| Description |
273 p. ; 24 cm. |
| Bibliography |
Includes bibliographical references (p. 245-261) and index. |
| Contents |
Marta Brunet and the outrageous text -- Maria Nadie, or the fallen virgin -- Maria Luisa Bombal, or the feminine writer -- Sadomasochist theater in La amortajada -- Diamela Eltit: the body of the letter -- Motherhood on trial in Los vigilantes. |
| Summary |
Chilean writers Marta Brunet, Maria Luisa Bombal, and Diamela Eltit present a female subject that resists legal imperatives, sexual contracts, and the patriarchal literary canon. From different perspectives and through different aesthetic paradigms, the narratives of these authors question modernity in Chile as a masculinist itinerary shaped by authoritarianism and Catholic ideology. Through the reexamination of the concept of passion and recovering its meaning in the Greek pathos, subjectivity is here posed as an individual's ethical tendency that expresses the subject's character. Challenging the Christian patriarchal view of passion as sin and vice and the economic definition of it as interest and calculation that modernity adds on, these texts position passion against binary Western epistemology, moral judgment, and social usefulness. Passion, understood in this way, allows the examination of three historical moments of the Catholic authoritarian Chilean modernity that this literature disputes. In all three moments, the narratives selected denounce calculation, interest, and logical rationality as the tools for the reorientation of the passions or what is the same, the suppression of contestatory claims. Gender, in these three aesthetic projects, is a form of marginalization embedded in a state authoritarian morality and law regulated by marriage and the family. In this context, female aggression and unconventional sexuality become a double threat to masculinity and to the process of modernization. These writers challenge a logocentric linguistic system through discursive strategies that organize a new narrative model, showing that motherhood and womanhood inevitably conflict in the public sphere and rights of citizenship. Throughout the literary imaginaries of the twentieth century there is a reiteration of an authoritarian patriarchal pattern that permeates the social arena as well as the female subject, revealing the contradictions of the Chilean modernity/modernization process. The nation appears invariably determined by semi-feudal and semi-modern structures as well as split female modern subjects. Noticing this has led the author to write this book and investigate specifically the ways the discourse of modernity conflicts with the marriage contract in the construction of feminine subjectivity. Marriage is one of the modern protocols that resolve sexual difference through a pact that proclaims male protection in exchange for female obedience. Subordination of difference becomes the overarching feature guiding an incomplete modernity and its attainment in a hierarchical society. By custom and law women are dependent on their fathers and husbands while in the public discourse they are offered the independence and autonomy of being modern. This irreconcilable contradiction marks female experiences and alternatives in a world that holds on to old patriarchal mores while claiming to be liberal and modern. This book will intrigue literary scholars, feminist critics, and cultural critics interested in literary and resistance movements in Chile and Latin America, and well as readers alert to critiques of capitalism and modernization. |
| Subject |
Chilean fiction -- Women authors -- History and criticism.
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Brunet, Marta, 1897-1967 -- Criticism and interpretation.
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Bombal, Maria Luisa, 1910-1980 -- Criticism and interpretation.
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Eltit, Diamela, 1949- -- Criticism and interpretation.
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Feminism and literature -- Chile.
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Literature and society -- Chile.
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| ISBN |
9780838757338 (alk. paper) |
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0838757332 (alk. paper) |
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