State terrorism and revolutionary struggle in the Argentine and Brazilian literature and documentary cinema

Abstract

As part of discussions on testimonial literature and memory, they are analyzed and compared novels and documentaries produced in Argentina and Brazil whose matter is state terrorism, which exterminated the revolutionary projects of the sixties and seventies of the twentieth century. The aim is to map out a framework to understand the particularities approaching and differentiate literary and cinematic compositions of both countries. The corpus is made, in the literary field, for texts of authors who participated in the struggle, armed or not, and were victims of repressive violence; in the film, are analyzed documentaries produced from the two thousand years, also taking into account the degree of involvement of its directors with those struggles. Two initial hypotheses allow us to interpret similarities and differences in artistic compositions. One concerns the transitions from dictatorships to democracies, different in each country, leading to memory also different policies. The other holds that the particularities in artistic works from both countries would originate not only in historical processes and different literary traditions, or the various ways of looking at and analyzing the historical past, but also the degree of trust, different in each country, regarding the existence of a Latin American intellectual community that share the same "structure of feeling" (Raymond Williams). Such confidence would have been generated by intense debates about the role of art and the place of intellectual, promoted and developed in the Casa de las Américas, discussion across from the Cuban Revolution, the intellectual discourse of the sixties and seventies in America Hispanic, but had lower vitality and extension in Brazil. (AU)