Novela neo-policial en Peru, Chile y Argentina y su relacion con el discurso de la memoria post-traumatica

This dissertation argues that detective fiction in Argentina, Chile and Peru, from the 1980s until the present, cannot be understood without considering its connections with discourses of trauma and memory.;An enormous corpus of testimonial literature was produced after the dictatorships in Chile and Argentina and the war against Sendero Luminoso in Peru, leading scholars to study the dilemma that bearing witness represents for the witnesses. The trauma victim struggles, after the fact, to incorporate the traumatic moment and find a language in which to articulate an event that cannot be fully known or apprehended, because it was not fully perceived when it occurred.;In the Chilean case, I analyze the work of authors such as Carlos Tromben and Ramon Diaz Eterovic, looking particularly at their relation to Pinochet's dictatorship and how they experienced the aftermath of that period. In both writers the discourse of traumatic memory is seen as the subtext of their entire production. Crime fiction provides a way of representing traumatic memory.;The Argentine detective novel of the same period struggles with the representation of History. Since the "Proceso de Reorganizacion Nacional" (1976-1983), Argentine writers have had to deal with the insurmountable burdens of a shattered national identity: bodies that remain unidentified at the bottom of the sea and in nameless graves. Those born after 1975 have sometime distrusted their official genealogy. Some of the novels studied here trace how memory is still a disputed place.;In Peru, crime fiction has depicted the war against Sendero Luminoso, the Maoist guerrilla movement, ruthlessly targeting the Andean population, many of whom were farmers who barely spoke Spanish and were caught in the middle of two opposite forces: the insurgents and the Peruvian Army.;Shifts that occurred in Latin American culture due to neoliberal policies are assessed in this dissertation, Some of the novels studied here face the quandary of becoming purveyors of nostalgia, reifications of memory stripped of its political and ideological contents.