Malvinas War Poetry : a Comparative Approach to Gustavo Caso Rosendi’s Soldados and Tony McNally’s Screaming in Silence from the Perspective of Trauma Studies

Abstract

The present thesis offers a comparative approach to a selection of poems from two collections, Screaming in Silence by Tony McNally and Soldados by Gustavo Caso Rosendi, in the light of trauma studies. The productions deal with the subject matter of Malvinas war poetry, i.e., literary texts inspired by or produced as a result of the 1982 military conflict. In overall terms, the corpus centers on the devastating and dehumanizing consequences of war for its participants and the outrage caused by the sense of waste and loss. In order to explore the corpus, the work is organized along two axes of analysis: representations of trauma during the armed conflict and representations of trauma in the aftermath of war. The poetry books will be read under the theoretical framework of comparative literature and trauma studies in order to identify similarities and/or differences in the way the authors construct the soldier personas’ war-torn identities. Special emphasis will be placed on the poetical portrayals of symptoms that can be attributed to the conceptual category of PTSD and that show how trauma develops and manifests itself in the first place. By recognizing and analyzing the representations of trauma, it should be possible to identify the determinate values and new meanings attributed to the extreme event that go beyond the traditional idea of trauma as a silencing shock that prevents linguistic representation.