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http://doi.org/10.33234/SSR.22.15
Deborah Rotshtein has a Bachelor of Arts in Language and Literature (UBA). She has taken courses in Ghent University, Jean Moulin Lyon III University and HarvardX. Currently, she is an Adscripta at the French Literature Faculty (UBA), where she began to translate. She has taught Creative Writing and literary courses at the Escuela Presidente Roca and the Instituto Libre de Segunda Enseñanza and was also part of the Premio Adolfo Bioy Casares 2020 Selection Jury. She is the author of Un verano en el equinoccial (Halley, 2025). This year, she will be pursuing her MFA at NYU.
Introduction
The present article focuses on the scope of silence as a linguistic element that has Pragmatic value, in particular in the Argentinian chronicle titled Donde no hago pie and written by Belén López Peiró. The text is a reconstruction of the (legal) case of abuse suffered by the author and the following trial, where the victim is not able to answer several questions addressed to her. Due to her silence, which is a response to something (whether it is what she lived or else), the court moderately dismisses her charges (given that the legal apparatus can act in the face of words but does not have a proper response when faced with “a void”).
We will analyse the tensions between law and literature, introducing Michel Foucault’s vision on the topic. Furthermore, linguistic “tools” will be used in order to approach the value of silence, represented by the graphic mark “—…”, in the chronicle.