Chile's prize-winning novel of rebellious defiance in revolutionary prose--a feminist triumph of Joycean stature.

Furthermore, she argues that this contest has been enacted literally and figuratively on the stage of human bodies as sites of domination and resistance. Examining works by Pia Barros, David Benavente and the Taller de Investigacion Teatral, Ariel Dorfman, Diamela Eltit, and Isabel Allende, Political Bodies engages emergent feminist critiques of authoritarianism in terms of gender and class, history and language.

"This collection of essays, written in clear critical discourse, is a practical tool for first-time or hesitant Eltit readers who seek discussion of a particular book or books and are not familiar with the author's entire production."--BOOK JACKET.

In a comparative and interdisciplinary analysis of modern and postmodern literature, film, art, and visual culture, Monika Kaup examines the twentieth century's recovery of the baroque within a hemispheric framework embracing North America, Latin America, and U.S. Latino/a culture. As "neobaroque" comes to the forefront of New World studies, attention to transcultural dynamics is overturning the traditional scholarship that confined the baroque to a specific period, class, and ideology in the seventeenth century. Reflecting on the rich, nonlinear genealogy of baroque expression, Neobaroque in the Americas envisions the baroque as an anti-proprietary expression that brings together seemingly disparate writers and artists and contributes to the new studies in global modernity.

Overwriting the Dictator is literary study of life writing and dictatorship in Americas. Its focus is women who have attempted to rewrite, or overwrite, discourses of womanhood and nationalism in the dictatorships of their nations of origin. The project covers five 20th century autocratic governments: the totalitarianism of Rafael Trujillo’s regime in the Dominican Republic, the dynasty of the Somoza family in Nicaragua, the charismatic, yet polemical impact of Juan and Eva Perón on the proletariat of Argentina, the controversial rule of Fidel Castro following Cuba’s 1959 revolution, and Augusto Pinochet’s coup d'état that transformed Chile into a police state. Each chapter traces emerging patterns of experimentation with autobiographical form and determines how specific autocratic methods of control suppress certain methods of self-representation and enable others. The book foregrounds ways in which women’s self-representation produces a counter-narrative that critiques and undermines dictatorial power with the depiction of women as self-aware, resisting subjects engaged in repositioning their gendered narratives of national identity.

This book examines Latin America's history of engagement with cosmopolitanisms as a manner of asserting a genealogy that links cultural critique in Latin America and the United States. Cosmopolitanism is crucial to any discussion of Latin America, and Latin Americanism as a discipline. Reinaldo Arenas and Diamela Eltit become nodal points to discuss a wide range of issues that include the pedagogical dimensions of the DVD commentary track, the challenges of the Internet to canonization, and links between ethical practices of Benetton and the U.S. academy. These authors, whose rejection of the comfort of regimented constituencies results in their writing being perceived as raw, vindictive, and even alienating, are ripe for critique. What they say about their relation to place with regard to their products' national and international viability is central. The book performs what it theorizes. It travels between methodologies, hence bridging the divide between cosmopolitanism and that alleged common space of Latin American identity as per the colonial experience, illustrating cosmopolitanism as a mediating operation that is crucial to any discussion of Latin America, and of Latin Americanism as a discipline.

This study is the only book in English to analyse Chilean memory culture using an interdisciplinary angle (memory studies, gender studies, literature in post-dictatorship Chile) It includes comprehensive material, from award-winning authors (Diamela Eltit, Carlos Franz, Arturo Fontaine), rising stars of the Chilean literary scene (Nona Fernández) to first-time published novelists (Pía González, Fátima Sime) It is the only book in English that focuses on women, memory and dictatorship in contemporary Chile from a cultural and literary perspective. It offers a new way of comprehending Chilean memory culture, considering gender and literature as two key elements in this cultural approach to the recent past.