Voices in Exile: Sandra Lorenzano's Saudades and María Teresa Andruetto's Lengua madre

Voices in Exile: Sandra Lorenzano's Saudades and María Teresa Andruetto's Lengua madre Public Deposited

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Creator

Phillips, Thomas Newton, II
- Affiliation: College of Arts and Sciences, Department of Romance Studies

Abstract

Exile serves as a major theme in two contemporary Argentine novels: Sandra Lorenzano's Saudades (2007) and María Teresa Andruetto's Lengua madre (2010). Both have connections to the Dirty War (Guerra Sucia), and as writing responding to state-sponsored torture, they explore memory, re-creation of the past, and identity. Saudades presents victims of violence and uprooting, following Jews in various centuries, immigrants seeking economic opportunity, and Argentines fleeing military abuse of power. Lengua madre, through letters, explores the lives of protagonists who suffer exile and insilio, the effects of which are mostly visible within linguistic forms of ownership, verbal tenses, and points of view that determine word choice, meaning, and ultimately identity. In both novels, language reveals the effects of exile and calls into question collective response to historical events, and the fractured reality of time and place influences the linguistics of location and identity.

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