Raquel Robles y Paloma Díaz-Mas. Un caso de estudio transatlántico sobre las maternidades derrotadas

Abstract

This work investigates the processes of conformation of maternal subjectivity in the novels Perder (2008) by Raquel Robles and Lo que olvidamos (2016) by Paloma Díaz-Mas based on a comparative literary study between Argentina and Spain. With a view to establishing a literary "transatlantic space" as a dialogical meeting and reflection (Gallego Cuiñas 2010), I seek to illuminate areas of convergence and distance between texts in terms of their fictional rhetorical choices and operations, as well as to account for the intrinsic relationship with post-dictatorial contexts and processes of democratic transition that the works selected here go through. In this sense, it is through stories of female voices (mothers or daughters) traversed by the dictatorial past that the novels present maternal fictions around loss, mourning, as well as the problem of the transmission of memory in both literary and genealogical links. Within my current research on the representations of motherhood in literary texts, I postulate that the mother is articulated in her fictional (self)representation as a device of narrative that enables the course of multiple political losses (both family and personal as well as public and institutional), allowing us to think in turn of a transnational literary series of defeated motherhoods, understood as a system of differential and specific enunciative position on the memory of the recent past, with respect to other discourses of current maternal fictions.

Keywords: literature- representation- memory- motherhood- defeat