This dissertation project explores cultural narratives in Chile during the transition to democracy from 1990 to 2010. I examine the impact of literature and cinema in the construction of (post) national discourses and its implications in the context of the globalized Chilean society. In the works of Alberto Fuguet, Carlos Franz, Alicia Scherson, Ernesto Díaz-Espinoza and Gonzalo Contreras, I advance the idea of a third space in transition which allows a post-colonial place of enunciation that falls between democratic realism and authoritarian narratives of dictatorship.Following Bernardo Subercaseaux’s conceptualization of historical national time as a theatrical world of spectacle, this dissertation explores emergent narratives of liminal communities, interrupting dichotomist discourses about the past.This study situates the following literary and cinematographic corpus between the centripetal discourse of national imagined communities and the centrifugal dynamics of globalized imagination. Walter Mignolo’s concept of ‘borderthinking’ helps to problematize the post authoritarian local-global axis, inciting the following question: Can we determine the existence of a new kind of post-national neorealism in Chile’s post-authoritarian period? If so, do these narratives present a disruption from the post-dictatorial rhetoric? Alberto Fuguet’s novel Mala onda (1991) and film Se arrienda (2005) offer fractured subjects as they enter fluid spaces between modernity and resistance. As the main characters fail, desacralizing the bildungsroman, they allow a critical representation of the subject within democratic realism, defined by Nelly Richards. Conversely, Ernesto Díaz-Espinoza and his film trilogy Kiltro, Mirageman and Mandrill (2006-2009) render a parody of the national hero between the fluid spaces of global and local realities. Through the novel Películas de mi vida (1993), Alberto Fuguet dislocates the period of political transition towards democracy with new temporality and velocity relocating the narrative from extraterritorial spaces. This study problematizes also the concept of ‘virtual realism’ in Alicia Scherson’s film Play (2005) and Carlos Franz’s novel Santiago cero (1988). These works navigate the world of hyperreality created through epistolary interchanges and virtual gaming to contest the place of enunciation of the national subject, specifically its construction and deconstruction process of Santiago’s neoliberal landscape. Finally, the figure of the cyborg appears to challenge democratic progressivism through historicity and memory in the works of Gonzalo Contreras’s novel La ciudad anterior (1991) and Alberto Fuguet’s film Velódromo (2009).It is important to establish a connection between these works and new ‘glocal’ imaginaries that have been overlooked since the decade of the 1990s. These cultural productions, in their visual and textual dynamic language, challenge national identities by intersecting the global with a local through folklorization, parody, and hyperbolic realisms. They deconstruct the naturalized national hero and reconstitute virtual and precarious cyborg identities disrupting dominant discourses such as the dictatorship and the democratic transition rhetoric.
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