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While mediated testimonials surged in Central America, within the Southern Cone, and especially in Argentina, a new kind of testimonial emerged in response to dictatorial repression. This dissertation, entitled “The Representation of Violence and the Violence of Representation: Argentine Women Novelists Writing Against the State,” examines violence in feminist committed literature from the Río de la Plata. I analyze the open condemnation offered in literary testimonies by Alicia Partnoy and Alicia Kozameh as well as the complex experimentalism in postmodern testimonial fictions by Nora Strejilevich, Liliana Heker, Alicia Borinsky, and Luisa Valenzuela.
This dissertation traces the incorporation of increasingly experimental narrative techniques into the parameters of the testimonial, a genre critics have considered to be “un-literary.” I emphasize the use of metafictional devices as a mode for the critical examination of the testimonial process as well as the employment of black humor and the carnivalesque as a method to critique authoritarian discourse. I show that although the authors under study do not invent new literary forms, they self-consciously explore existing paradigms and question the limitations that standard frameworks impose upon testimonial production. The reader, confronted with increasingly overt structural devices that reflect the authorial intervention always at work in the testimonial process, becomes a first-hand witness to the elaboration of testimonial narratives. Referentiality remains an integral textual component; however, the search for adequate forms or appropriate discourses becomes as important, if not more so, than historical content. For this reason, I focus on the tension that arises between testimonial intent, which traditionally favors mimetic representation, and aesthetic elaboration characterized by lyricism, narrative fragmentation, and metaliterary techniques. I demonstrate that as these texts become decreasingly mimetic they paradoxically depict violence in a more “realistic” manner.