Silvana Mandolessi
I am associate professor of Cultural Studies at KU Leuven. I received my PhD in Romance Literature at KU Leuven, and a B.A in Modern Literature at the Universidad Nacional de Córdoba, Argentina. Before joining the faculty, I was a Postdoctoral Fellow at Universität Heidelberg and Universität Konstanz.
My research interests lie in memory and trauma studies, twentieth century and contemporary Latin American literature and culture, affect theory and the digital turn. My work explores how Latin American countries have dealt with the legacy of human right violations, particularly enforced disappearance. I’m particularly interested in the transnational dimension of memory, not only in how mnemonic repertoires circulate across regions and continents, but also how theories and debates on collective memory travels – or not between Europe and (Latin) America. My latest research focuses on the impact of the digital turn on the shaping of collective memory, interrogating whether digitization represents a radical break with previous cultural memory frameworks, or just a new phase that is characterized by continuities more than ruptures between previous and current, online and offline memory practices. I am currently Principal Investigator of the ERC Starting Grant project “Digital Memories”, in which the impact of digital media on memory is examined by an interdisciplinary research team.
I am the author of Una literatura abyecta: Gombrowicz en la tradición argentina (Brill, 2012), co-author of Digital Reason: A Guide to Meaning, Medium and Community in a Modern World (Leuven UP, 2020), and co-editor of Disappearances in Mexico: From the ‘Dirty War’ to the ‘War on Drugs’. (Routledge forthcoming), Afectos y violencia en la cultural latinoamericana (Iberoamericana/Verveurt, forthcoming), El pasado inasequible. Desaparecidos, hijos y combatientes en el arte y la literatura del nuevo milenio (Eudeba, 2019) and Estudios de memoria, Eduvim 2015). I have also co-edited special issues of European Review and Nuevo Texto Crítico on the transnational dimension of identity, memory and culture in the Hispanic world.
I have been visiting professor at the University of California, UCLA, Los Angeles, and visiting researcher at UNAM (Mexico) and Universidad Nacional de Córdoba (Argentina).
My research interests lie in memory and trauma studies, twentieth century and contemporary Latin American literature and culture, affect theory and the digital turn. My work explores how Latin American countries have dealt with the legacy of human right violations, particularly enforced disappearance. I’m particularly interested in the transnational dimension of memory, not only in how mnemonic repertoires circulate across regions and continents, but also how theories and debates on collective memory travels – or not between Europe and (Latin) America. My latest research focuses on the impact of the digital turn on the shaping of collective memory, interrogating whether digitization represents a radical break with previous cultural memory frameworks, or just a new phase that is characterized by continuities more than ruptures between previous and current, online and offline memory practices. I am currently Principal Investigator of the ERC Starting Grant project “Digital Memories”, in which the impact of digital media on memory is examined by an interdisciplinary research team.
I am the author of Una literatura abyecta: Gombrowicz en la tradición argentina (Brill, 2012), co-author of Digital Reason: A Guide to Meaning, Medium and Community in a Modern World (Leuven UP, 2020), and co-editor of Disappearances in Mexico: From the ‘Dirty War’ to the ‘War on Drugs’. (Routledge forthcoming), Afectos y violencia en la cultural latinoamericana (Iberoamericana/Verveurt, forthcoming), El pasado inasequible. Desaparecidos, hijos y combatientes en el arte y la literatura del nuevo milenio (Eudeba, 2019) and Estudios de memoria, Eduvim 2015). I have also co-edited special issues of European Review and Nuevo Texto Crítico on the transnational dimension of identity, memory and culture in the Hispanic world.
I have been visiting professor at the University of California, UCLA, Los Angeles, and visiting researcher at UNAM (Mexico) and Universidad Nacional de Córdoba (Argentina).
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Books by Silvana Mandolessi
The digital revolution has changed our ways of thinking, working, writing, and living together. In this book the authors critically analyse the ways in which these new technologies have reshaped our world in numerous respects, ranging from politics, ideology, and philosophy over art and communication to memory and identity. The book challenges the customary view of a divide between analogue and digital culture, claiming instead that human endeavour has always been characterised by certain forms and aspects of digital thinking, building, and communicating, and that essential parts of analog culture are still being reshaped by new digital technologies. It offers a multidisciplinary approach to digital reason, reflecting the diversity of humanities scholarship and its fundamental contribution to the ongoing changes in our current and future thinking and doing.
Articles and book chapters by Silvana Mandolessi
–y más original– de la memoria.
(1976–1983). En el primer apartado se revisa el concepto de “trauma cultural” propuesto por Jeffrey C. Alexander y el rol de la literatura en el proceso de construcción del trauma. El siguiente apartado aborda la centralidad del informe Nunca más como narrativa fundacional y su importancia como intertexto para las narraciones literarias que se publican a partir de 1983. Por último se analiza la producción literaria sobre la tortura y la desaparición proponiendo una división en cinco configuraciones: pática, realista, irónica, espectral, posmemorial.
The article analyses the novel Una muchacha muy bella (2013) by Julián López within the paradigm of Argentine postdictatorial literature written by the second generation. I argue that López's novel issues a challenge to the definition of this corpus. I contend that Una muchacha muy bella innovates in three crucial aspects: the status of the narrator, the use of elegy as a form of memory, and the refusal to conform to the basic narrative and tropological conventions of trauma fiction, which transform it into an 'anti-trauma novel'. As a result of these aesthetic options, the novel not only critiques the common sense of Argentine postdictatorial memory but also outlines an alternative way of thinking about cultural narrative in relation to trauma. En la construcción de la memoria postdictatorial en Argentina la noción de 'familia' ha jugado un papel central. De acuerdo a Elizabeth Jelin (2010), la impor-tancia del vínculo biológico ha sido tanta que ha creado una jerarquía en torno a la propiedad del trauma, dando a las víctimas directas de la represión más Este proyecto ha recibido financiación del Consejo Europeo de Investigacion, en el Programa Marco de Investigación e Innovación de la Unión Europea Horizonte 2020 ('Digital Memories', Grant Agreement N° 677955). This article was published open access under a CC BY license https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/