The Untimely Present: Postdictatorial Latin American Fiction and the Task of Mourning (review)

Abstract

In The Untimely Present: Postdictatorial Latin American Fiction and the Task of Mourning, Idelber Avelar conjugates an impeccably researched and wide-ranging historical sensibility with a philosophically engaged approach to literary texts produced in the aftermath of the recent dictatorships in the Southern Cone of Latin America. Drawing on a range of thinkers including Nietzsche, Freud, Plato, Benjamin and Derrida, Avelar analyzes the fictions of such challenging novelists as Argentines Ricardo Piglia and Tununa Mercado, Brazilians Silviano Santiago and João Gilberto Noll, and Chilean Diamela Eltit. The result is a stimulating, subtly argued study that not only assesses the task of mourning undertaken in the literary texts by these authors, but that also interrogates assumptions about Latin American literary history and provides an original account of the cultural history of dictatorship.