Theses and Dissertations from UMD
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Item Un asunto minúsculo: Constelaciones contemporáneas en las narrativas de lo cotidiano(2024) hernandez, daniela paz; Demaría, Laura; Spanish Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Este trabajo explora cómo lo cotidiano, conceptualizado como 'minúsculo', es representado en las obras de cinco autores contemporáneos latinoamericanos: Teoría de la gravedad, de Leila Guerriero; Leer y dormir, de Gonzalo Maier; Ómnibus, de Elvio Gandolfo; Los llanos, de Federico Falco y Ella estuvo entre nosotros, de Belén Fernández Llanos. Estas narrativas varían en contenido y estilo, pero hablan de rutinas, detalles y asuntos pequeños, como lavar platos, viajar al trabajo u ordenar la casa. El objetivo principal de este análisis es ilustrar cómo estos aspectos aparentemente irrelevantes, mundanos o imperceptibles de lo cotidiano arrojan luz sobre la complejidad del presente y sus discursos de subjetividad. Para comprender el valor de lo cotidiano se estudia, primero, la capacidad de estas escrituras para construir materialidades autónomas y vibrantes; segundo, cómo estos pequeños asuntos minúsculos ayudan a distinguir lo familiar y crear en él un espacio de experimentación para el sujeto; y tercero, cómo producen una temporalidad única e íntima que se lee como una alternativa al tiempo uniforme e industrializado. Estos tres puntos se analizan utilizando herramientas de la teoría de los afectos, nuevos materialismos y los estudios culturales de lo cotidiano. El valor de esta investigación radica en su capacidad para ofrecer un punto de vista único, que va más allá de los límites de lo literario para abarcar una reflexión más amplia sobre el presente. En una era inundada de información y perpetuamente bajo el influjo de lo nuevo, este estudio fomenta la contemplación y la reflexión, ofreciendo una pausa, un contrapunto, al ritmo frenético de la vida moderna. Este trabajo sostiene que estas narrativas crean espacios para un compromiso más deliberado e introspectivo con la realidad y promueven un cambio sutil pero transformador, lo que representa en sí mismo un acto revolucionario.Item Heterodoxia critica: Ezequiel Martínez Estrada y Néstor Perlongher(2023) Diaz, Juan Manuel; Demaria, Laura; Spanish Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The dissertation explores how marginalized discourses of identity have been a central concern in Twentieth-Century Latin American literature. I am interested in writers that have been displaced, muted, ignored, or persecuted for one reason or another: race, sexual orientation, nationality, religious belief, and language. To combine these multiple reasons of marginalization, I advance the concept of heterodoxy. Two among the many representatives of heterodoxy are Ezequiel Martínez Estrada (1895-1964) and Néstor Perlongher (1949-1992). Thus, I argue, on the one hand, that Martínez Estrada inscribes in his Radiografía de la pampa (1933) a pioneer reading of the Frankfurt School’s critical theory to completely subvert the question on civilization and barbarism. On the other hand, I discuss the role played by Perlongher’s Prosa Plebeya (1997) in the dissemination of poststructural criticism in Latin America to rethink the dichotomy through his reappropriation and resignification of concepts like corporality and desire.Item ROBERTO FONTANARROSA: HISTORIA Y LITERATURA A CONTRAPELO. INODORO PEREYRA, EL RENEGAU(2022) Battauz, Cecilia Edith; Sosnowski, Saúl; Spanish Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)As a result of Spanish colonization, nation-building in Latin America followed distinctive and diverse processes, and a protracted chronology that spanned an entire century. The new nation-states that emerged from the nineteenth century wars of Independence forged their own symbols, imagery, and foundational narratives to provide a framework to disparate populations. Throughout the continent, literature played a fundamental role in the construction of symbolic narratives, which inexorably intertwined with official national history. In Argentina, one such myth was built around the “gaucho”, the cowboy of the Pampas plains who freely roamed the countryside. Once an actual social type, the “gaucho” disappeared around the end of the 19th Century due to changes introduced by modernization as Argentina transformed and refocused its economy to supply raw materials for European industries. As a literary figure, however, the gaucho survived as the dominant character of poems, novels, and short stories that conform a unique national literary genre: Gauchesca Literature.In my dissertation I study the comics Inodoro Pereyra, el renegau by Roberto Fontanarrosa (1944-2007), which features an atypical gaucho accompanied by his loyal talking dog. I analyze how Fontanarrosa deconstructs the national literary myth of the horse riding “gaucho” unveiling the inherent racism, social injustice, and ideological manipulation it has conveyed for the last two centuries. Fontanarrosa’s creation, which appeared regularly in the Argentine press and in book format for over thirty-four years until the author’s death, not only denounces the unspoken influence this traditional figure has had in shaping Argentine society, but it also highlights the common misrepresentation of indigenous communities and the unfair treatment to which they have been, and continue to be, subjected. Using parody, humor, and caricature, the comics revise national history and canonical literature along with artifacts from contemporary popular culture, such as films and folk songs. In addition, it offers a postmodern approach to the foundational narratives of the nation. My claims are that the comics offer an ex-centric perspective and that its subversive message defies traditional views of identity as fixed forms that could be predetermined. I propose that the narrative genre of comics—still marginalized from the literary canon—constitutes an excellent medium to present an alternative and irreverent approach to the subject, since its literary standing challenges the centrality of the official canon. At the same time, the comics suggest the need to see tradition and identity as concepts under constant change, thus showing a postmodern critique to monolithic grand narratives. Although my study concerns Argentine society, I believe it to be microstructurally significant for its premises may be applied to other societies built upon national myths, such as those created by most nation-states in the Americas after gaining their independence from colonial administration and cultural hegemony.Item Potencialidades desbordadas: Comunalidad y resistencias en las fronteras mexicanas(2022) Reyes , Nidia Mariana; Long, Ryan R; Spanish Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In recent years, the intense crises of economic globalization, political polarization and escalating violence have increased the dangers faced by migrants around the world. Mexico and Central America present cases where these factors have exacerbated the precariousness and brutality suffered by undocumented migrants. My dissertation focuses primarily on the representations and practices that portray the current socio-political situation of forced migration from Mexico and Central America to the United States. As well as on the artistic responses that shed new ways of imagining the resistance of the migrant and Latinx community. The variety of responses to the migration crisis is reflected in the diversity of the materials I analyze and interpret: documentaries, websites, novels and poetry. I compare Mexican writer Yuri Herrera's novel Señales que precederán al fin del mundo (2009) with Citizen Illegal (2018), a collection of poetry by José Olivarez, an American writer born to Mexican immigrants. I also develop an analysis of the transnationally co-produced (American and Salvadoran) multimedia journalistic project Los que iban a morir se acumulan en México (2017), which I read under the theoretical guideline of Mexican writer Sara Uribe's Antígona González (2012). Finally, I study the way in which the issue of migrant disappearances on the Mexican border is treated. I analyze the documentary María en tierra de nadie (2011) by Marcela Zamora, which portrays the journey of Central American mothers searching for their missing daughters and relatives, and the website WhoisDayaniCrystal, inspired by the documentary, ¿Quién es Dayani Crystal? (2013), which deals with the process of identifying the body of an undocumented migrant found in the so-called "corridor of death", one of the hottest and most dangerous areas of the Arizona desert. My analysis of literary texts from both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border shows how the border is not only a geopolitical and economic boundary but also a confluence of times, spaces, and bodies. But above all, it is a confluence of migrants and a multiplicity of people who, despite encountering violence at the borders and the migrant path, resist through every day and/or fleeting acts. En los últimos años, las intensas crisis de globalización económica, la polarización política y la escalada de violencia han aumentado los peligros a los que se enfrentan lxs migrantes en todo el mundo. México y Centroamérica presentan casos en los que dichos factores han exacerbado los niveles de precariedad y brutalidad que sufren lxs migrantes indocumentados. Mi disertación se centra principalmente en las representaciones y prácticas que retratan la actual situación sociopolítica de la migración forzada desde México y Centroamérica hacia Estados Unidos. Así como en las respuestas artísticas que arrojan nuevas formas de imaginar la resistencia de la comunidad migrante y latinx. La variedad de respuestas a la crisis migratoria se refleja en la diversidad de los materiales que analizo e interpreto: documentales, páginas web, novelas y poesía. Por ejemplo, comparo la novela del escritor mexicano Yuri Herrera, Señales que precederán al fin del mundo (2009) con Citizen Illegal (2018), una colección de poesía de José Olivarez, un escritor estadounidense nacido de inmigrantes mexicanos. También desarrollo un análisis del proyecto periodístico multimedia coproducido transnacionalmente (estadounidense y salvadoreño) titulado Los que iban a morir se acumulan en México (2017), mismo que leo bajo la pauta teórica de Antígona González (2012) de la escritora mexicana Sara Uribe. Finalmente, estudio la manera en la que se trata el tema de las desapariciones de migrantes en la frontera mexicana. Analizo el documental María en tierra de nadie (2011) de Marcela Zamora, que retrata el viaje de madres centroamericanas que buscan a sus hijas y familiares desaparecidxs y la página web WhoisDayaniCrystal, inspirada en el documental, ¿Quién es Dayani Crystal? (2013), que trata del proceso de identificación de un cuerpo de un migrante indocumentado encontrado en el llamado "corredor de la muerte", una de las zonas más calientes y peligrosas del desierto de Arizona. Mi análisis de los textos literarios de ambos lados de la frontera entre México y Estados Unidos muestra cómo la frontera no es sólo un límite geopolítico y económico, sino también una confluencia de tiempos, espacios y cuerpos. Pero, sobre todo, es una confluencia de migrantxs y una multiplicidad de personas que a pesar de encontrar violencia en las fronteras y el camino migrante, resisten a través de actos cotidianos y/o fugaces.Item Reading the Contemporary Body in the Works or Eduardo Lalo and Rita Indiana Hernández(2021) Lewis, Matthew C; Quintero-Herencia, Juan Carlos; Spanish Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation is interested in specificities of Caribbean bodies and the strategies that are used to perform, imagine, and make sensible the textual body so that it may be read through archipelagic contexts. I posit that the multi-disciplinary works of Dominican Rita Indiana Hernández (Santo Domingo 1977) and Puerto Rican Eduardo Lalo (Cuba 1960) turn a critical and creative eye to the corporealities that have been obscured and overshadowed by exotified, mainstream, and normative bodies and their representation. I argue that we tell stories with our bodies, and, likewise, the body is a text to be performed, read and made sensible. However, what we understand for the body—its capabilities and its limits—is a direct product of how these narratives have been politically and socially constructed, appropriated, and implemented in hegemonic discourses. My intervention lies questioning what narratives and images or the body are produced and privileged in these texts: how do these corporealities become sensible and make sense of the other bodies around them? What are the potential corporeal poetics and politics that may tie these texts together? By looking at the representation of anonymous bodies, the creation of Puerto Rican body-images, and the Dominican bodies situated within primal soundscapes, I suggest that these specific texts break with both preconceived and prescribed notions of a “Caribbean identity” and what it may mean to be Caribbean. This dissertation aims to interrogate the limits of hegemonic discourses of nationality and history by engaging with the ways in which the texts of Hernández and Lalo perform their own relationship to the contemporary, always crossing and challenging limits, imagining transitive bodies in constant motion, and implementing diverse strategies to produce and inhabit contemporary intervals that fiercely reject fixed and prescriptive notions of what a Caribbean body is, or of what it is capable.Item While Opening a Family Album(2021) Rojas, Claudia; Collier, Michael; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This collection of 30 poems center vulnerability in response to the everyday interactions and concerns of a female speaker. Personal trauma is contextualized through dreams, memory, and history. These poems explore love of the self, family, and community. Issues of immigration, gender, and race frame the speaker’s experiences. While these poems are based on real life, some poems transform the real into fictionalized stories. These poems are written through various written forms: free verse, prose, fixed form. English is the primary language used with Spanish words or phrases used on occasion.Item UNDOCUMENTARY POETICS: TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY HEMISPHERIC AMERICAN POETRY BY WOMEN AND NON-BINARY POETS(2021) Knowles, Andrea; Long, Ryan; Ontiveros, Randy J; Comparative Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Undocumentary Poetics elucidates how poets from across the Americas use poetry’s form to interrogate the bounded nature of form itself, including the forms of the poem, the canon, the nation, and of recounting and knowing history. This project challenges the writing of a hemispheric canon of American poetry that, by largely overlooking women and non-binary poets, especially and including those of color, continues to leave dominant, white hetero-patriarchal forms intact—despite the hemispheric framework’s inherent potential to uncover minor literary networks across borders and destabilize those deep-rooted systems of control. The contemporary poetry I examine confronts those systemic erasures by tackling the constraints of genre and form. The project’s focus on form and historical power brings it into conversation with recent discussions of historical and documentary poetry. The term “documentary” has been applied to a range of poems, from lyrics documenting personal experience to mixed-media experimental writing that pushes on the genre-categories of documentary and poetry. I ask how poetry itself can be “documentary.” How do poems become “documents” that substantiate official or State versions of culture and history? Do poetry’s canons, histories, and formal and generic expectations also play this documentary role? I propose that undocumentary poetry engages in and undermines poetic documentation in multiple senses. On the one hand, the poems I analyze make visible events, lived realities, or histories that are hidden within ‘official’ versions of history and culture, and they also make visible the forms that have enabled and perpetuated such erasures. On the other, the poems undermine the boundaries of that documentation, ultimately making even themselves provisional. I highlight the ways that poetry’s condensation of forms and language, and its resulting paradoxes and ambiguities, specifically enables such undocumentation. Rather than creating a new category or form of poetry with Undocumentary Poetics, I observe undocumentary poetics as a current within contemporary poetics, one that is invested in imagining a world with more nuanced and fluid, and less rigid, forms. It is a poetry that “inhabits contradiction” as M. NourbeSe Philip put it, “unraveling old systems of control and domination,” without creating new ones.Item LA TRADUCCIÓN DE NOVELAS CHICANAS AL ESPAÑOL(2020) Montelongo Valencia, Ofelia; Long, Ryan; Spanish Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The translation of Chicano/a literature brings a series of particular challenges because of the usage of code-switching between English and Spanish representing the Chicano/a hybrid language. This thesis analyzes the novels The House on Mango Street (1984) by Sandra Cisneros, Across a Hundred Mountains (2006) by Reyna Grande and I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter (2017) by Erika L. Sánchez and how their translations into Spanish mexicanize the text, altering the Chicano/a hybrid language. This thesis studies the code-switching approaches proposed by Lourdes Torres, the translation strategies of Basil Hatim and Ian Mason, and the translation paradigms of Anna María de D’Amore, to suggest a type of Chicano/a works’ translation into Spanish, that displays the code-switching initially used. This proposal will help reflect the Chicano/a culture in the United States through the hybrid language in the Spanish translation. -- La traducción de la literatura chicana trae consigo una serie de desafíos particulares debido a la alternancia de códigos entre el inglés y el español que se entrelazan para mostrar el lenguaje híbrido chicano. En este trabajo se analizan las novelas The House on Mango Street (1984) de Sandra Cisneros, Across a Hundred Mountains (2006) de Reyna Grande y I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter (2017) de Erika L. Sánchez y cómo sus traducciones al español mexicanizan los textos, alterando el lenguaje híbrido, uno de los mecanismos más reconocibles en las obras chicanas. Esta tesis estudia las estrategias de code-switching de Lourdes Torres y de traducción de Basil Hatim e Ian Mason, junto con los paradigmas de traducción de Anna María de D’Amore para proponer un tipo de traducción de las obras chicanas al español reflejando la alternancia de código utilizada originalmente. Esta propuesta permitirá reflejar la cultura chicana en Estados Unidos a través del lenguaje híbrido en la traducción al español.Item BY THE AUTHORITY OF DREAMS: TRUTH AND KNOWLEDGE IN KICHWA MUSKUY NARRATIVES(2020) Carney, Lisa Warren; Harrison, Regina L.; Spanish Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)For Kichwa-speaking Runa of Ecuador’s tropical forest region, narratives about muskuy experiences—dreams and visions—are revered sources of knowledge. Muskuy is a real (non-fantasy) experience in which humans communicate with each other and non-human persons that inhabit their environment, acquiring information and powers in the process. Through analysis of video recordings of muskuy narratives told by Kichwa speakers (2014-2016), this dissertation explores how verbal artistry, performance technique, and emotional resonance are central to knowledge acquisition and transmission. Specifically, narratives are deemed truthful and authoritative when they evoke empathy and memory through imagery, gesture, and vocal dynamics. Whereas ethnography and psychoanalysis have been the prevalent models for scholarship of indigenous dream practices, this is among the first scholarly work to use diverse methods of ethnopoetic analysis such as close reading, performance studies (Bauman, Hymes), linguistic analysis (Mannheim, Nuckolls), and ethnographic contextualization (Galli, Uzendoski) to elucidate the aesthetics of Kichwa muskuy narratives. Chapter 1 examines muskuy as a source of gender-specific knowledge and authority conveyed in the narrative of a master ceramicist woman’s dream interaction with a Clay Master Spirit. Narrative skill is one manifestation of mature womanhood or manhood that is developed partially through muskuy. Through artful storytelling, a narrator demonstrates her feminine strength. Chapter 2 elucidates the central role of dialogue in articulating authority and credibility. In a narrative of a boy’s transformation into an anaconda, implication and allusion induce dialogic resonances (Bakhtin), while quotation and perspective-marking with “evidential” enclitics animate authoritative voices within the narrative. Additionally, interlocutors substantiate narrative information through commentary and story contributions. Chapter 3 compares a traditional muskuy narrative from the community of Sarayaku, Ecuador, to the same story transformed for digital media platforms that in turn give it the force of prophecy in activist contexts. Thus, strategic and creative modifications allow muskuy narratives to remain an authoritative source of knowledge for Runa as they are recontextualized for non-indigenous audiences. The truth and authority of muskuy narratives emerge from artistry that engages listeners’ imagination, memory and emotion. Affecting and aesthetically complex, these stories are an ancestral form that remains salient for Runa today.Item EL LUGAR DEL LECTOR: UN RECORRIDO A PARTIR DE TEXTOS DE OSVALDO LAMBORGHINI, MANUEL PUIG Y WASHINGTON CUCURTO(2020) Bartis, Sebastian; Quintero-Herencia, Juan Carlos; Spanish Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation stems from a challenge posed by Argentine writer and poet Osvaldo Lamborghini in a 1980 interview. He affirmed that instead of denouncing or lamenting oppressive practices and discourses, his job was to showcase the ways we are involved intrinsically in those practices, not as victims but as accomplices or tormentors. As readers we are accustomed to fictional representations of injustice and oppression; they scandalize or hurt while also comforting us with the idea that we’re fair and stand on the right side. What Lamborghini’s narrative cancels is the position of the reader as a witness who would learn about injustice to eventually amend it. With this in mind, this dissertation traces an arch spanning the 1920s and the five following decades, allowing us to read under a different light narratives on work, family, and state in Argentine writers Roberto Mariani, Leonidas Barletta, Horacio Quiroga and Roberto Arlt. Lamborghini’s texts are not alone in affirming that violence is not outside the law but rather at its core. The dissertation compares how the novels of Manuel Puig, one of Lamborghini’s contemporaries, also insist on the same ethical task. Both Lamborghini and Puig present the desolation that arises from realizing that the violence present in our laws and discourses is experienced at the same time as absurdities, confusion, and ineludible fatalities. In the final section, the dissertation examines writer Washington Cucurto’s strategy to subvert the mainstream narrative about marginalization in Buenos Aires during the 1990’s. Expanding on Lamborghini’s ethical task, Cucurto subverts the middle-class reader's expectations with his novels. His works operate as a productive deviation both from the pathologization of the marginals and their depiction as defenseless doomed beings. Furthermore, they contest the symbolic and spatial demarcation between the center and the margins to show the centrality of those groups and spaces labeled as marginal.