A look at Argentina's military dictatorship from 1976 to 1983 is the subject of a new book by Jorgelina Corbatta, associate professor of Romance languages and literatures. Narrativas de la Guerra Sucia en Argentina (Narratives of the Dirty War in Argentina) is written in Spanish and focuses on the writing of four authors, three of whom fled the country and one who stayed during the war. After a condensed historical introduction the works of Ricardo Piglia, Juan JosŽ Saer, Luisa Valenzuela and Manuel Puig provide the primary textual strategies and materials with which Corbatta weaves a kind of zone of terror and darkness where discourses and images of torture, power, impotence, eroticism and naked vulnerability circulate and are meticulously examined from the point of view of literary criticism. Corbatta, a native of Argentina, started the book in 1977 when she and her family left the country because of the military coup d'Žtat. At the time she was teaching aesthetics and literature at the Universidad Nacional del Sur in Bahia Blanca, her native city. "I introduced a lot of authors who were revolutionary and very contemporary, therefore they were seen as subversive by the military regime," she said. "From the coup in March 1976 until 1983 the military ran the government and abolished democratic rights," she said. "The university was closed because some programs were seen as places of subversion. Many intellectuals, artists and thinkers were persecuted so we decided to leave the country because it was not safe to stay. " During those years many people were forced to leave the country but Corbatta and her family made their own decision to leave for Colombia. From there they eventually came to the United States. "I needed to figure out what happened to my country and the way to do that was through this book," she said. "Sometimes it was very painful because I read a lot about what took place during those years. One of the most painful was the book Never More (Nunca Mas), which included declarations from people who were tortured in prison, separated from their families and "˜disappeared' (los desaparecidos). "Writing this book I revisited the past and lived the whole experience again. I went through the fear, the destruction of the libraries, censorship, self-censorship and repression all over again." The book was presented at the International Book Fair in Buenos Aires in April and landed Corbatta numerous interviews in newspapers and on television and radio. Corbatta calls the war one of the cruelest periods of Argentina's history. "It was a period of terror and violence under a military government that could kidnap, torture and kill people with total impunity," she said. "That lead to a mass exodus. There was more freedom and autonomy for people who left and oppression and self-censorship for those who stayed. "It was a very personal thing because I left with my first husband and our two kids. I was deprived of the opportunity to teach what I wanted or read what I wanted. The war decided my future. This put a sign on our generation. The book is homage to people who stayed and fought, who were tortured and killed and disappeared. "Even in 1999 there still are things people in Argentina don't talk about. Fifteen years after democracy came back to Argentina the country is still bleeding." Corbatta is planning to have the book translated into English. She has continued working in the field of connecting literature, authoritarianism and censorship and recently presented a paper at the University of Teikyo (Germany) on "Echoes of Pinochet", detention in two Chilean authors - Ariel Dorfman and Isabel Allende - and in Spain (Francisco Umbral)." The paper was a success, she said, mainly because of its human concerns about General Augusto Pinochet Ugarte's trial in England and Spain, and in connection with human rights movements, neocolonialism, and intellectuals in exile: "I am very satisfied about working on these topics because it is a way of informing people about those horrible years of dictatorship and, at the same time, to look for justice to be made."