Volver al orden: archivo activo y circuito del orden autoritario en la narrativa temprana de Diamela Eltit

Lazo, D. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0008-0232-921X (2026) Volver al orden: archivo activo y circuito del orden autoritario en la narrativa temprana de Diamela Eltit. Revista Visitas al Patio, 20 (2). ISSN 2248-485X (In Press)

Abstract/Summary

The novels of Diamela Eltit (b. 1949) constitute one of the most radical interventions in the Chilean narrative fiction of the 1980s, produced under the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet within the geopolitical background of the Cold War. This article proposes a reading of two of her earliest works, Lumpérica (1983) and Por la patria (1986), as an active archive of the authoritarian imaginaries generated in Chile during that period, particularly in relation to the logic of the demand for order. Revisited from the standpoint of the contemporary Chilean conjuncture — marked by the failure of the process initiated in the wake of the 2019 uprising and by the rearticulation of neo-conservative discourses — these novels allow us to examine the persistence and reactivation of a desire for order that traverses dictatorship, transitional neoliberalism and the present. Rather than representing authoritarianism as a historically closed phenomenon, Eltit’s early narrative exposes the circuit of authoritarian order through a repetitive logic of classification, segmentation and discursive saturation that renders its return possible.

Item Type	Article
URI	https://centaur.reading.ac.uk/id/eprint/129751
Refereed	Yes
Divisions	Arts, Humanities and Social Science > School of Literature and Languages > Languages and Cultures > Spanish and Hispanic Studies
Publisher	Universidad de Cartagena
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