Literature and the war

This thesis analyzes the complexities of Argentinean politics during Juan Domingo Perâon's last presidency, (1973-1974), as presented in Osvaldo Soriano's novel No habrâa mâas penas ni olvido. Soriano's work, set in the fictitious town of Colonia Vela, in the state of Buenos Aires, illustrates in a small scale the different social and political components that make up the national body. Historical and fictitious elements dramatize the conflict among the left and right wings of the Peronist Party. These two factions divide the villagers, who hold diverse images of Perâon and what the party entails, while putting their political beliefs and physical well-being at stake. Quickly the two splinter parties trigger an open arm conflict while fighting under the same slogan: "Perâon o muerte". Supported by diverse theoretical perspectives, this thesis reveals that Soriano's novel sheds light into one of the most confusing periods of Argentinean history while rescuing the sacrifices of the people.

Great War veteran David Jones's poem about the war, In Parenthesis, has been attacked by literary critics Paul Fussell and Evelyn Cobley on the grounds that the poem, usually read as an instance of "literature of protest" against the war, indicates Jones's ideological complicity with the war through its extensive allusions to heroic Celtic myth, British literature, and Catholic liturgy. This thesis argues that Jones's intricate allusive network represents a mythopoetic method of endurance, a way of making order amidst the chaos of the Western Front. Jones's mythopoetic method, which I call allusive "seeing," serves as both a psychological defense mechanism against the war's strangeness and horror and a protest against the perception that because of the industrial, unheroic nature of the Great War, the soldiers who fought and died in it cannot be considered heroes.