Languages, Literatures, & Cultures Theses and Dissertations

Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2785

Browse

Subject: search.filters.subject.History, Latin American

Search Results

Now showing 1 - 3 of 3
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Monsters in Paradise: The Representation of the Natural World in the Historias of Bartolome de Las Casas and Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo
    (2010) Thompson, Katherine A.; Harrison, Regina; Spanish Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    In the years following Columbus's landfall, European efforts to describe the physical reality of a hitherto unknown hemisphere led to profound epistemological changes. As recent studies by Canizares Esguerra and Barrera-Osorio have shown, early Spanish accounts of New World nature reflect an unprecedented emphasis on empirical methods of acquiring and systematizing knowledge of the natural world, contributing to the emergence of natural history and ultimately the Scientific Revolution. Sixteenth century texts were not, however, "scientific" in a modern sense. Empirical observation was shaped by scholastic and humanistic philosophy, and mingled with wondrous images derived from classical and medieval sources; these various discourses combined in ways that were colored by the authors' ideological perspectives on the justice of the Spanish conquest. This dissertation examines the interaction between proto-scientific empiricism and inherited epistemologies in descriptions of the natural world in the histories of Bartolome; de Las Casas and Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo. While contemporary historians of science acknowledge the importance of these works, they rarely engage in detailed textual analyses. Literary critics, on the other hand, only infrequently concentrate on the role of proto-scientific discourse. Rabasa has studied several natural images in both authors, Myers and Carrillo Castillo have examined the role of empiricism in Oviedo, and Wey Gomez and Padron have studied geographical representations, but few studies have focused exclusively on Las Casas's and Oviedo's portrayals of the natural world in its totality. This dissertation analyzes how the tension between discursive modes produced contrasting images, paradisiacal and stable in the case of Las Casas and liminal or "monstrous" in the case of Oviedo. Chapter One outlines the intellectual formations of both authors; Chapter Two examines spatial and geographical constructs; Chapter Three centers on flora and fauna; Chapter Four concentrates on food and agriculture; and Chapter Five looks at concepts of Nature as active agent. In each of these areas, Las Casas's and Oviedo's attempts to describe unfamiliar and often anomalous New World natural phenomena stretched, altered, and at times subverted existing concepts of the natural world in ways that would have implications for future notions of American nature.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Historias que regresan: Topología y renarración en la segunda mitad del siglo XX mexicano
    (2007-05-15) Ruisánchez, José Ramón; Aguilar Mora, Jorge; Spanish Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    This dissertation attempts to re-read the crucial texts of seven Mexican narrators of the second half of the twentieth century --Juan Rulfo´s Pedro Páramo, Carlos Fuentes´ La muerte de Artemio Cruz, José Agustín´s De perfil, Elena Poniatowska´s La noche de Tlatelolco, Carlos Monsiváis´ Entrada libre and Juan Villoro´s El disparo de argón-- in their intersection with historical events of the same time period. It explores the question of how did these books create a counterhegemonic historiography that successfully displaced the official and massmediatic versions, shedding light into the areas that privileged by them, and unsilencing what these dominant narratives muted. Basically this entails thinking the density of the intrinsically literary as a way to create topological spaces, i.e. texts that include both the I of the narrator(s) and of the reader, thus presenting far more complex versions of historical events. This kind of textuality forces, instead of a linear narrations that explains away, a work of re-narration that involves a plurivocity of senses that never cease to emanate from the texts. In each chapter I concentrate on what makes each book different from the rest, thus, creating book-specific theories that tense the overarching topological-renarrative general conceptualization.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    "...bajo el tumulto no hay nada": Formas para el mal en las literaturas hispanoamericanas del siglo XIX.
    (2007-03-28) Ponce-Ortiz, Esteban; Aguilar Mora, Jorge; Sosnoswski, Saúl; Spanish Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    The idea of evil is a cornerstone where different discourses have come into contact. This idea has touched philosophic discourses as well as medical and psychiatric ones, and it is part of the every day speech of ordinary people. The general opinion is that human beings are a defined species whose conscience has the power to more or less locate without difficulty where evil and good exist. Therefore, there is a social need to locate the place of evil, and this need allows the fixation of "that place" within the political and religious discourses. In this sense, evil, one of the most complex concepts, became one of the most manipulated categories at the service of power and the authoritative order. This dissertation deconstructs the fabrication process of evil's images, and the manipulative Latin America's fabric of morals trapped on the dialectic process among liberal and conservative political factions. The bipolarities Church - State, individuality - society, or rationality - instinct, among others, are reviewed as a complex set of tensions. Such tensions appeared peculiarly exposed in poetic works despite their cryptic nature. Poetry is used as a tool to unveil the same phenomenon in non-poetic texts that construct an apparently coherent political discourse. Multiple poetic and literary representations of evil have replicated the foundational narrative that centers on a dilemma for human beings: to choose between individual impulse and the restraint of public morals. Literature in Latin America shows diverse poetic notions of evil, from the orthodox Catholic idea to the materialist denial of the existence of evil. Between these two poles, other approaches arose usually in agreement with political affiliations that nevertheless proved inconsistent allowing for the proliferation of unorthodox positions. The study focuses on selected poetry works by Andrés Bello ("Las fantasmas"), Esteban Echeverría ("El ángel caído"), José Eusebio Caro (selection), Juan León Mera (selection), Rubén Darío ("El coloquio de los centauros") and José Martí (Versos libres).