pauline-s-pages

[pauline-s-pages]

María Elena Walsh, a dedicated writer under the last Argentinian dictatorship (1976-1983).

We know by books and testimonies that the life during an authoritarian period is not easy, even more when you are a writer who expresses opinions in conflict with dictatorship’s rules, but we often forget that it is so much more difficult if you are this kind of writer and a woman.

Then, I chose to study how the Argentinian author María Elena Walsh had faced this double censorship, succeeded in steering clear of this, and still managed to criticize dictatorial and patriarchal habits in her texts during this period.

I chose particularly this author because her existence was rich and paradoxical. Indeed, on one hand, she became more famous than Perrault in Argentina for her productions of literature, poems and songs for children, and nowadays, even if it is posthumous, she is quite renowned for her anti-authoritarian and feminist positions. On the other hand, some of her publications had been banned in 1978 by the dictatorial censorship, her creations are not studied at school, and her name seems to be forgotten in recent anthologies of Latin-American literature.

Therefore, I decided to read up on the dictatorial regime machinery and its censorship on authors and to investigate the functioning of the patriarchy to understand the problematic that women authors were living during dictatorial periods.

I will learn just few texts in comparison to her huge creation but it will be more practical to understand her literary strategies to negotiate the censorship.

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