as an aesthetic of "brutalism" and "cruelty". The world of the novel of violence is a world without law, defined by the ineffectiveness or simply the absence of the police or the judiciary. There is a lack of a legitimate authority, formal or informal, signifying the crisis of the judicial system. But, also, this literature appears to have worldwide lectors in late modernity.

Literary Obstinacy: Violence and the Literary in Cristina Rivera Garza’s La muerte me da (2008)

2016

Written to address the contemporary crises of violence and the exhaustion of the symbolic capacities of literature in Mexico, Cristina Rivera Garza’s La muerte me da (2008) puts together a self-effacing narrative that crumbles in its attempt to give words to the reality that it faces. This article offers a close reading of La muerte me da so as to argue that the novel’s reflection on violence and literature operates by recurring to an engagement with, and through, the literary tradition which allows for both a critique of the representational ethics of literature and for an ethics of literature. It goes on to show how this literary investigation recuperates a previous aesthetic and ethical operation from the literary tradition which, when articulated with the contexts of contemporary violence, yield novel ways of thinking this relation.

The Language of Female Violence in Jorge Ibargüengoitia's Las muertas

I n the early 1960s in Mexico, accounts of three notorious sisters inundated newspapers. Delfina, María de Jesús and Luisa González Valenzuela, known as "Las Poquianchis," 2 were accused of crimes including mass murder, torture, the kidnapping of women for prostitution, and the clandestine operation of a brothel. Due to the extensive coverage of the case by the Mexican media, the Poquianchis became an infamous sensation, captivating the interest of the Mexican people and even drawing in international press. 3 With his novel Las muertas (1977), Jorge Ibargüengoitia responds to the overzealous media damnation of the women by providing an alternative narrative of the crimes of the Poquianchis.

They Live: Violence, Horror and Spectres in Four Contemporary Argentine Films

Acta Universitatis Sapientiae, Film and Media Studies, 2022

In the Argentine film "The Headless Woman" ("La mujer sin cabeza", Lucrecia Martel, 2008), the protagonist Vero is haunted by the possibility of killing someone in a hit-and-run. Although hinting at the crimes committed during the last dictatorship in Argentina, "The Headless Woman" refers more to a mechanism of the past that is transformed and updated within contemporary society. In this essay, Martel’s film acts as a starting point in the exploration of recent Argentine films that deal with spectres from the past that pervade everyday life in the present: "Clementina" (Jimena Monteoliva, 2017), "One Sister" ("Una hermana", Sofía Brockenshire and Verena Kuri, 2017) and "The Returned" ("Los que vuelven", Laura Casabé, 2019). In a decade in which we can notice a remarkable growth of the horror genre in Argentine cinema, these films embrace several codes and characters from the horror genre to approach the Argentine reality. The author discusses how these filmmakers adopt similar aesthetic features from the horror genre to invoke and address the violence that permeates Argentine society today, with special attention devoted to ghosts, a key figure to understand an ongoing history of brutalities that usually go unresolved. Published at Acta Universitatis Sapientiae, Film and Media Studies – The Journal of Sapientia Hungarian University of Transylvania, vol. 22, November 2022, pp. 77-96. Available at: http://www.acta.sapientia.ro/acta-film/C22/film22-05.pdf

El hombre de Montserrat: writings on violence in the latin american crime fiction

Alea, Estudos Neolatinos, 2018

Th e article adresses the novel El hombre de Montserrat, written by the Guatemalan writer Dante Liano and recognized within the genre of crime fi ction, as a precursory model for a narrative that established a way of rewriting the history of violence in Central American countries in both fictional and theoretical terms. Dante Liano’s successful reception has turned the novel into a reference of the Central American literature of the nineties. Th is is due to the fact that his narrative is replete with mechanisms that were seen in the best works of the previous Latin American narrative, far from the great discourses, by a displaying genre hybridization, a parodic transgression or lexical localism.

Law or desire: politics of eroticism in Argentinean art and literature (1959-1989

This essay studies three cases of fictional works accused of obscenity in Argentina: the banning of the first Spanish-language edition of Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita (1959), the trial surrounding Germán García's novel Nanina (1969), and the lawsuit against Jorge Polaco's never-premiered film Kindergarten (1989). The debates triggered by these three cases evidence how the discourse surrounding censorship took shape in Argentina. In light of questions posed later by technological advances that have expanded the limits of what can be represented, it becomes clear that at stake in the judicialization of those earlier cases was the state and civil society's determination to regulate the imagery of certain desires.