Spaces of Madness

Eunice Rojas is an assistant professor of Spanish at Lynchburg College.

Rojas explores the function of medical madness, as a theme, in some Argentine prose works published between 1889 and 2011. She engages with Manuel T. Podestá, Roberto Artl, Leopoldo Marechal, Julio Cortázar, Adolfo Bioy Casares, Juan José Saer, Aberlardo Castillo, Ricardo Piglia, and Luisa Valenzuela to dislocate reason, sanity, and rationality in opposition to madness as an artistic metaphor of resistance to oppressive military dictatorships. Even though the study covers more than a century, it focuses on works dealing with Argentina's Dirty War—also known as Process of National Reorganization, the name used by the Argentine military government for a period of state terrorism from roughly 1974 to 1983. Building on Foucault and Derrida, Rojas looks at concepts of heterotopia, cure, and poison in studying how insanity functioned within Argentine society and literature. In addition, using as a model the Borda Hospital, the oldest and most important national psychiatric institute (which is located Buenos Aires), the book examines psychiatric hospitals and asylums and depicts them as alternative spaces of resistance against pseudo rational forces of violence and repression. Of particular value to those interested in Argentine prose. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above.

• Table of ContentsAcknowledgmentsIntroductionChapter 1: Early Asylums: Manuel Podestá, Horacio Quiroga, and Roberto ArltChapter 2: The Asylum in the Works of Julio Cortázar and Adolfo Bioy CasaresChapter 3: The Schizophrenic Machine in Ricardo Piglia’s AsylumChapter 4: Luisa Valenzuela's Passage through the AsylumChapter 5: Juan José Saer's Committed Detective Chapter 6: The Asylum as Juan José Saer's Argentine Founding Myth Chapter 7: The Poet as Patient: The Literary Life of Jacobo FijmanConclusionWorks CitedAbout the Author