Languages, Literatures, & Cultures Theses and Dissertations

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End date: 2019Subject: search.filters.subject.Latin American literature

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    El humor de la política o la política del humor en los productos culturales del México contemporáneo
    (2019) Contreras, Jose Alfredo; Long, Ryan F; Spanish Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    This dissertation analyzes humorous cultural products composed in present-day Mexico. Humor has at its core transgressive and critical qualities that challenge ordinary expectations and common perceptions. In Mexico, humorous cultural products are perceived as a frivolous and superficial expression that is subordinate to the solemnity of “serious” works. This study challenges the notion of incompatibility between humor and thought by presenting the rich tradition of humor and its constant dialogue with social and political events in Mexico. In addition, it considers works by renowned Mexican authors which demonstrate and reflect upon the subversive character of humor. This project focuses on literary works, films and political cartoons as cultural products especially suited to help understand contemporary Mexico. The focus on humorous cultural products highlights representations of politics, society and the state in a way that denaturalizes predominant narratives and discourses. The works of David Toscana emphasize the creation and imposition of social and political conventions, and simultaneously show their questionable legitimacy and fragility. In addition, novels by Bernardo Fernández (Bef), Jorge Vázquez Ángeles, Juan Pablo Villalobos, and Juan Villoro draw from the tradition of the detective novel to question the official discourse surrounding the Mexican Drug War by providing a nuanced representation in which criminality and authority are problematized. Furthermore, these novels address the relationship between neoliberal economic policies that produce inequality and environmental degradation instead of the economic development they promise. Films by Alfonso Cuarón, Luis Estrada, Fernando León Rodríguez, and Emilio Portes, provide a satirical approach to the institutions of power, such as the state, television networks, and the Church. Through the representation of historical and present events, these works depart from the hesitant satire of the 20th-century to produce cinematic works that are increasingly critical and in very direct terms. Political cartoons by Rafael Barajas Durán (el Fisgón), Cintia Bolio, Bulmaro Castellanos (Magú), Antonio Helguera, and José Hernández emphasize the democratization of the country while addressing persistent issues like gender inequality and corruption.
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    Liminal Criminality in Post-Conflict Central American Crime Fiction
    (2018) Watson, Kayla; Rodríguez, Ana Patricia; Spanish Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    In his article, “Historia Negra, Novela Negra,” Nicaraguan author, critic, and recipient of the 2017 Miguel de Cervantes Prize, Sergio Ramírez reflects on the critical and political potential of the crime fiction genre in Latin America, and specifically, in Central America. He comments that, unlike any other literary tradition, detective fiction has become a mirror that reflects transnational corruption (np). Considering crime fiction as a mirror or mimetic vehicle, as Ramírez suggests, allows us to examine how societies are represented through literature and specific genres, to interrogate relations and paradigms of power, and to analyze the power of language itself. The crime fiction or novela negra genre critiques power dynamics through the dissolution and transgression of spatial, temporal, and psychological borders. Taking Ramírez’s quote as my point of departure, I argue that crime fiction is the vehicle to critically engage liminal criminality, which I define as the individual or institutional acts of violence that transgress judicial boundaries and procedures, in post-conflict Central American literature. My corpus consists of five transnational Central American novels – Horacio Castellanos Moya’s El arma en el hombre (2001), Héctor Tobar’s The Tattooed Soldier (1998), Marcos McPeek Villatoro’s Minos (2003), Daniel Quirós’ Verano rojo (2012), and Jacinta Escudos’ El asesino melancólico (2015). In this dissertation, I analyze the novels’ protagonists’ liminal criminality, which refers to the ways in which they manipulate their positionality as criminals, crime fighters, and victims within current economic and political systems to reflect on and contest post-conflict paradigms of power. I examine individuals who are neither wholly victim nor criminal, but rather are individuals whose prior victimization manifests in displays of acts of violence and criminality in their search for justice. The liminally criminal acts include revenge, misuse of investigative tools and extra-judicial investigations, extortion, and suicide, among many others. The protagonists’ liminal criminality has the power to disrupt hegemonic processes and highlights how institutional and political wartime violence is recycled and disarticulates the possibility of achieving justice in truly post-conflict period.
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    POETIC MINERALOGY: NEW STONES FOR “THE LOOSENED HAND” BY MARTÍN ADÁN. RECONSTRUCTION AND INTERPRETATION
    (2017) Monsalve, Maria Monsalve; Aguilar Mora, Jorge; Spanish Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    Poetic Mineralogy: New Stones for “The Loosened Hand” by Martín Adán. Reconstruction and Literary Interpretation is an innovative research project in the field of literature and digital humanities that aims to collect, interpret, and make available the verses of the long and neglected poem “La mano desasida” [The Loosened Hand], by the Peruvian poet Rafael de la Fuente Benavides, better known by his pseudonym Martín Adán (1908-1985), a fundamental, yet understudied figure in Latin American literature. “La mano desasida” was written in fragments around 1950 on a variety of unusual surfaces, including napkins, cigarette papers, and notebook pages that Adán himself never put together. Collecting the verses of “La mano desasida” has been a challenge for decades and many scholars allude to the poem as a mystery or labyrinth. Portions of the extensive fragments were published in the 1960s, with a more but not entirely complete version comprising some 200 pages produced in 1980. Many verses remain as yet unpublished, and scholars continue to piece the text together, seeking to determine if there is a proper order. The structure of the poem relies on interruption, division, and incompleteness, which reveals a deep understanding of how fragments express totality, an idea that was crucial during the German Romanticism. The poem, set in the ruins of Machu Picchu, recreates the ancient conversation between Man and Stone, a key concept in the Andean culture.
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    Transgresiones espaciales y funcionales: la audiencia en la producción teatral chilena durante el periodo dictatorial de Augusto Pinochet
    (2017) Gonzalez-Contreras, Melissa; Cypess, Sandra M; Spanish Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    This dissertation focuses on the theatrical production written and staged during Augusto Pinochet’s (1915-2006) dictatorship (1973-1990) and the prevalence of the figure of the audience in the theatrical text and performance. The theatrical audience is explored as a theoretical and concrete example of the fluctuating role deemed necessary of the social audience or citizenry. The focus on the theatrical audience is informed by the expansive theatricality of the Chilean State in its sociopolitical and economic displays; by the exploration of the mechanisms by which the sociopolitical milieu and the theatrical stage and event coincide and inform each other; by the revision of the dictatorial setting through the lens of the theatrical paradigm; and by the inquiry upon the degree of participation, interaction, and influence that the sociopolitical and theatrical performances allow from their participants. This project analyzes the figure of the theatre critic of the period as a means to apprehend the experience of this particular type of audience, but most importantly it explores the spatial and functional transgressions of the theatrical audience in six plays that, in addition to portraying the shifting conception of the participants in the theatrical event, are also indicative of the formal innovations of the Chilean theater of the period: Hojas de Parra (1977) by Jaime Vadell and José Manuel Salcedo, Baño a baño (1978) by Jorge Vega, Guillermo de la Parra and Jorge Pardo, Redoble fúnebre para lobos y corderos (1981) by Juan Radrigán, Cinema Utoppia (1985) by Ramón Griffero, Lo que está en el aire (1986) by Carlos Cerda and ICTUS, and Retablo de Yumbel (1986) by Isidora Aguirre. I argue that by means of the plays’ themes and innovative theatrical techniques, dramatists and directors trigger an active role for the audience that is directly correlated with the social, political, and economic state of their context. The reconceptualization of the role and participation of the audience during the theatrical event proves to be symptomatic of the necessary social and political reorganization of Chile’s social spheres during the country’s dictatorial period.
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    ¿A QUÉ SABE LA ESCRITURA?: FIGURACIONES DEL SABOR EN LA ESCRITURA DE LA COMIDA A TRAVÉS DE COCINA CRIOLLA DE CARMEN ABOY VALLDEJULI, LOS CINCO SENTIDOS DE TOMÁS BLANCO Y LAS COMIDAS PROFUNDAS DE ANTONIO JOSÉ PONTE
    (2017) Ocasio, Monica Ocasio; Quintero-Herencia, Juan Carlos; Spanish Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    This thesis traces the relation between food and the double meaning of saborear: simultaneously flavor and savor, as a means of thinking about the production of a culinary image that reproduces and partakes of a specific sensible life. The sensible, in this thesis, is approached from what Emanuele Coccia proposes in his book, Sensible life: A Micro-onthology of the Image, as: “the Being of forms when they are outside, in exile from their proper place” (21). I interpret el sabor (flavor) as the moment from which food is imagined, taken out of its “place” (be that a recipe or a prepared dish) by some writing and we begin associating and producing new images, starting with the tongue, what is heard, smelled, and remembered. This thesis will look specifically at Carmen Aboy Valldejuli’s Cocina Criolla (1954), Tomás Blanco’s Los cinco sentidos (1955), and Antonio José Ponte’s Las comidas profundas (1997) and how the saborear leads to new understandings of the culinary image.
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    Una mirada que incomoda. Preguntas para pensar en y alrededor de Mario Levrero y su obra
    (2017) Mora Quintero, Norman; Demaría, Laura; Spanish Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    Using “discomfort” (incomodidad) as an axis term, this paper traces and analyzes the ways in which Mario Levrero’s works challenge the categories of authorship, discourse, and work (of art). With this in mind, I examine how Levrero’s authorial figure and works confront and disrupt the institutional and cultural production, distribution and experience of literary/cultural objects in four different instances: the dislocation of the supremacy of the author, the disarticulation of the idea of work of art, the analysis of the bodily experience of reading, and the reimagining of the social and shared urban space.
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    'Irishness' in Caribbean and Latin American Literature: The Diasporic and Liminal
    (2017) Glynn, Douglas Michael; Cypess, Sandra M; Spanish Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    My dissertation examines representations of the diasporic Irish within the varied literary imaginaries of the Caribbean and Latin America and argues that these representations create a literary paradigm surrounding ‘Irishness’. The project begins by offering a racialized historical overview of the Irish commencing with the conquest of Ireland and following up to the modern day. I then relate observations elucidated by this overview to current conceptions of Irish identity while specifying many of the diaspora spaces to which the transatlantic Irish arrived. I utilize a transamerican approach to literature which permits cross-cultural and multilingual readings of texts that would otherwise remain in isolation to each other. Putting my study into dialogue with scholars like Robin Cohen, William Safran, Avtar Brah and Laura Zuntini de Izarra, I define the terms ‘diaspora’ and ‘diaspora space’ while seeking to underscore the corollaries between these concepts and representations of the Irish in diaspora. After establishing the ways in which I understand and use these terms, I employ the works of Victor Turner and Sandor Klapcsik, among others, to lay down my theoretical framework of the liminal and liminality. In doing so I directly interconnect theories of diaspora and liminality which provides a unique theoretical perspective, and later interject my own nascent theory of the ‘figure’ to better deconstruct the Irish characters under study. Reading a selected corpus of literature from writers such as American-Guatemalan Francisco Goldman, Cuban Zoé Valdés, Jamaican Erna Brodber, Mexican Patricia Cox, American Carl Krueger, and Argentines Rodolfo Walsh and Juan José Delaney, through the liminal process allows me to analyze literature from multiple perspectives while decentering previous literary criticism that has not recognized this multiplicity embedded in liminal readings of narratives. Over the breadth of the project I look to these and other scholars in my efforts to (re)define, dissect, work and wield the terms ‘diaspora’, ‘liminal’ and ‘liminality’ in a variety of fashions, adding to them my own ideas of perpetual liminality, while extracting and examining the representations of ‘Irishness’ found through each of my textual analyses.
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    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.
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    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.
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    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.