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This dissertation examines seven contemporary novels by authors from Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay, all of them written during the 1980s and 1990s. These novels are Silviano Santiago's (1936-) Em Liberdade (1981), Haroldo de Maranhao's (1927-) O Tetraneto del-rei (1982), Eduardo Belgrano Rawson's (1943-) Fuegia (1991), Cesar Aira's (1949-) La liebre (1991), Juan Jose Saer's (1937-) El entenado (1983), Tomas de Mattos (1937-), !'Bernabe, Bernabe! (1988) and Napoleon Baccino Ponce de Leon's (1947-) Maluco. La novela de los descubridores (1989). All of these novels "rewrite" previous texts from the 19th, 18th and even 17th Centuries. The study explores the relationship these novels establish with their own traditions and their national pasts, in the process of rewriting the texts. This implies, I argue, a much broader cultural problem--the return, and location of the past--that seems to be haunting different kinds of cultural production and contemporary fiction.
The dissertation begins by examining the twofold process of rewriting that seems to be invoIved in these novels: the rewriting of texts from the past and the rewriting of the discursive traditions in which these texts are embedded. In rewriting not only the stories but also the genres in which these old stories were originally written--chronicles, autobiographies, travel accounts and memoirs--these contemporary novels show an ambivalent return to the past, both endorsing and at the same time criticizing their specific national traditions.
The return to the past, I suggest, is more than a return to a discursive tradition. By tracing the narrative displacements that these novels establish in relation to the foundational texts, the dissertation intends to show how this process of rewriting is, on the one hand, a rewriting of the national tradition and, on the other, a way of criticizing the foundational texts that have been used to construct a national culture. In restaging the past, as I argue, the novels are simultaneously rewriting the national culture and positing the emergence of new cultural identities.
Reading these novels as cultural genealogies, my analysis attempts to re-situate the concern with history that some critics attribute to these texts. By shifting the attention to the genealogies that emerge out of these texts, I have tried to demonstrate that they can be read as deep reflection of the past that challenges the reader to further re-think the uses and abuses of history.