College of Arts & Humanities
Permanent URI for this communityhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/1611
The collections in this community comprise faculty research works, as well as graduate theses and dissertations.
Browse
2 results
Search Results
Item Symbiotic Cities: Buenos Aires, Montevideo, and Mass Culture, 1910-1960(2016) Richter, Daniel Alex; Williams, Daryle; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation examines how Buenos Aires emerged as a creative capital of mass culture and cultural industries in South America during a period when Argentine theater and cinema expanded rapidly, winning over a regional marketplace swelled by transatlantic immigration, urbanization and industrialization. I argue that mass culture across the River Plate developed from a singular dynamic of exchange and competition between Buenos Aires and neighboring Montevideo. The study focuses on the Argentine, Uruguayan, and international performers, playwrights, producers, cultural impresarios, critics, and consumers who collectively built regional cultural industries. The cultural industries in this region blossomed in the interwar period as the advent of new technologies like sound film created profitable opportunities for mass cultural production and new careers for countless theater professionals. Buenos Aires also became a global cultural capital in the wider Hispanic Atlantic world, as its commercial culture served a region composed largely of immigrants and their descendants. From the 1920s through the 1940s, Montevideo maintained a subordinate but symbiotic relationship with Buenos Aires. The two cities shared interlinked cultural marketplaces that attracted performers and directors from the Atlantic world to work in theatre and film productions, especially in times of political upheaval such as the Spanish Civil War and the Perón era in Argentina. As a result of this transnational process, Argentine mass culture became widely consumed throughout South America, competing successfully with Hollywood, European, and other Latin American cinemas and helping transform Buenos Aires into a cosmopolitan metropolis. By examining the relationship between regional and national frames of cultural production, my dissertation contributes to the fields of Latin American studies and urban history while seeking to de-center the United States and Europe from the central framing of transnational history.Item Visiones y Re-visiones: el Espacio de la Nación en la Narrativa Uruguaya del Retorno a la Democracia(2005-12-06) Rivero, Elizabeth Gladys; Sosnowski, Saúl; Spanish Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In this dissertation, I analyze the textual strategies that enable literature to explore a multiplicity of "other nations" emerged after the fragmentation of Anderson's "imagined community". My analysis is focused on spatial images in some novels published in Uruguay in the post-dictatorship period (1985 to the present). These post-dictatorial re-visions are based on the demolition of the old homogenous and essentialist conceptions of the nation, and their aim is to foster a permanent dialogue of complementary/opposite community models, rather than establish themselves as the official one. I study the novels La casa de enfrente (1988) by Alicia Migdal, Perfumes de Cartago (1994) by Teresa Porzecanski and Cañas de la India (1995) by Hugo Achugar to show how the traditional ideas about the nation, identity, memory, and history are re-written from a feminist/feminine point of view. These texts emphasize the political significance of the space of the house, and the deletion of borders between the private and public spheres, as well as between the local and the global. In the novels Trampa para ángeles de barro (1992) by Renzo Rosselló, Estokolmo (1998) by Gustavo Escanlar and Caras extrañas (2002) by Rafael Courtoisie, I argue that the choice of narrative genre implies a sordid image of the community. Moreover, the geographical trajectories of the characters convey a rhetoric that fragments the urban map, and develops ghettos. Finally, in El camino a Ítaca (1994) by Carlos Liscano (1949), Un amor en Bangkok (1994) by Napoleón Baccino Ponce de León (1947) and Cielo de Bagdad (2001) by Tomás de Mattos (1947) I explore how a new national imaginary is restructured in the light of transnational migrations and the internationalization of symbolic markets. To that end, the novels resort to the literary tradition through inter-textuality, re-signifying the power of literature to interpret the new identity realities and "dream" of alternative world models, thus creating a post-modern "utopia".