Narrative politics in Chile, under and after the Cold War: Jose Miguel Varas

This dissertation analyzes literary works by the Chilean author, Jose Miguel Varas, published between 1946 and 1967, and then again between 1990 and 1995---that is to say, under and after the Cold War---as narrative politics. Such a reading practice takes the cultural and the political to be mutually and dialectical constitutive; understanding literature as narrative politics is to understand it as equally a political cultural act and a cultural political act. Through his works I argue that Varas articulates a political position from the left: first against the overdetermining bipolarity of the Cold War, and second against the post-Cold War celebrations of globalization and the end of history.;In the second and third chapters I trace in Varas's early writing the articulation of what we might think of as a red nationalism, a unique Chilean democratic socialist imaginary. Without suggesting direct causality I do place this writing in relation to the emergence and triumph in Chile of the Unidad Popular in 1970, arguing the writing's status as both a reflection of and contribution to the dynamics of that unprecedented event. In the fourth and fifth chapters I give extensive readings of two of Varas's post-Cold War books, situating them as critical interventions into, first, the otherwise optimistic mood of democratic renewal in many parts of the world, and second, the ludic celebrations of globalization and global community resting on now---unproblematized capitalist foundations.;My conclusion dwells further on these latter novels, and points up the difference between Varas's and other work post-Cold War writing from Chile and Latin America, which consists in a refusal in Varas's works to lay the past to rest. I posit a further difference residing in a perspective on the future, casting Varas's novels in terms of "remembering the future". That is to say, if the future was once animated by ideas of social progress (socialism), it is less so now. My point in the conclusion---and, I argue, the point of Varas's post-Cold War narrative politics---is that we need to remember that future.