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 Alan Pauls: Poéticas del anacronismo(2016) Charry, Luis F.; Demaría, Laura; Merediz, Eyda; Spanish Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Alan Pauls (b. 1959) is an Argentine novelist and essayist. His works have barely been studied outside of Latin America; therefore, my work will be one of the first to focus critically and theoretically on his oeuvre and raise awareness of his importance to Contemporary Latin American Literature. The fundamental concept of my thesis is anachronism, which I develop by investigating the ways in which the present and the past are interconnected in the same temporal space. My dissertation has two interconnected parts. In the first, I propose an approach to Pauls’ literary work that emphasizes its engagement with literary and cultural theory. Specifically, I analyze how Pauls’ first novels –El pudor del pornógrafo (1984), El coloquio (1989), Wasabi (1994)– are strongly influenced by various theoretical discourses, especially the work of Roland Barthes. The guiding question of my dissertation’s first part is how one can narrate a fictional text without strictly appropriating narrative devices. Namely, I suggest that Pauls’ conception of literature is inevitably related to critical discourse. In the second part, I study a trilogy that Pauls wrote about the 1970s in Argentina: Historia del llanto (2007), Historia del pelo (2010), and Historia del dinero (2013). Here I focus on how Pauls uses the 1970s to propose a new conceptualization of the “political.” For Pauls, the “political” is not represented in the great events of a particular time but rather in the “effects” that these events produce; these effects are minor, almost imperceptible, and for that reason much more powerful as a literary event mechanism per se. From my point of view, this new conceptualization of the “political” contains in itself a problematic issue: the articulation between personal experience, history, and fiction. In conclusion, this interrelation between theory, politics, history, and fiction defines the path of my dissertation, which would have been just the “starting point” in my personal attempt to reconfigure the map of the Latin American literary contemporaneity.Item Constituting Republics: Toward Political Conception of the Constitutional Predicament(2012) Dzhuraev, Emilbek; Elkin, Stephen L; Soltan, Karol E; Government and Politics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)How is a good political order constituted? This work is a critical and constructive exploration of the problem of political constitution. Recent contributions to the study of this subject have often failed to adequately recognize its political nature, and have thus fallen short of being able to inform the challenges of actual constitutional development. This thesis argues for a broader conception of constitution that overcomes the limitations imposed by the legalist, formal-institutional, philosophic, and cultural-essentialist perspectives, and one that accounts for the political-ness of the matter more satisfactorily. Correctly understood, constitution of a well-ordered society is a practical, situated, and continuous predicament. From this broad view of political constitution the dissertation moves on to elaborate a more specific instance of it, the idea of pragmatic republicanism. Pragmatic republicanism is a comprehensive idea of political constitution, comprising four main elements: a realistic vision of a good polity, a set of thin-normative procedural orientations of constitution, a set of basic empirical conditions of constitution, and the concept of constitutional crafting that is tantamount to the activity of constituting in the midst of the preceding three elements. Once these concepts are outlined, the idea of pragmatic republicanism is applied, by way of illustration, to the case of Kyrgyzstan - an instructive case of a seemingly hopeless constitutional malaise. This work builds upon a very eclectic range of literature as it makes the case for an interdisciplinary and `problem-driven' understanding of political constitution. Contra some of the conventional criteria of good social science, this work defends the view that a proper understanding of constitution must accept conceptual complexity, deficit of parsimony, analytic uncertainty, and theoretical incompleteness as unavoidable and even necessary.Item Essentially Powerful: Political Motherhood in the United States and Argentina(2007-04-29) Gibbons, Meghan Keary; Peres, Phyllis A.; Rosenfelt, Deborah; Comparative Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)"Essentially Powerful" explores the roles of essentialism around motherhood in the political protests of two groups in the United States and Argentina. Another Mother for Peace in the U.S. and the Madres de la Plaza de Mayo in Argentina based their protests on their identities as mothers, authorizing themselves to challenge their states' actions around their children. The states themselves also used the figure of the mother to promote specific behaviors that limited political opposition. The contrast between these two approaches problematizes the figure of the subject within poststructuralist and feminist debates about resistance. The subject is seen alternately as an active agent who can use essentialism strategically and a discursive construction that can be easily manipulated by ideology. This study explores the ground between these two poles, mapping the ways in which essentialisms around motherhood can be proscriptive in the hands of hegemons, but empowering when used by subjects themselves, who blend experience with essence. Interviews with participants in both groups as well as testimonial accounts, films and media coverage of the groups combine to allow a rich exploration of essentialisms by the mothers and their states. My first chapter explores how the Madres and the dictatorship used essentialism to struggle for discursive control over Argentine motherhood. The Madres' authorization of themselves as public, political subjects -in interviews, testimonies and letters-- challenged the dictatorship's formation of motherhood as a private, domestic identity. Chapter two examines the representation of the Madres' protests in film, exploring the ambivalence that Argentine audiences experienced in the women's blurring of several traditional binaries: emotion and reason, family and state, private and public. My third and fourth chapters analyze the narrative strategies of Another Mother for Peace. These North American mothers used essentialism to justify their movement into the public, political sphere, while still performing traditional, domestic motherhood in strategic ways. My final section explores how distinct cultural, religious and historical paradigms inflected the experiences of these two mothers' groups differently, facilitating and/or problematizing their uses of essentialist identities. This analysis critiques the limitations of both proscriptive and biological essentialisms, and allows us to see how the mothers' own experiences of motherhood pushed them beyond the boundaries of traditional essentialism and into new subjectivities.