Date Available

7-14-2019

Year of Publication

2017

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Document Type

Doctoral Dissertation

College

Arts and Sciences

Department/School/Program

Hispanic Studies

First Advisor

Dr. Enrico Mario Santí

Abstract

During the period of military government in Argentina, Brazil (1964 –1982) and the present day communist Cuban regime, a machinery of cultural repression was established in these countries, these states had a systematic plan of cultural repression of any kind of opposition, dictatorships had an organized and sophisticated operating control over the press and all publications. The dissident writers examined in this dissertation developed strategies of resistance that depended largely on allegory to carry their messages against their respective oppressive regimes. By means of a detailed rhetorical analysis, our study examines the lookings of allegory and cultural resistance under the constraints of repression. Our corpus includes six novels written by dissident writers during the period studied in this dissertation. The fictional narratives selected in this study are divided into novels from Brazil, Argentina and Cuba. The Brazilian novels: of Jorge Amado Dona Flor e seus dois maridos (1966) and Érico Verissimo, Incidente en Antares (1971); two Argentine novels: Ricardo Piglia’s, Respiración artificial (1980) and Martin Khoan’s, Dos veces junio (2002); and by two Cubans: Jesús Díaz, Las iniciales de la tierra (1987) and Zoé Valdés, La nada cotidiana (1995). This dissertation demostrates that allegory and ghosts, as literary figures, can evolve and assume new functions of resisting oppressive governments through confronting, denouncing, identifying and conjuring national traumas as well as adapting themselves to the different political circumstances in which they are used.

Digital Object Identifier (DOI)

https://doi.org/10.13023/ETD.2017.261

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