Ekphrastic Anxiety and the Technological Mediation of Memory in Post-Dicatatorship Narratives from Brazil

This article explores the tensions between text and image in three literary narratives concerned with a reassertion of memory in the face of the 'política de esquecimento' that has prevailed during the post-dictatorship period. It argues that this tension between text and image, which manifests itself as a prevarication between what I call (following W.J.T. Mitchell) 'ekphrasic hope' and 'ekphrastic fear', expresses an anxiety in relation to the reconfiguration of the borders between individual and collective identities that is catalysed by the increasing mediation of memory by the communications technologies of the information age.