Américanas, Autocracy, and Autobiographical Innovation: Overwriting the Dictator

ISBN-13: 9781032335919 / Angielski / Miękka / 2022 / 248 str.

Lisa Ortiz-Vilarelle

Opis

Overwriting the Dictator is literary study of life writing and dictatorship in Americas. 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.

Recenzje

"Throughout the work, Ortiz-Vilarelle articulates her analyses with a number of scholars in autobiography studies, such as Paul John Eakin, Leigh Gilmore, Marianne Hirsch, and Sidonie Smith. The text succeeds in laying out the myriad strategies women writers use to bypass the impossibility of writing the self in autocratic environments."

- Renata Lucena Dalmaso, Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly

Spis treści

Introduction: "Impossible Autobiography: Women’s Life Writing and Twentieth Century Latin American Dictatorships"

Chapter 1: "I Remember Trujillo: Trujillo en Mis Memorias Denial, Shame, Martyrdom, and Nostalgia in Dominican Women’s Memoir"

Remembering Trujillo: The Memoir Boom

Dictator as Tragic Hero: Aída Trujillo and the Shadow of Third-Person Memoir

The Daughter and the Demi-God: Fugitive Acts in Flor de Oro Trujillo’s Memoir Exposé

Memoir as "Casa-Museo": Dédé Mirabal’s Ritual Memorial and the Transmission of Memory

Patremoir as Post-Dictatorial Counter-tour: Angelita Trujillo’s Publicly Private Nostalgia

¿Seguiré a Caballo?: Trujillo in the Twenty-first Century Imagination

Chapter 2: "Dueña y Señora de Su Canto": Autobiographical Depictions of the New Nicaraguan Woman

Poetic Interiorismo and "The Six": Why This Is Not Testimonio

Milk Poems and Blood Poems: Womanhood, Embodiment, and the New Nicaraguan Woman

The Mirror Poems: Refractory and Reciprocal Recognition

Chapter 3: "‘Distinguished Ladies’ and the Doctrine of Chilean Womanhood: The ‘Anti-manuals’ of Diamela Eltit, Isabel Allende and Marjorie Agosín"

The Distinguished Woman

Auto-surveillance and Auto-performance in Diamela Eltit’s E. Luminata

"Only a Woman Could Imagine a Story Like This": Desire and Patriotism in Isabel Allende’s Aphrodite and My Invented Country

Marjorie Agosín’s Filial Narrative: Producing Genres of Liberation in the Next Generation

Matremoir: A Cross and A Star

Patremoir: Always from Somewhere Else

Chapter 4: "Exile Memory and The Paradigmatic Before-and-After in Post-1959 Cuban Women’s Life Writing"

Overwriting Fidel: Zoe Valdés on How a Leftist Dictator is Still a Dictator

Revisionary Exile Memory

"Salida Definitiva / Definitive Departure": Ruth Behar’s Autoethnographic Memory and the Impossibility of Return

Reconciling the Irreconcilable

Chapter 5: "‘There is No Need for Us to Speak of Eva Perón’: Evita’s Caudillagrafia"

Caudillagrafia: Autobiography as Perónist Manifesto

Doctrinary Overwriting: How to Hide a Dictator

Shadow and Light

The Condor and the Sparrow

El Simulacro: Not Even the Peróns were the Peróns

Old Eva / New Evita

The "Benefactress"

La Presidenta / La Resentida

The Heart and the Womb of Argentina

Conclusion: Self-less Self-representation

Conclusion: "Common Denominators: Impossible Autobiographies"

O autorze

Lisa Ortiz-Vilarelle (PhD, English, Wayne State University, 2000) is Professor of English at The College of New Jersey. Her work appears in European Journal of Life Writing , a/b: Auto/Biography Studies , Life Writing Annual ,
and Life Writing . Her research also appears in critical collections and anthologies, including Inhabiting La Patria : Identity, Agency, and Antojo in the Work of Julia Alvarez , edited by Emily Hipchen and Rebecca Harrison (2014). She was recently awarded the annual Hogan Prize (2018) by the editors of a/b: Auto/Biography Studies for recognition of an outstanding essay published in the journal. She has been a summer fellow at the Cornell School of Criticism and Theory (1998) and a visiting scholar in the Center for Biographical Research at the University of Hawai’i, at Manoa (summer 2018) and in the Departments of Modern Languages and Cultural Studies and English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta, Edmonton (2020). She currently serves as Book Reviews Editor for a/b: Auto/Biography Studies.