Content area
Abstract
My dissertation examines in Ricardo Piglia's novels Respiración Artificial (1980); and La ciudad Ausente (1992), the question of memory and utopia, within de general context of a postmodern characterization of his narrative. I study the contemporary cultural condition and specially the impact that massive culture has in literature. Postmodernism is mainly associated to the rise of new technologies in communication and transmission of information, when the fusion and fragmentation of realities and media globalization characterize the processes of cultural transformation. The study commences by describing the general conditions of postmodernism, directly related to the technological revolution and the rise of a new kind of social and economic order. I analyze in the novels of Piglia some features considered typically postmodern, that include metafictionality, parody, fragmentation, generic hybridization, autoreferenciality and intertextuality. In the same way I analyze the question of memory and its essential function in the process of readjustment and reconfiguration of identity in a post-dictatorial historic time, characterized fundamentally by the processes of cultural democratization, and the relation between historical knowledge, fiction and language. In the other hand, I examine how in Piglia's novels the utopian projections function not only to build an alternative space to the hegemonic discourse of power, but also to describe phenomena that determine the processes of postmodern globalization.
