OBJECTOS REAPARECIDOS EN EL IMAGINARIOTESTIMONIAL DE LA ÚLTIMA DICTATURA ARGENTINA (1976 - 1983).

The thesis contributes to scholarship on testimonial literature narrating the state violence perpetrated by the last Argentine dictatorship (1976-1983) by investigating the literary representations of the objects that circulated in political prisons and clandestine centers of detention, torture, and extermination. By looking at a corpus of testimonial texts where objects play a significant role at a rhetorical and narrative levels, the dissertation asks how material elements influenced the daily experience of the abductees, thereby affecting collective memory and imagination. The theoretical framework developed in the Introduction draws from the “material turn” in humanities and “object-oriented ontology” to integrate narratological and semiotic approaches with a multidisciplinary perspective on objects. Hence, the textual analysis focuses on classifying and interpreting the objects appearing in these literary testimonies, exploring their narrative and symbolic functions and the ways in which they contribute to shaping the narratives of these traumatic events. The thesis is structured into three chapters, each identifying a different category of objects. The first two chapters look at the macro-category of “catastrophic objects” which includes instruments of torture used by the perpetrators, such as the picana and blindfolds. The third chapter discusses “objects against incommunication”, i.e., items aimed at restoring communicative and emotional connections under total isolation. The thesis’ conclusions look at how these categories of objects contribute to shaping the archetypal structures of the collective imagination.