Deviant Narratives: Anomalous Subjective Positions in Post-Boom Latin American Literature

This dissertation investigates the protocols the literary text uses to illustrate processes of subjectification and outline alternative subjective transformations. The corpus of study includes texts published between 1994 and 2004 of four representative Latin American authors, Laura Restrepo, Roberto Bolaño, Diamela Eltit, and Juan José Saer, whose works outline anomalous subjective positions in the context of extreme socio historical upheavals. This dissertation is informed by literature in the fields of psychoanalytic, literary and cultural theory, especially the works of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Michel Foucault and Jacques Lacan. I claim that these literary texts are not exclusively diagnostic narratives that present the symptoms of collective subjective deterioration but also privileged sites for the display of an excess that allows individuals and collectivities to both resist the imposition of power and generate their own mechanisms of subjective survival.