Las Historias Explosivas: Resisting Justice in Ricardo Piglia’s La ciudad ausente

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Abstract/Contents

Abstract: Argentine post-dictatorship can be characterized by a series of legal actions to exculpate the dictatorship's accused, from the Ley de punto final of 1986 to the presidential pardons of 1990. From within this overarching narrative of reconciliation, Ricardo Piglia's La ciudad ausente tells the story of a storytelling machine, Elena, whose stories form a sort of resistance to state control—resistance, in particular, to the narrative that justice had already been served. Drawing on Wai Chee Dimock's theory of justice's residues, Walter Benjamin's theory of storytellers, and Paolo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed, this thesis builds on Idelber Avelar's analysis in The Untimely Present to examine the role of storytelling within La ciudad ausente, and suggests that it may serve as a means of resistance to the narrative of achieved justice. This analysis of La ciudad ausente thus provides an example of the inadequacies of legal justice, and the importance of alternative strategies for achieving restitution and moving forward.

Subject	Department of English
Subject	Ricardo Piglia
Subject	Post-dictatorship
Subject	Postdictatorial Latin American fiction
Subject	Neoliberalism
Subject	Post-dictatorship justice
Subject	Transitional justice
Subject	Critical legal studies
Subject	Storytelling
Subject	Testimony
Subject	Walter Benjamin
Subject	Paolo Freire
Subject	Cyborg theory
Subject	Wai Chee Dimock
Subject	Narrative resistance
Genre	Text
Genre	Thesis

DOI	https://doi.org/10.25740/wg735cw9266
Location	https://purl.stanford.edu/wg735cw9266

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License: This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 4.0 International license (CC BY-NC).

Preferred citation: Maciorowski-Hribar, Sierra T. (2020). Las Historias Explosivas: Resisting Justice in Ricardo Piglia’s La ciudad ausente. Stanford Digital Repository. Available at: https://purl.stanford.edu/wg735cw9266

Stanford University, Department of English, Undergraduate Honors Theses

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