Constellations of conflict: violence, war and writing the nation in Daniel Ferreira's Pentalogía (infame) de Colombia
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Date
2024
Authors
Davies, Rhys
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Publisher
University College Cork
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Abstract
This thesis analyses the different representations of violence in contemporary Colombian author Daniel Ferreira’s Pentalogía (infame) de Colombia. Using a broad palette of theoretical approaches to violence, I read critically the first four novels of the Pentalogía to examine how Ferreira narrates different periods of twentieth century Colombian violence, looking specifically at how the Pentalogía works to explore the cracks (grietas) in official accounts of history. In the introduction, I begin by setting the scene to the Pentalogía and situating Ferreira’s novels within the long tradition of fictional narratives on Colombian violence, arguing that his work could best be understood as a continuation and renewal of Figueroa’s concept of novelas de la violencia. In the first chapter, which focuses on La balada de los bandoleros baladíes, I analyse manifestations of violence that have been mainly unexplored in previous fictional accounts of the conflict such as paramilitary massacres from the perspective of the perpetrator, ‘social cleansing’ and intra-family violence. My second chapter examines Ferreira’s second novel, Viaje al interior de una gota sangre, and looks at cyclical violence and palimpsestic memory in the novel, analysing particularly how violence from previous eras haunts the present and future, like the writing on a palimpsest. In the third chapter, I examine the violence of a land conflict of the late 1960s and early 1970s in Rebelión de los oficios inútiles, and through dialogism, polyphony, heteroglossia, I explore the way the novel’s peripheral voices resist official versions of history. In the fourth chapter, I posit that Ferreira adopts a Bildungsroman structure in El año del sol negro to narrate different representations of gendered violence in the Colombian civil war, La Guerra de los Mil Días. In my thesis, I argue that Ferreira’s Pentalogía could be read as constructing various counter-histories around different periods of twentieth century Colombian violence.
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Keywords
Violence , Pentalogia , Daniel Ferreira , Colombian conflict , Colombian literature
Citation
Davies, R. 2024. Constellations of conflict: violence, war and writing the nation in Daniel Ferreira's Pentalogía (infame) de Colombia. PhD Thesis, University College Cork.