Theses and Dissertations from UMD
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New submissions to the thesis/dissertation collections are added automatically as they are received from the Graduate School. Currently, the Graduate School deposits all theses and dissertations from a given semester after the official graduation date. This means that there may be up to a 4 month delay in the appearance of a give thesis/dissertation in DRUM
More information is available at Theses and Dissertations at University of Maryland Libraries.
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Item Trastornos de la representación: el afecto en Macedonio Fernández, Antonio Di Benedetto y César Aira(2012) Lima-Vales, Dolores; Aguilar Mora, Jorge; Spanish Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In a broad sense, categories of representation provide us with the epistemological coordinates by which we come to know and perceive reality. At the beginning of the 20th century, the avant-garde unleashed a radical rupture with codified forms of representation. Throughout the next hundred years, these categories were continually interrogated by developing new literary aesthetics. Traditionally, the anti-representational nature of such texts was often studied in terms of the principles and values they opposed. However, in this dissertation, the paradigm of "affect" is used to analyze new modes of constituting sense that these narratives put forward. The notion of "affect" delineated by Gilles Deleuze in his reading of Baruch Spinoza is defined as any mode of thought that experiences an encounter with the "being of the sensible". Such an encounter eludes representation and is subject to constant variations of force and intensity. This study shows how affects produce disruptions to categories of representation and how they offer new ways for the notion of sense to emerge and transform. This dissertation explores the notion of affect within the works of three Argentinean authors: the avant-garde novel Museo de la novela de la eterna by Macedonio Fernández; the collection of stories published during the second part of the 20th century by Antonio Di Benedetto; and the contemporary novels of César Aira, written during the end of 20th century and the first decade of 21st. In each work, the distinct modes of affect that shape each narrative are investigated: passion in the work of Macedonio Fernández, idiocy in the work of Antonio Di Benedetto, and frivolity in the work of César Aira. By shining light onto the processes used to create affective sense, the study explores how the authors use encounters with the sensible to dismantle notions of identity, causality, and finality. Furthermore, this dissertation addresses how these different sensibilities relates to the epistemological and aesthetic inquiries of their times.Item Gramática de un pensamiento solitario. Lenguaje y poesía en Alfredo Gangotena(2011) Burneo, Cristina; Aguilar Mora, Jorge; Spanish Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The broadest sphere of bilingualism corresponds to the coexistence of two languages in a writer. This dissertation addresses less evident forms and realms of bilingualism in poetry. It is focused mainly on Alfredo Gangotena (Quito, 1904-1944), an Ecuadorian poet of French and Spanish expression. Through Gangotena's work, the author defines bilingualism as the individual code a bilingual writer forges through the writing process using two linguistic and cultural systems which, together, constitute the second element of his bilingual circumstance. This private language emerges as a universe with its own values and coherence as it creates its own constellation of influences and elective affinities, always within a split existential situation. Mother and second language, origin and destination, are categories subverted by the bilingual poet, whose literary and vital space becomes liminal and undetermined. Alfredo Gangotena's work is also shaped by illness. The body is the space of experience and confluence of physical suffering, anguish, inner exile and rootlessness, all expressed often through images of infirmity. Beyond a mere set of rhetoric strategies, writing is an aesthetic outlet for this circumstance. Although it cannot be confirmed if he suffered of hemophilia or any other blood disorder, Gangotena's poetic universe is built upon the image of a bleeding body. The Andes and France are not conceptually linked -at least, that is what the extant critical material would lead us to believe. The dissertation also focuses on the linkages that exist between Gangotena as an Andean poet, and the turn-of-the-century Parisian cultural environment that shaped his poetry in great measure. The author analyzes his work within a transatlantic experience of language and expatriation. Through the creation of his work, Gangotena questioned the intellectual tasks assigned to writers in Ecuador at the height of indigenism and the consolidation of the national project, being therefore perceived as a dissident, an afrancesado.