Theses and Dissertations from UMD
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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.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 Un lugar en el mundo: literatura, conocimiento y autonomía en tres novelas colombianas de finales del siglo XX(2009) Romero, Diana Patricia; Sosnowski, Saúl; Spanish Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In this dissertation I analyze three end-of-20th-century Colombian novels: La muerte de Alec (1983) by Darío Jaramillo Agudelo (1947), Sin remedio (1984) by Antonio Caballero (1945) and Basura (2000) by Héctor Abad Faciolince (1958). This analysis revisits the problematic relationship between literature and knowledge stemming from the loss of grounding of human action arising from modernity and exacerbated by end of 20th Century posmodernism and constructivist currents. Revisiting the Kantian concept of aesthetic autonomy, in which knowledge and art were closely linked, I propose that taking up again this relationship constitutes a search for a space in which literature can be conceived as an autonomous space as long as it is not separate from knowledge. This search makes sense in a context in which literature has lost its privileged aesthetic status faced with the attacks of the militant commitment of the 60&rsquos and 70&rsquos and with the fact that other cultural manifestations have become more popular with the advent of cultural studies and other postmodernist and poststructuralist trends. Each of these three novels emphasizes different social and aesthetic imaginaries such as the romantic aesthetic tradition, existentialist philosophy and cognitive science. These social and aesthetic imaginaries are activated by a credulity/incredulity (skepticism) mechanism that either makes possible the search for a space of autonomy in which knowledge and literature reconcile or that evinces a longing for their reconciliation. The question of the grounding of knowledge and values remains unsolved while heuristic and pragmatic solutions are offered.Item LATIN AMERICAN COMING OF AGE NARRATIVES: A SYMBOLIC AND PHYSOANALITICAL READING(2009) Roman, Ruth; Aguilar-Mora, Jorge; Spanish Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Childhood is a disquieting age subsequent to the inexorable exile from love. After being banned from the only boundless union of love it will ever experience, the child sets upon a relentless journey to invent her/himself. Thus, the child surmounts its first creative challenge by transposing feelings of sorrow and loss; its first self silhouette is forged from the hardships of grief. The child assimilates its loss through symbolization, and in doing so, s/he begins her/his irreversible pursuit of identity and self-definition. This dissertation explores eight Latin American childhood narratives. The child protagonists of these stories reconstruct their world, so as to insert themselves in it. In order to achieve this, they must construct a first identity or façade through which they access their own narratives. The initial chapter focuses on three Andean boys who trial test schoolboy demeanors in and out of the school's enclosure: Timoleón Coloma (Ecuador, 1888) by Carlos Tobar; Gran Señor y Rajadiablos (Chile, 1948) by Eduardo Barrios; Los Ríos Profundos (Perú, 1957) by José María Arguedas. The second chapter explores the paternal home where three girls rehearse appearances and social behaviors: Ifigenia (Venezuela, 1924) by Teresa De la Parra; Balún Canán (México, 1967) by Rosario Castellanos; La Madriguera (Argentina, 1996) by Tununa Mercado. The third and last chapter visits the fictional childhood of two Cuban poets. We witness the dawn of imagery creativity in the poetic identity of two Caribbean boys: Paradiso (Cuba, 1966) by José Lezama Lima and Celestino antes del Alma (Cuba, 1967) by Reinaldo Arenas. Furthermore, each of these initial attempts at cohesive identity thrive in transition, not only because of the nature of their childhood passage but also because of the volatile social and historical landscapes these eight novels depict. After examining the different identity constructions in childhood, the following questions can be answered: with what symbolic resources do Latin American children elaborate their first identities? Who are their role models? What symbolic processes activate when confronted with threatening events? In order to answer these questions this dissertation draws insights from the disciplines of psychoanalysis and symbolic anthropology, especially from the assertions of Jacques Lacan, Melanie Klein, Gilbert Durand and Gastón Bachelard.Item Pasión por el método: Poéticas del modernismo y la vanguardia(2008-06-11) Fierros, Gustavo; Aguilar-Mora, Jorge; Spanish Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)ABSTRACT Title of dissertation: PASIÓN POR EL MÉTODO: POÉTICAS DEL MODERNISMO Y LA VANGUARDIA Gustavo Fierros, Doctor of Philosophy, 2008 Dissertation directed by: Dr. Jorge Aguilar Mora, Department of Spanish and Portuguese This dissertation studies the poetics of Spanish American modernistas and avant-garde poets. I focus on the reflexive texts written by the poets, examining the development of aesthetic autonomy in modern literature as a context for the study of modern Spanish American literature. In chapter one, I consider the relationship between the public sphere and the emergence of critical discourses about art and poetry in Europe and the Americas. This process provides a historical perspective for the poetic discourses of the Romantic period's most relevant poets. My study demonstrates how the emergence of different poetics of the Spanish American modernismo movement surface as a result of comparative tensions between the public sphere and the place of the isolated figure of the poet in Europe. In the second chapter I discuss the aesthetic conceptions of José Martí. I argue that his critique of modernity serves as a context for his aesthetic ideas. I also explore Martí's idea of the poet as a hero, based on his metaphor of a warrior and the relation of this image to the poetics of Ralph Waldo Emerson. In the third chapter I study the aesthetic notions of Manuel Gutiérrez Nájera and Rubén Darío as they relate to the poets' positions within the new market economies of late nineteenth century Spanish America. I discuss their views of the place of the poet within the market economy and the influence of this view on their aesthetic conceptions. In order to interpret the position of these poets I use Bataille's "notion of expenditure", a concept that provides the theoretical support necessary for characterizing the dissident attitude to the market as an "unproductive waste." In the last part of this chapter I explore the tensions between symbol and allegory, showing how they relate to Bataille's concept of expenditure in Darío's poetics. Continuing to explore the consolidation of aesthetic autonomy in Spanish American literature, in the fourth and last chapter of this dissertation I explore the avant-gardes' development of two poetic tools-- the image and the metaphor. I study this process by analyzing the poetic vision of Leopoldo Lugones, Vicente Huidobro and Jorge Luis Borges. I offer an interpretation of the tensions between the image and the metaphor by comparing the manner in which each poet implements these poetic tools. I argue that exploring the relationship between the verbs "ser" and "estar" in the Spanish language can explain these tensions. This dissertation arrives at the final conclusion that in Spanish America, ideas of aesthetic autonomy -or pragmatic poetics as conceived by Martí- came as the result of tensions in the public sphere, as well as the voluntary choices made by poets. The period examined in this study is also an era characterized by a special flourish of reflexive texts written by Spanish American poets. This passion for poetic methodology can be understood as an urgent search for new answers to the same question: what is poetry?Item Virtudes de la errancia: escritura migrante y dispersión en Juan Rodolfo Wilcock(2007-06-03) Gonzalez, Carina Fernanda; Sosnowski, Saul; Spanish Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Living abroad often exerts a powerful influence on the way individuals construct social interactions. This dissertation addresses linguistic displacements generated by geographic exile. It is mainly focused on Juan Rodolfo Wilcock (1919-1978), an Argentine writer who emigrated to Italy in 1955, toward the end of Juan Domingo Perón's regime. Through Wilcock's writing, the author defines the concept of "migrant writing" dividing it into three categories: eccentricity, technology, and the use of mass-media strategies. Wilcock's exile relocates his narrative outside of the traditional canon. Under this light, the author suggests a reading that, instead of emphasizing the fantastic, concentrates on the entropic relation between culture and language. The dissertation also explores certain features of Wilcock's originality, due in part to his interpretation of the theory of Chaos as a way to produce an alternative order. Following an abrupt displacement from Argentina's literary establishment, and after breaking up with the genealogy of his precursors (Borges and Cortázar), his innovative mind brings him to a new stand build within the frame of his own eccentricity. Through the perspective of the "migrant writing," the author explores how Wilcock implements technology through a revision of the avant-garde movement, incorporating popular elements in order to fracture realism. Utilizing mass media strategies Wilcock produces a hybrid textuality in which, instead of verbalizing his images, he underscores their artificiality. Finally, the transgressive character of his narrative is examined through Wilcock's use of the power of excess as a way to exorcise the sense of loss, and to imitate strategies with which primitive cultures faced nature's degradation.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.Item The Body in Pieces: Representations of Organ Trafficking in the Literatures and Film of the Americas(2007-04-24) Dix, Jennifer; Peres, Phyllis; Comparative Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation explores the use of the trope of organ trafficking to critique neoliberal globalization in the Americas. Each chapter addresses a different genre and analyzes texts articulated in response to conditions grounded in different locations. The texts studied include print media from Guatemala and Brazil, Mexican popular film and detective fiction from the U.S. (Tony Chiu's Positive Match and Linda Howard's Cry No More) and Mexico (Miriam Laurini's Morena en rojo, Gabriel Trujillo Muñoz's Loverboy, and Paco Ignacio Taibo II's La bicicleta de Leonardo). Comparative analyses also address Francisco Goldman's The Long Night of White Chickens, Karen Tei Yamashita's Tropic of Orange, and Leslie Marmon Silko's Almanac of the Dead. These analyses are linked by their critique of neoliberal globalization and their representation of the human body's commodification. Together, they outline the contradictions of a mobility-dependent regime and establish the inescapable scope of economic changes that alter the relationship between the nation-state and its inhabitants. Neoliberalism also causes changes in the representation of the body. Bodies are represented outside the social structures and institutions that previously gave them meaning. The body's economic value replaces socially ascribed identities. Representations of the commodified body in these texts selectively erase gender and race. This dissertation also explores the construction of a new set of identities grounded in the body. These competing identities of medical and corporeal citizenship demonstrate the problems of establishing identities in market-driven terms of production and consumption. This dissertation also engages in a investigation of the relation of literary genre to content. As my discussion of popular culture demonstrates, generic form partially constrains or shapes the content of these works. In contrast, when literary works are positioned outside of genre constraints, the scope of the meanings attributed to organ trafficking expands, accompanied by formal innovations. My dissertation produces an interrogation of American cultural spaces--understood in the broadest sense--that acknowledges the work of both spatial and cultural forces in the construction of this hemispheric imaginary.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.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).