Languages, Literatures, & Cultures Theses and Dissertations
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Item Alan Pauls: Poéticas del anacronismo(2016) Charry, Luis F.; Demaría, Laura; Merediz, Eyda; Spanish Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Alan Pauls (b. 1959) is an Argentine novelist and essayist. His works have barely been studied outside of Latin America; therefore, my work will be one of the first to focus critically and theoretically on his oeuvre and raise awareness of his importance to Contemporary Latin American Literature. The fundamental concept of my thesis is anachronism, which I develop by investigating the ways in which the present and the past are interconnected in the same temporal space. My dissertation has two interconnected parts. In the first, I propose an approach to Pauls’ literary work that emphasizes its engagement with literary and cultural theory. Specifically, I analyze how Pauls’ first novels –El pudor del pornógrafo (1984), El coloquio (1989), Wasabi (1994)– are strongly influenced by various theoretical discourses, especially the work of Roland Barthes. The guiding question of my dissertation’s first part is how one can narrate a fictional text without strictly appropriating narrative devices. Namely, I suggest that Pauls’ conception of literature is inevitably related to critical discourse. In the second part, I study a trilogy that Pauls wrote about the 1970s in Argentina: Historia del llanto (2007), Historia del pelo (2010), and Historia del dinero (2013). Here I focus on how Pauls uses the 1970s to propose a new conceptualization of the “political.” For Pauls, the “political” is not represented in the great events of a particular time but rather in the “effects” that these events produce; these effects are minor, almost imperceptible, and for that reason much more powerful as a literary event mechanism per se. From my point of view, this new conceptualization of the “political” contains in itself a problematic issue: the articulation between personal experience, history, and fiction. In conclusion, this interrelation between theory, politics, history, and fiction defines the path of my dissertation, which would have been just the “starting point” in my personal attempt to reconfigure the map of the Latin American literary contemporaneity.Item EN BUSCA DE UN PAÍS INTERIOR: LA NOVELA LÍRICA VANGUARDISTA EN GILBERTO OWEN, ROSAMEL DEL VALLE Y HUMBERTO SALVADOR(2015) Gonzalez, Norman Alberto; Aguilar Mora, Jorge; Spanish Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Scholars have shown a tendency to analyze the so-called “historical avant-garde” from a perspective of "shock". This vanguardist gesture seeks to destabilize a mode of thinking and doing art in the early part of the twentieth century. If there is indeed an inevitable initial historical moment when the avant-garde becomes iconoclastic and distinguishes themselves in a patricidal gesture, there must exist another moment when the contributions of the avant-garde can be seen to challenge not only the formal aspects of the cultural tradition, but also its contents. Few authors have considered the avant-garde writings in dialogue with a tradition that began in the nineteenth century or with other contemporary aesthetics —often opposed in style and approach. One purpose of this work is to locate other aesthetic affinities with the avant-garde movement to better define how they differ and create their own genealogies as well as enter into dialogue with each other. In order to achieve this I propose a reading of the context in which one can see the necessity to seek a new expression for the spiritual demands of the time. One of these new spiritual demands is addressed by the so-called lyrical novel, which can be considered as a subgenre of the literary vanguards. Thus, by analyzing three Latin American writers: Gilberto Owen (Mexico, 1904-1952), Rosamel del Valle (Chile, 1901-1965) and Humberto Salvador (Ecuador, 1909-1982) and their avant-garde lyrical novels written between 1928 and 1931, I will identify what can be considered new, which elements characterize these novels, and how their content challenges the traditional narrative genre and creates new sensibilities. The avant-garde fundamentally breaks with the aesthetics of representation, leading to broader ontological, epistemological, and political ruptures. The aim of avant-garde literature is to regain the dynamic aspect of reality that was lost through the domination of rationalism. We are able to explore this re-appropriation through unique approaches to the elements of imagination, the occurrence (or not) of events, and experience and see how the authors were able to contribute to the radical critique of aesthetic beliefs and notions of reality at the beginning of the twentieth century.Item ArteletrA: The Politics of Going Unnoticed in the Latin American Sixties(2014) Bartles, Jason A.; Demaría, Laura; Spanish Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation focuses on the long 1960s in Latin America to ask about forms of political and ethical interventions that went unnoticed in the cultural debates of the era. Within the vast Latin American cultural markets of the sixties, I study four authors who works were overlooked both critically and popularly at the time. Calvert Casey (1924-1969), a gay Cuban-American writer, worked and published in Havana from 1958 to 1965 when he went into self-exile. Juan Filloy (1894-2000), the Argentine "writer from three centuries," returned from a thirty year editorial silence in the sixties. Héctor Manjarrez (1945) returned to Mexico City from London and began to publish only after the massacre at Tlatelolco. Armonía Somers (1914-1994), a female, Uruguayan writer of dark and erotic tales, was originally dismissed by many of her contemporaries for her provocative themes. What unites these diverse authors is a common problematic, unique to them, which appears throughout their works--a practice I call "the politics of going unnoticed." Political philosophy from Plato to Rancière highlights the process of passing from invisibility to visibility within the public sphere. However, these authors imagine subjects who purposefully avoid the spotlight and still engage in dissensus. While reading the Latin American cultural archive against the grain, my analysis is guided by three questions: (1) How can a seemingly unimportant subject enact a radical critique while, paradoxically, going unnoticed by dominant institutions? (2) How do these authors promote an ethics that open dialogues among political adversaries in a democratic framework without relying on exclusive categories? And (3), what are the formal strategies they employ to reflect the politics and ethics of going unnoticed? I contend that these authors imagine new possibilities for political action far from entrenched ideologies (e.g., Peronism, the Cuban Revolution) and violent acts of aggression or repression (e.g., the Tupamaros, the massacre at Tlatelolco). Moreover, they generate the conditions of possibility for agonistic, democratizing transformations of existing institutions and epistemologies that exceed exclusive national and identitarian boundaries.Item Violencia, retórica y persuasión: revisión del debate en torno a la evangelización indígena(2014) Rodriguez, Maggy; Merediz, Eyda M.; Spanish Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)During the sixteenth century, true piety and virtue became issues of primary importance for the emergent Spanish imperial design which sought to define Catholic Orthodoxy and to evangelize the people of the newly discovered regions of America. The antagonists of the famous Contienda de Valladolid (1550), Bartolomé de Las Casas and Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, were involved in responding to the emperor's inquiry about the legality of the war that Spaniards were waging against the indigenous people of the New World. The legal and political implications of their opposing arguments have been thoroughly studied by numerous scholars. Nevertheless, the main focus of this study is to explore the ways in which the implicit script of their work contributed to the religious debates of the century. The ultimate question debated in Valladolid, I argue, was to inquire into and develop the methods and rules on how to preach and promote the Holy Catholic Faith in the New World, which was concerned, above all, with perfecting the life of the spirit. These evangelizing ideas appear in Sepulveda's Demócrates Segundo as well as the summarized content of Las Casas' De unico modo, whose doctrine served as the basis for his legal arguments during the dispute. Such emphasis reveals that, although Sepúlveda and Las Casas had differing interpretations of Aristotle's ideas and opposing views on the legitimacy of the conquest and colonization of America, the authors agreed on the need to readdress evangelization, given the new challenges posed by the cuarta terrae. This dissertation recovers the missionary plan outlined in the Valladolid Debate and examines the nuanced differences of the methods proposed by Las Casas and Sepúlveda. It suggests that Sepulveda proposes a quasi-natural way of Christianizing Amerindians that requires their submission to the Spanish government so that, by imitating a superior model, the naturally inferior beings would rise to the excellence prescribed by the law of nature and become Christians. On the other hand, Las Casas advocates a more natural way of arriving to the truth through a cognitive model that relies on their reasoning rather than on emotions, as was recommended by the ecclesiastical rhetoric of Fray Luis de Granada.Item Quevedo y su recepción y huella en la poesía del Siglo XX (De Rubén Darío a José Emilio Pacheco)(2013) Echazú, Alejandra; Sánchez Martínez de Pinillos, Hernán; Spanish Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The metaphysical and love poetry of the Spanish writer Francisco de Quevedo (1580-1645) has exceeded all the dynamics that writing at that time had imposed: its rhetoric shows the intimacy of the poet's feelings and his anguish in a way that it approaches him to the existentialist pain of a contemporary man. Quevedo was valued as a Humanist thinker and an original concept-maker both, in his own life as well as in his writings; thus, Quevedo's verbal inventions, ideological perspectives, and innovative expressions that renewed the Petrarchan and Cancioneril traditions, have been intensely reread by Contemporary poets. First, I delimit some of Quevedo's poetics that called the attention of 20th Century poetic generations, contextualizing them in the Baroque period. Stemming from Dámaso Alonso's seminal study, "El desgarrón afectivo en la poesía de Quevedo," I focus on the term "affective tearing" in the context of Renaissance anthropology (affectus is defined as the rhetorical, semantic and syntactical lyrical expressions that manifest the breakup of the analogical traditional world view). The influence of Quevedo at the beginning of the 20th century is explored in the second chapter in the figure of the Nicaraguan poet Rubén Darío through the legacies of the Baroque time during the Modernist period. Having broken the link between the symbol and the symbolized, Darío had to reformulate some poetic concepts. In the third chapter, I concentrate on the term "sincerity" as a rhetorical trope that connects passion and intellect, after Gracián's theory of poetical language, a motto for the avant guard poets, both Spanish and Latin Americans, living in Europe before WWII. I explore their poetics and the legacies from the Baroque and the Romanticism as they had to work in a diverse symbolic horizon, very different from their predecessors. In the fourth chapter I focus on the poetic dialogue between Quevedo and the Peruvian poet César Vallejo regarding the transcendence in death and through the body. Finally, I trace the legacy of Quevedo in the second half of the 20th century in the poems of Pablo Neruda, Jorge Luis Borges and Octavio Paz. Some of Quevedo's topics are glossed, others are rethought, others are adapted to new contexts, but all these poets recognize their debt to the Spanish Baroque poet. In order to demonstrate that Quevedo's poetry continues to be reread and rewritten, I conclude my study with the works published in the 21st century by the Mexican poet José Emilio Pacheco.Item Guerra de Canudos y Guerra Cristera: Apocalipsis, profecía y subversión de la historia en Vargas Llosa, Rulfo, García Márquez y Garro(2014) Gonzales, Oscar; Cypess, Sandra; Spanish Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The objective of this study is to analyze the historical novel The War of the End of The World (1981) by Mario Vargas Llosa and the novel Pedro Paramo (1955) by Juan Rulfo by discussing apocalyptic motifs and historical themes that influence the texts. Both novels present the gradual decay and destruction of the religious communities of Canudos and Comala--literary towns at the intersection of fiction and history. Vargas Llosa models the town of Canudos on historical events related to the War of Canudos (1896-1897) in northeast Brazil. Juan Rulfo's depiction of Comala is partially influenced by the Cristero War (1926-1929) in western Mexico. Both Vargas Llosa and Rulfo use apocalyptic imagery and prophecy to subvert the official history of the events, much like John of Patmos did in the Book of Revelation. The Peruvian novelist is influenced by both Biblical and medieval apocalyptic imagery. Rulfo's novel is influenced by apocalyptic pre-Columbian mythology. The authors use apocalyptic imagery to question official accounts and the history of both events. Vargas Llosa questions the account of Os Sertões (1902) by Euclides da Cunha and presents an alternative point of view of the events. On the other hand, Juan Rulfo questions the Mexican Revolution (1910-1920) and the historical representation of the Cristero War. Both the Canudos War and the Cristero insurrection represented peasant revolts under the guise of religious uprisings, and many complex sociological, political, cultural, and economic factors treated in the novels---from inequality, to rural-urban-ethnic divides, and the need for agrarian reform---spurred the conflicts. The dissertation also discusses the use of apocalyptic imagery in the representation of the literary town of Macondo in One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) by García Márquez and the town of Ixtepec in Recollections of Things to Come (1963) by Elena Garro.Item Towards Cross-Border Hispanic Theatre: Breaking Barriers of Language, Space, and Time - Bilingual Website (English-Spanish) www.hispanictheatre.org(2013) Morales Chacana, Lina J.; Messinger Cypess, Sandra; Spanish Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The need for critical reflection and dissemination of cross-border Hispanic theatre is the main focus of this research. Through this work I explore the influence of the paradigm shift from modernity to postmodernity in Western and Hispanic drama. I also delve into the impact of the new systems of representation of history and interdisciplinary studies on Hispanic theatre. In addition, I address the interconnections between history and literature, which have modified dramatic narrative processes and techniques as well as the construction of characters. In conclusion, I present a bilingual (Spanish-English) web site, www.hispanictheatre.org, devoted to cross-border Hispanic theater. This is a type of theatre that, in essence, reconstructs history, revises canons, problematizes discourses, establishes relationships between local and global issues, and takes into account the audience context; it is a transmedia creation produced by collaborative efforts, and is committed to breaking barriers of language, space, and time.Item Escritura, derecho y esclavitud: Francisco José de Jaca ante el nomos colonial(2013) Moreno-Orama, Rebeca; Merediz, Eyda M.; Spanish Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation concentrates on the relationship between law, literature, and slavery in the Hispanic Caribbean of the Early Modern Period. My analysis is based on two letters and a treatise, Resolución sobre la libertad de los negros y sus originarios, en estado de paganos y después ya cristianos (1681), that were written by Capuchin friar Francisco José de Jaca, while he was serving as a missionary in the Caribbean region. His writings set the stage for a discussion of how Spanish hegemonic legal thinking is challenged and redefined from an alternative transatlantic narrative. The concept of nomos colonial that I introduce in this dissertation denotes the symbolic normative space originated by the legal justifications of the Spanish conquest and colonization. Through the exploration of the nomos colonial, my project focuses on how the rhetoric of law served simultaneously as a discursive practice of imperial domination and of cultural resistance. By reclaiming the aesthetic and conceptual originality of Francisco José de Jaca, a neglected author who demonstrated the illegality of Amerindian and African slavery, the dissertation reveals the epistemological shift produced to (re)accommodate the colonial subjects within the nomos colonial. By situating Jaca's contributions in a counter-hegemonic legal corpus that dates back to Antón de Montesinos and Bartolomé de Las Casas, the research re-envisions the ideological debates about slavery in the 16th and 17th centuries. Ultimately, my goal is to reconsider some foundational fictions of the Caribbean world--Amerindian legal status, slavery, and Black subjectivity--by underscoring the relevance of an intellectual whose discourse was constructed from the tension between the Spanish legal tradition and the colonial experience.Item Está en llamas el jardín natal: la poética de Marosa di Giorgio(2013) Campero, Maria Elena; Aguilar-Mora, Jorge; Spanish Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In the work of Marosa di Giorgio (1932-2004), the experience of Uruguayan countryside, in which she lived up until her teenage years, leaves an indelible trace that becomes the core of a peculiar literature. Her prolific work, which includes poems in prose and narrative, has often astonished and disoriented critics. Few of them have carried out a thorough analysis of her complete work. Instead, for many years, di Giorgio has remained classified as a "strange poet" and her books have been approached by critics in a tangential and incomplete way. One of the goals I intend to achieve is to go beyond this point. First, I focus on the city-countryside tension present in di Giorgio's poetic compilation Los papeles salvajes as related to her personal story but also as a triggering force that shapes her writing. Although her fictional universe is eminently rural, I examine how the presence of the city arises in the horizon as the final cause responsible for the disappearance of her beloved childhood space. I show how di Giorgio re-signifies shocks and brightness/light, both directly related to the space of the city, and places them in her family's small farm in order to transform the rural landscape into a territory that does not bear exclusively the economic value imposed by the city. By doing so, di Giorgio presents this rural domain as complete otherness in relation to the city, protecting it from the city's threat. Second, I analyze the wild and incredible erotic encounters that take place in nature, a repeated topic of all her narrative, as an experience of otherness and becoming. Special emphasis is placed on her novel Reina Amelia since it presents how otherness, in the erotic field, is always punished in the city. Finally, I argue that the eroticism proposed by di Giorgio is of peculiar divine nature. Finally, I explore in depth how otherness and the experience of becoming/metamorphosis intertwine as a key force of di Giorgio's literary universe. In addition, I study how this conjunction of otherness and becoming/metamorphosis manifests itself in di Giorgio's particular writing style.Item Narrativas de la suspensión: una mirada contemporánea desde la literatura y el cine argentinos(2013) Gordon, Rocio F.; Demaria, Laura; Spanish Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation focuses on the theoretical and philosophical concepts of narration, experience, and the contemporary. In this study, I analyze works of Argentinean writers and film directors from the last two decades, principally those of Sergio Chejfec, Martín Rejtman, Lisandro Alonso, Diego Meret and Lucrecia Martel. The dissertation examines how being contemporary is not only a condition of the present, but also a critical confrontation with our own time. Through the concept of narrativa I argue that seemingly plotless texts can still narrate experience even though experience can no longer be grasped - as elaborated by Walter Benjamin and Giorgio Agamben. As I understand it, suspensión refers to the possibility of narrating experience, in spite of the inherently ephemeral and fleeting nature of human experience in the present age. Suspensión is related to a way of narrating experiences without following a storyline because these narratives do not progress towards an end. They are not attached to any specific objective, a position that I connect to Deleuze and Guattari`s views on desire analyzing capitalism. For these authors, in our current society all desires are attached to a specific object of desire. Through the detachment of the narration from a linear plot and an end these narratives break from the dominant impositions of capitalism. My dissertation explores how the selected works, by opposing the rapid pace of the technological and information era, ―suspend‖ the linear plot. They choose instead to narrate through duration, which I define as a narrative that lingers in images (Chapter 2, Alonso y Chejfec), through inertia, a narrative that progresses following automated characters and moves forward through disjointed situations (Chapter 3, Rejtman), and through pause, a narrative that emphasizes inactivity and passivity (Chapter 4, Martel and Meret). In the context of entrenched neoliberalism and globalization, I propose these are three different aesthetics that show the sense of emptiness and lack of shock within our contemporary society. At the same time, I see these aesthetics as a way of dealing with the aforementioned features as they shed light on the shadows and obscurities of the present.