Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-dlnhk Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-27T22:18:57.240Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Testimony, Ethics, and the Aesthetic in Diamela Eltit

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Mary Beth Tierney-Tello
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Two works by the Chilean writer Diamela Eltit, El Padre Mío (1989) and El infarto del alma (1994; produced in collaboration with Paz Errázuriz), contain an undeniable testimonial impulse that aligns them with testimonio, a genre of subaltern personal narrative that has emerged with new force in Latin America in recent decades. Yet these texts, which present subjects who are mentally ill, incoherent, or lacking identities, call into question some of the key assumptions about testimonial practice and its reception, disrupting the usual responses of identification with and empathy for the narrator. By reading and writing testimonial discourse through a postmodern aesthetic, Eltit advocates the recognition of testimonial subjects as producers and agents of culture rather than as victims in need of compassion. Her project, with its particular merging of the aesthetic and the ethical, constitutes a local yet politically urgent attempt at rethinking the predominant conceptualizations of marginal culture, refusing the notion that the aesthetic is the exclusive privilege of elite culture.

Type
Special Topic: Ethics and Literary Study
Information
PMLA , Volume 114 , Issue 1: Special Topic Ethics and Literary Study Introduction by Lawrence Buell , January 1999 , pp. 78 - 96
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1999

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Works Cited

Adorno, Theodor. “Commitment.” 1965. Aesthetics and Politics. Afterword by Fredric Jameson. Trans. ed. Ronald Taylor. London: Verso, 1980. 177–95.Google Scholar
Agosín, Marjorie. Remarks. La literatura testimonial en Latino-américa: Neuvas voces, nuevas teorías / New Voices, New Theories. Northeast Mod. Lang. Assn. convention. Montreal. 19 Apr. 1996.Google Scholar
Bertens, Hans. The Idea of the Postmodern: A History. New York: Routledge, 1995.Google Scholar
Beverley, John. “The Margin at the Center: On Testimonio (Testimonial Narrative)”. De/Colonizing the Subject: The Politics of Gender in Women's Autobiography. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1992. 91–114.Google Scholar
Beverley, John. ‘“Through All Things Modern’: Second Thoughts on Testimonio.” Boundary 2 18.2 (1991): 1–21.Google Scholar
Beverley, John, and Oviedo, José. Introduction. Beverley and Oviedo, Postmodernism Debate 1–17.Google Scholar
Beverley, John, and Oviedo, José., eds. The Postmodernism Debate in Latin America. Spec. issue of Boundary 2 20.3 (1993): 1–238.Google Scholar
Beverley, John, and Zimmerman, Marc. Literature and Politics in Central American Revolutions. Austin: U of Texas P, 1990.Google Scholar
Brito, Eugenia. Campos minados (literatura post-golpe en Chile). Santiago: Cuarto Propio, 1990.Google Scholar
Cánovas, Rodrigo. “Apuntes sobre la novela Por la patria (1986), de Diamela Eltit.” Acta literaria 15 (1990): 147–60.Google Scholar
Dorfman, Ariel. “Political Code and Literary Code: The Testamonial Genre in Chile Today.” Some Write to the Future. Durham: Duke UP, 1991. 133–95.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Eagleton, Terry. “The Ideology of the Aesthetic.” The Politics of Pleasure: Aesthetics and Cultural Theory. Ed. Regan, Stephen. Buckingham: Open UP, 1992. 17–31.Google Scholar
Eltit, Diamela. El Padre Mío. Santiago: Zegers, 1989.Google Scholar
Eltit, Diamela. “Resistencia y sujeto femenino: Entrevista con Diamela Eltit.” Interview with Julio Ortega. La torre Apr.–June 1990: 229–41.Google Scholar
Eltit, Diamela, and Errázuriz, Paz. El infarto del alma. Santiago: Zegers, 1994.Google Scholar
Franco, Jean. “Going Public: Reinhabiting the Private.” On Edge: The Crisis of Contemporary Latin American Culture. Ed. Yúdice, George et al. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1992. 65–83.Google Scholar
González Echevarría, Roberto. “Biografía de un cimarrón and the Novel of the Cuban Revolution.” The Voice of the Masters: Writing and Authority in Modem Latin American Literature. Austin: U of Texas P, 1985. 110–23.Google Scholar
Gugelberger, Georg M., ed. The Real Thing: Testimonial Discourse and Latin America. Durham: Duke UP, 1996.Google Scholar
Harlow, Barbara. Resistance Literature. New York: Methuen, 1987.Google Scholar
Jara, René, and Vidal, Hemán, eds. Testimonio y literatura. Minneapolis: Inst. for the Study of Ideologies and Lit., 1986.Google Scholar
Kadir, Djelal. The Other Writing: Postcolonial Essays in Latin America's Writing Culture. West Lafayette: Purdue UP, 1993.Google Scholar
Lértora, Juan Carlos, ed. Una poética de literatura menor: La narrativa de Diamela Eltit. Santiago: Cuarto Propio, 1993.Google Scholar
Malverde Disselkoen, Ivette. “Esquizofrenia y literatura: El discurso de padre e hija en El Padre Mío de Diamela Eltit.” Acta literaria 16 (1991): 69–76.Google Scholar
Moreiras, Alberto. “The Aura of Testimonio.” Gugelberger 192–224.Google Scholar
Neustadt, Robert. “Diamela Eltit: Clearing Space for Critical Performance.” Women and Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory 7.2 (1995): 219–39.Google Scholar
Neustadt, Robert. “Diamela Eltit: Leyendo entre signos de Lumpérica a El infarto del alma.” Modalidades de representación del sujeto femenino auto/bio/gráfico. Ed. Peña, Luis H. and Maiz, Magdalena. Colección andamios 1. Mexico: Facultad de Filosofía y Letras de la Universidad Autónima de Nuevo León, 1997. 55–70.Google Scholar
Pratt, Mary Louise. “Overwriting Pinochet: Undoing the Culture of Fear in Chile.” Modern Language Quarterly 57 (1996): 151–63.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Richard, Nelly. “Cultural Peripheries: Latin America and Postmodernist De-centering.” Beverley and Oviedo, Postmodernism Debate 156–61.Google Scholar
Richard, Nelly. “Estéticas de la oblicuidad.” Revista de crítica cultural 1.1 (1990): 6–8.Google Scholar
Richard, Nelly. Margins and Institutions: Art in Chile since 1973. Melbourne: Art and Text, 1986.Google Scholar
Richard, Nelly. “Reply to Vidal (from Chile).” Beverley and Oviedo, Postmodernism Debate 228–31.Google Scholar
Richard, Nelly. “Por amor al arte: Rupturas críticas y fugas de imaginarios.” Residuos y metáforas (ensayos de crítica cultural sobre el Chile de la Transición). Santiago: Cuarto Propio, 1998. 243–68.Google Scholar
Sklodowska, Elzbieta. “Spanish American Testimonial Novel: Some Afterthoughts.” Gugelberger 84–100.Google Scholar
Sklodowska, Elzbieta. Testimonio hispanoamericano: Historia, teoría, poética. New York: Lang, 1992.Google Scholar
Sommer, Doris. “No Secrets.” Gugelberger 130–57.Google Scholar
Sommer, Doris. “No Secrets: Rigoberta's Guarded Truth.” Women's Studies 20.1 (1991): 51–72.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sommer, Doris. “Textual Conquests: On Readerly Competence and ‘Minority’ Literature.” Modern Language Quarterly 54.1 (1993): 141–53.Google Scholar
Sontag, Susan. On Photography. 1977. New York: Anchor-Doubleday, 1989.Google Scholar
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. Ed. Nelson, Cary and Grossberg, Lawrence. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1988. 271–313.Google Scholar
Tierney-Tello, Mary Beth. Allegories of Transgression and Transformation: Experimental Fiction by Women Writing under Dictatorship. Albany: State U of New York P, 1996.Google Scholar
Vargas Llosa, Mario. La utopía arcaica: José María Arguedas y las ficciones del indigenismo. México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1996.Google Scholar
Vidal, Hernán. “Postmodernism, Postleftism, Neo-Avant-Gardism: The Case of Chile's Revista de crítica cultural.” Beverley and Oviedo, Postmodernism Debate 203–27.Google Scholar
Williams, Gareth. “The Fantasies of Cultural Exchange in Latin American Subaltern Studies.” Gugelberger 225–53.Google Scholar
Yúdice, George. “Marginality and the Ethics of Survival.” Universal Abandon? The Politics of Postmodernism. Ed. Ross, Andrew. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1988. 214–36.Google Scholar
Yúdice, George. “Testimonio and Postmodernism.” Gugelberger 42–57.Google Scholar