Languages, Literatures, & Cultures Theses and Dissertations
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Item ANTÍGONAS EXILIADAS DE LA GUERRA CIVIL DE LAS ESPAÑAS (1936-1999): CONCHA MÉNDEZ Y ERNESTINA DE CHAMPOURCIN(2019) Bort Caballero, María de la Luz; Naharro-Calderón, José María; Spanish Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) left a marked influence on the culture and literature of contemporary Spain. After Franco violently toppled the Second Spanish Republic, those with progressive ideas were persecuted, executed, and more than a half a million were forced into a nearly forty-year diaspora. These displacements left diverse traces buried in private memories and certain literary and cultural practices. Despite active research in the last four decades, there are still untapped questions and silences. Particularly, works by exiled women writers and intellectuals that have been relegated to the margins. They offer unexplored spaces of memory and insights into the experiences of forced uprootings. Through poets Concha Méndez (1898-1986) and Ernestina de Champourcin (1905-1999), this thesis delves into geographies of memory, and seeks to broaden the relevance of poetry written in exile, biased by the male canon and its scholarship. It posits the recognition of fresh and close readings of repression and resistance while looking through the violet lenses of equity. These poets refused to abandon their own voices or be silenced due to their marginalized condition as women and exiles. The figure of the classical archetype, Antigone, and the dialogic theories of María Zambrano, allow for a further exchange with these authors’ poetry, oral testimonies and remembrances. The entombment of Antigone, for Zambrano, represents both a challenge and a liberation where expulsion is redeemed by the affirmation of the feminine self. Even though these women were banished to the same location, Mexico, D.F., Concha Méndez offers insights into the study of the plight of her terminal exiles. Meanwhile, Ernestina de Champourcin represents the possibility of interrogating a reconstruction of exile as she attempts a definite return to Spain. However, both voices and experiences coexist within the trauma of loss, solitude, survival, a search for refuge, and the reinvention of oneself. They call for a review and rethinking of categories such as inner exile, and propose new multidisciplinary lenses in order to read alternative discourses of exodus in a feminine mode.Item MARKET BEHAVIOR IN THE POST-TRANSITIONAL NARRATIVE OF RAFAEL CHIRBES AND BELÉN GOPEGUI(2018) Giller-Wilde, Anne; Naharro-Calderon, Jose Maria; Spanish Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation attempts to identify pertinent literary strategies found in the Spanish capitalist contemporary narrative. Having traced patterns like the stock market’s pendular movements in the Spanish post-Franco Transitional narrative of Rafael Chirbes and Belén Gopegui, this thesis considers similar thematic and stylistic repetitions deriving from the 19th Century Spanish Realist and Naturalist Novel and the Post-War period of the Civil War (1939-1975), characteristics which manifest themselves cumulatively in the novels of Chirbes and Goegui. Taking into account economic and market theories, and borrowing R.N. Elliott’s wave theory terminology for charting of market data and analysis of numerical data over time, the thesis considers qualitative literary fluctuations analogous to the temporal structures of stock market prices which occur through the history of trading. Due to differing experiences in the aforementioned periods, male and female authorship are considered separately in the two periods anterior to the post-Franco Transition. The dissertation also relies on theories of memory, history and group psychology, concepts close to formulations found in theories such as those of Prechter, Frost, Ortega y Gasset, Ricoeur, etc. It proposes that the novels of Chirbes and Gopegui, because of their discernible temporally ascending intertextual articulation, are analogous to the fifth wave of Elliott’s five-wave market cycle, which he termed social movement and whose momentum was stimulated by collective social emotion or Prechter’s social mood. In Chirbes and Gopegui, the underlying social mood is one of indignation and resentment whose manifestation can be traced from the late 19th-Century, to the Post-War period under the dictator Francisco Franco, culminating in the Post-Transitional novel, in which a generational rift rooted in socio-economic inequality is indicative of the unhealed wounds from the Spanish Civil War. The novels from the three time periods are also of an economic nature, treating human engagement with money and its consequences. Chirbes’ and Gopegui’s protagonists are theoretically a return to the universal protagonist in the novels of Benito Pérez Galdós, but who embody the socio-economic concerns of the 21st Century, completing a literary social movement.Item 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.Item ENTRE EL DESEO Y EL PUDOR, EL AMOR HEREOS EN LA NOVELA SENTIMENTAL: GRISEL Y MIRABELLA DE JUAN DE FLORES(2017) Eldredge, Ginette Alomar; Benito-Vessels, Carmen; Spanish Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In the studies about Medieval Spain, only men were believed to be susceptible to amorous passion or lovesickness. I propose that a more nuanced and complete understanding of women’s roles and actual behavior can be reached by analyzing the same medical and philosophical treatises that deny them the possibility of suffering from lovesickness. In fact, my readings of texts such as Grisel y Mirabella (ca. 1475), Celestina (1499) and Tristán de Leonís (1501), demonstrate that women’s behavior in literary representations is guided by the same symptoms experienced by lovesick men, symptoms that women sometimes suffer even more intensely than men. The topic of women’s lovesickness and the rhetorical devices used to depict the power and influence of women in medieval Spanish literature has not been formally studied due to the misjudgment that this malady was an exclusively male condition. This study shows that women's roles in Juan de Flores' sentimental romance Grisel y Mirabella (1495) were influenced by lovesickness or amor hereos. I also discuss how linguistic and narrative theories, as well as historical rhetoric about sexuality from the time of this text, helps us to understand how lovesickness influenced the female discourse created by Juan de Flores in the late Middle Ages. In doing so, I argue that the female characters were an alterity of power to their real counterparts in society. In some narratives they are resistant within the text, in others they struggle to act upon their desire without fearing the moral and social consequences.Item Legados de Guerra Civil en "Las Españas": infancias, exilios y memorias.(2017) Gomez-Martin, Maria; Naharro-Calderón, Jose María; Spanish Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation examines Spanish Republican Exile’s second generation‘s literary production in Mexico after the Civil War (1936-1939): a selected group among “the children of war,” born in the homeland before 1934. Even if they diverge in literary genres or stylistics, all these authors share their own traumatic traces and violent conflict experiences. Therefore, it is essential to analyze the effects of this trauma in order to understand the lost Spanish imaginaries that these children recreated in their works. Likewise, it is fundamental to acknowledge their nepantla liminal condition (a náhuatl word for “in between”). Their double alienation and shared lack of Spanish and/or Mexican identities allowed them to recreate a new space where fiction and reality, memory and imagination converged. Specifically, these revised interpretations of selected works (Carlos Blanco Aguinaga, José de la Colina, Manuel Durán, Tere Medina Navascués, Nuria Parés, Luis Rius, Enrique de Rivas, Roberto Ruiz, Tomás Segovia, and Ramón Xirau) are based on exile as existential discourse transfigurations, as well as their own transient beings’ complex introspections. But we also highlight Roberto Ruiz’s resistance to traumatic expatriations by projecting a narrative of transnational transcendence. KEYWORDS: Spanish Civil War legacies, children, exile, second generation, trauma, memory exiles, memories.Item Compañeros del exilio: Una cartografía de resistencia después de la Guerra Civil española(2017) Taylor, Kathryn; Naharro-Calderón, José María; Spanish Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation studies the cultural production of three intellectual couples following the Spanish Civil War. Using a variety of genres, my project explores and problematizes traditional approaches to the study of literary and artistic productions in the Post-Civil War period. While previous studies of women’s texts have often been limited to describing feminine difference and noting the oblivion and exclusion of female voices from the canon, I argue that women’s voices need to be considered as part of a larger cultural discourse. By establishing a dialogue among texts created by literary couples, we see the variety and complexity of experiences and responses both during and after the war. Also, while traditional approaches have studied the texts produced in exile separately from those created in Spain, I include texts written in both territorial Spain and exile. Through an examination of responses and strategies of resistance utilized in both spaces, I challenge both the idea that Inner Spain was left with a cultural void after the exodus of 1939, and the myth that there was no communication between the interior and exterior of Spain. The first chapter reconsiders the works of María Teresa León in relation to her husband, Rafael Alberti. León’s literary persona has long been overshadowed by the very public voice of Alberti, and most studies of her work have focused on this fact rather than on her extensive literary production. By looking at a number of texts by León, some of them completely overlooked by the canon, we see themes similar to Alberti’s, particularly a dedication to their political ideals and the future of Spain. In the second chapter, I question the claim that the exodus of Spanish intellectuals at the end of the Civil War left the country devoid of cultural values by studying the works of Rafael Sánchez Ferlosio and Carmen Martín Gaite. The case of Martín Gaite is notable because she achieved more fame and recognition for her work than her spouse. Although she was writing in a very conservative Spain for women, she used strategies of the fantastic to undermine patriarchal domination that clearly influenced her husband’s works. In the final chapter, I examine the work of Jomí García Ascot and María Luisa Elío, who accompanied their parents into exile in Mexico as children. While a common assumption is that they should have adapted perfectly to their new country, the uprootedness of living in exile and a phantom Spain become central themes in both of their works. Their collaboration in the mythical film on exile, En el balcón vacío, portrays the decisive influence of Juan Ramón Jiménez, an exile and inner Spain icon of his own.Item ¿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.Item "Cuando lleguemos": Narrativas Latinx del siglo XXI(2017) Garcia-Avello, Macarena; Rodriguez, Ana Patricia; Spanish Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Since 2015, the use of the term "Latinx" has become widespread on the Internet and other sociocultural contexts. Referring to Latinas/os or Hispanics in the United States, the term not only problematizes national categories associated with Latinidades but also suggests a more inclusive vision of gender and sexual identities that transcends heteronormative binaries. The "x" in “Latinx” deconstructs gender binarism, pointing to a more flexible and expansive spectrum of gender and sexual identities in the context of transnational cultural formations, or what have been associated with “genderqueer” practices. This doctoral dissertation examines the origins, developments, and deployments of the term “Latinx” in the Internet and in a corpus of US Latinx literary texts in the 21st century. In particular, I examine the formation of transnational “Latinx” identities, discourses, and micro-resistances in Days of Awe (2001) by Achy Obejas, Trace Elements of Random Tea Parties (2004) by Felicia Luna Lemus, Rosas de abolengo (2011) by Sonia Rivera-Valdés, The Cha Cha Files: A Chapina Poética (2014) by Maya Chinchilla, A Cup of Water Under My Bed: A Memoir (2014) by Daisy Hernandez, and Juliet Takes a Breath (2015) by Gabby Rivera as well as these writers’ interventions on the Web 2.0, including their websites, blogs and social media. Each of my chapters studies the production of a transnational literary space, the rejection of gender binarisms, and the resistances enacted in US Latinx literature and the Web. The convergence of these three elements in the 21st century evinces a paradigmatic shift in US Latina/o literature. While the US Latina “literary boom” and borderlands literature might have sought synthesis or resolution, or the creation of a third space associated with Gloria Anzaldúa’s “consciousness of the borderlands,” the US Latinx literary texts examined here reject narrative resolution. Instead, US Latinx texts display what Michel Foucault has called micro-resistances, an endless process that challenges and deconstructs literary conventions and social norms. Resisting resolutions, US Latinx writers further extend their work onto the Internet, using social media as tools of resistances in the Latinx community. As a way of understanding the on-going micro-resistances in US Latinx literature and social media, I read José Esteban Muñoz´s idea of "futurity" and Juana María Rodriguez´s theories on "gestures" in relation to Giorgio Agamben´s theory on potentialities.Item '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.Item The Sword and the Pen: Life Writings by Militant-Authors of the Việt Minh and Front de Libération Nationale (FLN)(2016) Hoang, Phuong; Orlando, Valerie K; French Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation examines four life writings by militant-authors of the Việt Minh and Front de la Libération Nationale (FLN): Ngô Văn Chiêu’s Journal d’un combattant Viet-Minh (1955), Đặng Văn Việt’s De la RC 4 à la N 4: la campagne des frontières (2000), Si Azzedine’s On nous appelait fellaghas (1976), and Saadi Yacef’s two-volume La Bataille d’Alger (2002). In describing the Vietnamese and Algerian Revolutions through the perspectives of combatants who participated in their respective countries’ national liberation struggles, the texts reveal that four key factors motivated the militants and led them to believe that independence was historically inevitable: (1) a philosophical, political, and ideological framework, (2) the support of multiple segments of the local population, (3) the effective use of guerrilla and psychological warfare, and (4) military, moral, and political assistance provided by international allies. By fighting for the independence of their countries and documenting their revolutionary experiences, the four militant-authors leave their mark on the world using both the sword and the pen.