| Latin American experimental fiction in English translation received great acclaim in the U.S. in the 1960s, in part due to the feeling on the part of many writers and critics that national writing had reached a low ebb. The 'boom' in Latin American fiction, though it gave massive exposure to a handful of 'discovered' writers, distorted the historical grounding of this writing as a whole, representing it mainly as an exotic, tropical and organic 'magical realism.';My dissertation, taking Uruguay and Argentina as case studies, reconstructs the concrete cultural contexts in which this body of experimental writing came into being, emphasizing its often adversarial relation to the legitimating rhetoric of the military dictatorships holding power in these two countries during the seventies. Social and intellectual spheres had been shattered under dictatorship. Many intellectuals found themselves in an unwilling exile, or an internal 'exile,' where editorial activity atrophied, and the constraints on open expression were severe. Nelson Marra, Teresa Porzecanski, Silvia Schmid, Ricardo Piglia, Jorge Luis Borges, and Luisa Valenzuela employed a wide range of fictional artifice in countering or commenting on the self-legitimating expressions of military government, and in attempting to recover a sense of collective identity. These writers' styles ranged from grotesquerie, mock epic and satire, to an oblique fiction in which directly social subject matter was rejected in favor of an imaginative writing meant to discredit the military's stale ideological rhetoric and nostalgic official pronouncements.;U.S. writing, despite claims that it languished, has remained equally diverse since the sixties. The fiction of Donald Barthelme, Gordon Lish, Harry Mathews, John Barth, Fanny Howe, Lydia Davis, Kathy Acker and William Burroughs explores such genres and styles as epistolary fiction, 'trash' writing, generative devices, and 'plagiaristic' parody. The topics they gravitate to include the obliteration of feminine identity, the role of history in contemporary life, and the difficulty of pursuing political radicalism in a patriarchal consumer society. Like their Latin counterparts, they often express profound skepticism about the origins and current state of democracy, all the while striving for a credible means of affirming social identity. |
