Languages, Literatures, & Cultures Theses and Dissertations
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2785
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Item Espacios de mujeres españolas: memorias, represión, fragmentos y espectáculos, 1939-.(2013) Di Stravolo, Loredana Margaret; Naharro-Calderón, José María; Spanish Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)During the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) Spain suffered a huge repression, as General Francisco Franco overtook an established Republican Government and stayed in power for nearly forty years. People lived in fear; a fear so severe that they were forced to repress their memories of wartime events. After the death of Franco in 1975, Spain established a democratic-monarchic government. Again, forgetting the past was the path taken by all political parties to avoid any confrontations, as memory slipped into oblivion. In my investigation, I will contribute to the excavation of the past and help break the silence by focusing on Spanish women's spaces during the social context of the Spanish Civil War, Spain's postwar, Transition to Democracy and PostTransition. I will study theories of memory based on the research of Paul Ricoeur, Tzvetan Todorov, Pierre Nora, and Maurice Halbwachs, as a source to explore Spanish women's spaces and identities as well as their contributions, not only to society and culture but also to the literary world. The authors at the core of my study include: Carmen Laforet, Ana María Matute, Carmen Martín Gaite, María Luisa Elío, Mercé Rodoreda, Carmen Praga, Tomasa Cuevas, Dolores Medio, Dulce Chacón, Ricardo Vinyes and Javier Cercas. My research spans several genres, with novels and testimonies by and about women that use memory - individual and collective - as a vehicle to reconstruct their feminine identities and spaces. Although Spanish women were trapped in a patriarchal society during the postwar years, they were able to skillfully manipulate the imposed censorship to express themselves and their needs. The texts that I include in my investigations can be broken into three main phases: repressed memory, fragmented memory and spectacular memory. This dissertation shows how memory can serve as an agent for liberation especially for women of an oppressed and forced silence of the past.Item Desglosar la memoria. La sensibilidad del tiempo en la obra poesía de José Antonio Ramos Sucre(2009) González, Pausides; Aguilar Mora, Jorge; Spanish Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation explores the theme of memory in the poetry of José Antonio Ramos Sucre (1890-1930), a Venezuelan poet associated with the country's first literary vanguard group known as the "Generación del 18". In order to fully understand the poetry of Ramos Sucre, it is important to begin by looking at the thematic shift that occurred in his writing when his interest in the glorious past of the nation completely gave way to a poetically recreated notion of universal memory. Such displacement can be seen as a manifestation of what Walter Benjamin called "loss of experience." Through this lens, it is possible to show that the work of Ramos Sucre is part of a collective sense of grief born mainly from the Venezuelan reality of the nineteen twenties, the years during which the country was deeply entrenched in the dictatorship of Juan Vicente Gómez. The sense of grief is expressed through a poetic subject, the "I" in Ramos Sucre's poems, which is tied to a continual remembrance, and specifically to the experiences that are part of its duration. Here it becomes clear that Ramos Sucre's work was greatly influenced by the philosophy of Henri Bergson. This dissertation performs an unconventional reading of the poetic work of Ramos Sucre, in which the existence of a single self is identified, a single "I" that is capable of remembering all of his own experiences. Finally, this dissertation shows how the poetic subject in Ramos Sucre's poetry expresses his memory through writing, and how the purpose of his writing is to achieve his own oblivion. We conclude our work by considering the orphic nature of that oblivion, so that the "loss of experience", expressed through an exceptional voice of the Venezuelan vanguard such as Ramos Sucre, ends up being replaced by the need for a return to the orphic country that so captivated the imagination of the Romantic poets.Item Hechos de orillas: Nuevas expresiones de la identidad judeo-argentina contemporanea(2007-04-13) Ran, Amalia; Sosnowski, Saul; Spanish Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The search of the Jewish immigrants for a consolidated identity, social and cultural integration, and recognition within the "official" History of Argentina is narrated through a web of personal stories and family genealogies that disclose the struggles with the collective memories in order to create a new "text": the story of the Jewish Argentineans. After more than a century of Jewish presence in Argentina, what is the importance of these stories for the current identification of these individuals? What is the significance of "being a Jew" -a descendant of immigrants, the other for many generations-, and of "being Argentinean" -a citizen with full political rights and a social actor? This dissertation focuses on novels created in Argentina, Spain, France, United States and Israel by descendants of Jewish immigrants to Argentina and by those born in that country. It examines the current shifting trends in defining the personal and collective identity of Jewish Argentineans in Argentina and its Diaspora. I assess the relevance of geographical spaces, national boundaries, languages and gender for the personal identification with the "imagined community" of the argentinidad and propose different ways to resolve the identity crisis of these individuals whose personal stories had been excluded from the canonical History documented by the state. I argue that the nostalgic return to the migrant past, the revision of symbolic national patrimonies and the redefinition of the collective identity enable new self expressions, and analyze the significance of these discourses through three different perspectives: first, I examine the impact of the distance created by the passing of time. The novels use the "Wandering Jew" as a literary resort in order to dialogue with past events and present an alternative version of it. Second, I evaluate the relevance of geographical distances and linguistic gaps in the formation of the national, cultural and personal identities, upon the nostalgic return to the past, and a sense of dislocation associated with this act. Finally, I examine the importance of biographical elements, such as gender, class and generational differences, for the Jewish and Argentinean identification at the beginning of the XXI century.