The limits of testimonio, language, and history: A reading of Diamela Eltit and contemporary Chilean discours

This dissertation re-examines the genre of testimonio through the texts of Diamela Eltit. Analyzing El padre mio , El infarto del alma and Lumperica , alongside Michel de Certeau's The Writing of History and "The Aura of Testimonio" by Alberto Moreiras, it is argued that Eltit's narratives, while not traditionally considered to fall within the confines of testimonio, inform the aesthetic concerns of the genre. Accordingly, there is a consideration of how these texts challenge current conceptualizations of witnessing and forgetting in the dictatorship and post-dictatorship eras in Chile; the understanding of woman and the body; and the perception of public versus private space. Eltit, through her experimental use of language, exposes the limits of the novel, simultaneously reshaping the definition of testimonio. Chapter 1 discusses the relation between witnessing and history through Dori Laub's observations about the experience of a Holocaust survivor. It then examines El padre mio (1989) as a work that somewhat subscribes to the form of tesitmonio but whose content speaks beyond the testimonio as traditionally conceived. Chapter 2 turns to El infarto del alma (1994) and continues the discussion begun in Chapter 1 but turns the focus to testimonio during Chilean Transition. Chaper 3 grapples with Certeau's question: Can there exist an alternative history through literature? The discussion focuses on the possibilities for witnessing and history in relation to the testimonio and the possibility for what may be called "post-testimonio." Lumperica (1983) is read as a contemporaneous view of testimonio that works through the possibilities for the future of historical narrative. With the premise that Lumperica is an archive of a particular historical "event" that exposes the impossibility of the event as a concept, there is a review of the context in which Lumperica was written and an overview of some central critical arguments that address it as a book about dictatorship and witnessing. The last part of the discussion is concerned with the relation between posthegemony and post testimonio.