The Wounded Word: 40 years after 'Lumpérica,' 50 years after the coup d'état

Abstract

This article rereads Lumpérica, Diamela Eltit’s first novel, forty years after its publication and fifty years after the coup that installed the civilian-military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, to probe the continuities that exist between the wounded word under dictatorship –which lies at the very heart of Eltit’s literary reflection– and the wounds that still linger in memory fifty years after the coup.