Memoria y postmemoria en el teatro argentino: Variaciones sobre el pasado dictatorial en el teatro de fin de siglo (1987--2001)

Date of Completion

January 2006

Keywords

Literature, Latin American|Theater

Degree

Ph.D.

Abstract

This dissertation examines the ways in which theater incorporates and interrogates the memories of a conflicted past. It is argued that by mobilizing some aspects of a dictatorial past, the playwrights studied intervened in a politics of memory at a time when the government was promoting social forgetfulness. The Argentinean political arena of the 1990's began with a deliberate effort by the government to forget the past, but many plays dramatized the way people dealt with it with the purpose of questioning and engaging in a dialogue with the spectator's relationship to this period. ^ The theatrical works selected for this study were written shortly after the restoration of democracy in Argentina that ended the terrorist policies implemented by the National Reorganization Project (1976-1983). The selected plays for this project, El Bizco (1992), by Marta Degracia; El cuarto del recuerdo (1994), by Mario Cura; Bar Ada (1996), by Jorge Leyes; Señora, esposa, niña y joven desde lejos (1998), by Marcelo Bertuccio; A propósito de la duda (2000), by Patricia Zangaro; and the Cycle "Theater in Search for Identity" (2001) show characters struggling to come to terms with the recent past. ^ If there is no such thing as spontaneous memory, and our collective memory, as Pierre Nora observes, is fading, then others means are available to keep the past alive. This study shows how this was accomplished by various theatrical representations during a particularly period of Argentine history.^

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