Eltit, Diamela

(1949– )

   Chilean novelist, literary theorist, essayist, and video and performance artist. Born in Santiago, Chile, she holds degrees from the Universidad de Chile and the Pontificia Universidad Católica (Chile). Eltit is grouped among the members of the Post-Coup Generation of 1980, those Chilean writers whose works were first published during the years of the dictatorship of Augusto Pinoche Ugarte. In the late 1970s, in collaboration with other Chilean artists such as the poet Raúl Zurita and the visual artist Lotty Rosenfeld, Eltit founded the Colectivo de Acciones de Arte, an artistic collective that tested the limits of official censorship through avant-garde and performance-art representations. The group’s work has been exhibited in several Latin American countries and Europe. In 1987 Eltit organized the IEI Congreso Internacional de Literatura Femenina Latinoamericana in Santiago. She has promoted literacy campaigns and was a cultural attaché at the Chilean embassy in Mexico City during the presidency of Patricio Aylwin Azócar. She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1985 and has received several awards and grants in her native Chile. Eltit has lectured on literary theory at Brown University and the Universidad Nacional de Chile and is a frequent speaker in universities in Europe and the United States. She is currently a professor at the Universidad Tecnológica Metropolitana in Chile.

   Her first novel, Lumpérica (1983, translated as Lumpen in 1997), sought to dismantle the discourse of authority through the use of extremely experimental and cryptic language. The text makes repeated references to a performance piece, performed at a brothel in the city of Maipu in 1980, where Eltit washed the pavement in front of the brothel, inflicted a series of cuts on her arms, and concluded by reading a portion of the novel. Lumpérica received ambivalent reviews from literary critics in Chile, though its use of experimental language is often credited with helping it escape official censorship. Her 1986 novel, Por la patria (translated as For the Fatherland), offered a critique of the Chilean regime in the form of the protagonist, a woman who has been detained and tortured by the government. Later novels-still rooted in linguistic experimentation but closer to traditional narratives—include El cuarto mundo (1988, translated as The Fourth World in 1995), Vaca sagrada (1991, translated as Sacred Cow in 1995), and Los vigilantes (1993). She has also collaborated in documentary work such as El infarto del alma (1995, with the photographer Paz Errázuriz) and Los trabajadores de la muerte (1998).