Genre Conventions in The Vast Hell by Guillermo Martinez
This assignment asks you to select one of the short stories we've read for class and write an essay about how the story follows, reimagines, or subverts conventions of the genre to have an effect on its audience. Your thesis will be guided by an analysis of the key conventions of crime fiction and complemented by secondary sources.
Your argument should do two things:
Define your assigned text as an example of a specific genre according to one or more key conventions present in this text, and
Analyze how the text follows, reimagines, or subverts those conventions in order to create a specific effect on its readers.
Because form and content are inextricable, your analysis should focus on the text’s language and stylistic choices, as well as its ideas or narrative. Secondary sources should be used to provide context and background information, and to engage with other people’s arguments about the text or genre. (You can find sources on your own via the library or the internet if you want to, but you can also simply use the course bibliography. If you go looking for your own sources, please run them by me before you cite them so I can help you evaluate their quality.)
Requirements
Rhetorical Situation: Your audience for this essay is the academic discourse community, including your instructor and your peers. Beyond demonstrating your critical reading and academic writing skills to your instructor, your purpose in writing this essay is to contribute meaningfully to the ongoing class discussion of genre, rhetorical situation, and your assigned texts.
Length: 1500-1800 words
Sources: A minimum of two (2) secondary sources, not including the primary text, must be used to develop the essay. Sources may be academic or non-academic, and an annotated works cited page is required as part of the final draft. (Use MLA style if you're familiar with it, but if not, just make sure that you (a) cite your sources clearly when you reference them in your essay and (b) include a complete list of them, with annotations, at the end of your paper.)
By the time you complete this assignment, you should be able to:
Situate a text within its generic context by identifying its key genre conventions, discourse communities, and purpose(s)
Analyze how relationships between genre conventions and stylistic choices in a given text achieve a specific purpose, elicit a specific audience response, and/or address a specific context
Develop arguable claims driven by textual analysis and substantive engagement with secondary sources, in accordance with academic writing conventions
Integrate primary and secondary sources according to their relevance and rhetorical efficacy within the essay
Credit the original ideas of others through proper attribution and citation, in accordance with academic writing conventions
The Vast Hell (Guillermo Martinez)
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The Vast Hell (Guillermo Martinez)
The dictatorial leadership style is an authoritative means of governing people that tend to go beyond limits and lead to instances of human rights abuse. Military dictatorship, for instance, is associated with zero tolerance of citizens' rights and privileges as human beings. Despite being in a leadership position, humans, as subjects, deserve humane treatment by those in authority instead of resorting to mistreatment and possibly killing those of contrary opinion. Larger parts of South America have faced an authoritative style of leadership. Junta, a dictatorial military form of government, has led countries, including Argentina. The Junta in Argentina led to severe abuses of human rights, including mass killings conducted in secrecy. Vast Hell is a fictional story presented by Martinez through crime fiction conventions. It shows mass killings of civilians as a means, setting at the center stage, showing dictatorship to the audience. Martinez employs stylistic devices in depicting a shift from traditional crime fiction to an actual life occurrence of the mass killings in Argentina.
The French woman was different from the women in the town, and her appearance attracted many men who came into the barbershop to cut their hairs. The distinct appearance gives readers the idea that the French woman will be the female fatale who leads the story, giving the audience exactly what they are looking for. Therefore, it follows the conventions of crime fiction because Martinez presents the French woman as a female fatale. Historically, women in society played the second fiddle when it came to how society treated women. In many societies, the perception of women was that of being second after a man, a notion playing out in Martinez's fictional story.
When the French woman and the stranger go missing, Espinosa's widow raises the alarm of discovering the dead bodies of the stranger in town and the French woman. The widow, however, is ridiculed by the narrator symbolizing how women in Argentine society were belittled. "In the meantime, Espinosa's widow seems to have gone out of her mind. She went about digging holes everywhere…" Such a statement by the narrator in the fictional story by Martinez highlights the plight of women in the context of Argentina during the dictatorial military rule.
The relationship between the French woman and the young boy who recently came into the town triggered the jealousy of her husband, Cervino. It follows the crime convention by giving people the expectation that crime will happen soon since the jealous husband realized his wife had an affair with a young man. Through employing a short fictional story, Martinez provides a synopsis of the actual situation in Argentina during the Dirty War. Individuals suspected of going against the military rule were executed with their bodies buried in secret mass graves. Families of those affected were forced to believe that the government of the day, the junta, had no information on missing persons. According to Kaminsky (2008), there was an absolute military dictatorial rule in Argentina during the 1970s and 1980s. Kaminsky's work, Dirty War Stories, and Guillermo Martinez's fictional story complement each other in highlighting the period of dictatorial military rule in Argentina.
In Kaminsky's Dirty War Stories, the author highlights the plight of women in a relatively similar fashion to that of Martinez. The junta regime in Argentina claimed the lives of many citizens especially, the young population agitating for change. Mothers felt the urge and responsibility to demonstrate in the plaza in protest of the junta regime despite the possibility of being viewed as insane. "They knew quite well they were not mad." The statement mentioned above is an extract of the Dirty War Stories symbolizing treatment and perception of women in society. "What Espinosa's widow had said (that from her window she could always hear laughter and moaning coming from the boy's tent, the unmistakable sound of two bodies rolling around together.)"
The crime happens with the disappearance of the French woman and the young boy. Although Cervino explained that the French woman departed the town to take care of his father-in-law, half of the town citizens did not believe him. More and more people suspected Cervino killed them. The fictional crime started here. It follows the crime convention that the missing people mea...