Languages, Literatures, & Cultures
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Item IMÁGENES DE/DESDE LAS VILLAS: LA CONSTRUCCIÓN LITERARIA DE ESPACIOS EN LA CIUDAD INFORMAL(2022) Bulansky, Daniela; Sosnowski, Saúl; Spanish Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The villas (commonly viewed as “shanty towns”) in Argentina, have been addressed in literary texts since they began to form as part of the “informal city.” This dissertation interrogates the literary images of these spaces in the city of Buenos Aires, with a particular focus on works that emerge from the villas themselves. Accordingly, they do not appear as marginal, but are situated as the narrative center from which it becomes possible to question the image of a modern, compact and definitive view of the city. This dissertation has grouped texts as they relate to their sociopolitical contexts. The first group includes the short story “$1 en Villa Desocupación” (1933) by Enrique Amorim, the dramatical work La marcha del hambre (1934) by Elías Castelnuovo, and Las colinas del hambre (1943) by Rosa Wernicke (the only novel that takes place in another region); all three set in the 1930’s. The second provides an analysis of the novel Villa Miseria también es América (1957) by Bernardo Verbitsky, in order to follow the trail of the first appearances in newspapers of the term “villa miseria,” which paralleled the ways these phenomena were made visible in the second half of the 1950’s. The third group consists of four novels that followed the 2001 socio-economic crisis: Santería (2008) and Sacrificio (2010) by Leonardo Oyola, La Virgen Cabeza (2009) by Gabriela Cabezón Cámara, and Con V de villera by Lula Comeron. By then, the villas were a well-recognized fact; therefore, these novels do not necessarily center on revealing their existence. The spaces that comprise the villas that these works produce are boundless, diverse, and fluid; moreover, they move away from privileging visual images, prominent in the works of the two previous groups. All of the works insert the villa within a literary tradition as spaces, equal to any other, where literature is possible. It is not a question of ignoring the power dynamics that mark the villas as a phenomenon, but to consider the movements that these works represent as they relocate the center by focusing on the interior of the villas and thus, literarily, constructing narratives from within.Item La nature et l'Autre dans Chocolat, Tintin au Congo et Vendredi ou la vie sauvage; une lecture écocritique et post-coloniale(2021) Le Saux, Guilhem Mael; Eades, Caroline; French Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Tintin in Congo (1931) by Hergé, is an example of the colonial discourse colonial empires propagated to reduce both nature and the Other to inferior beings. Chocolat (1988) by Claire Denis, and Vendredi ou la Vie Sauvage (1971) by Michel Tournier, offer a critical perspective on said colonial discourse. With those three texts, among others, I offer an analysis of how the colonial and neocolonial discourses destroy, exploit and reorganize colonized spaces, nature and peoples. In the first chapter, I develop the destruction of both local cultures and natures in order to make way for colonial empires’ exploitation. In a second chapter, I go over the practices of how colonial empires exploit both natural resources and peoples in colonized spaces. Finally, in a third chapter, I explain how colonial empires intend to reconfigure colonized spaces under a European model; be it language, religion or the use of nature.Item Irrational Women: Healing Cultural Trauma Through Decolonial Consciousness and Hybrid Spirituality in Chicana and Pinay Narrative Fiction(2021) Quijano, Laura Michelle; Rodríguez, Ana Patricia; Spanish Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)What discursive strategies do women of color have at their disposal to confront and dismantle white supremacist patriarchy? Pinay (Filipina) and Chicana authors engaging with this question, like Ana Castillo, Evelina M. Galang, Jessica Hagedorn, Cecilia Manguerra Brainard, Emma Pérez, and Carmen Tafolla, seem to conclude that the hybrid and decolonial consciousness emanating from cultural traumas reimagines more just and healing relationships with the self, partners, and communities. These decolonial reimaginings deprivilege and decenter rational thought as the most productive path to understanding, healing, and transformation. The mythic, creative, somatic, and spiritual are at the center of Chicana and Pinay authors’ decolonial, healing processes. In conversation with the relational work of women of color feminists, such as Gloria Anzaldúa, bell hooks, and Leny Mendoza Strobel, this dissertation reads Pinay and Chicana narrative fiction of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries side by side to demonstrate how the historical impact of Spanish colonialism and U.S. imperialism, and their resulting cultural traumas, have similarly shaped the decolonial discursive strategies that these authors use to dismantle the binaries of race, gender, and sexuality, among others. Chicana and Pinay authors create female protagonists whose irrational experiences provide them with new insights into personal and collective healing, while simultaneously redefining the boundaries of everyday reality.Item Fictions of Hybridity in the Anthropocene: Literature and Science in the Works of Rétif de la Bretonne(2021) Bezilla, Charlee Myranda; Benharrech, Sarah; French Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Experiments in genetic engineering have raised environmental, medical, and ethical questions concerning the manipulation of biological processes. Does modifying an organism in this way change its nature? What do increasingly complex relations between human and machine, organism and technology, mean for human identity and our relations with non-human lifeforms? These questions rest on uneasy but persistent dichotomies of nature and culture, of the humanities and the sciences, and on notions of modernity and progress central to ecocriticism and the environmental humanities. Conceptions of humans as distinct from nature—what anthropologist Philippe Descola names the “nature/culture” divide—are deeply imprinted in the Western psyche and reflected in disciplinary divisions separating the humanities and the sciences, what Bruno Latour calls the “Internal Great Divide.”These questions about hybrid beings, manipulating nature, and the nature/culture divide were particularly pertinent in eighteenth-century French literature and natural history, a period coinciding with the nascence of biological science wherein many thinkers locate the beginnings of the “Anthropocene,” an epoch in which human activity has markedly affected earth systems. Drawing on methods from literary studies and ecocriticism, I examine how literary texts engage debates on the mutability of species, the nature of man, and anxieties about governing populations that remain relevant today. Through the lens of Nicolas-Edme Rétif de la Bretonne’s 1781 novel La Découverte australe par un homme-volant, I engage close readings of the novel alongside natural historical texts to consider the possibilities of “hybridity” as a tool for understanding literary production, the relationships between humans and nonhumans, and how the domains of fiction and science can come together. I find that these texts posit hybridity as a promising intervention, despite growing concerns about degeneration stemming from crossbreeding experiments. After analyzing the formal aspects of the “hybrid” text and its paratexts in Chapter 1, in Chapter 2, I examine how the novel incorporates, interrogates, and extends contemporary theories about the nature of humans and animals. Chapter 3 explores the manipulation of hybrid creatures and proto-eugenicist politics in La Découverte australe alongside key texts from the period to trace how the novel engages contemporary discourses of perfectibility and degeneration. Chapter 4 shows how the novel promotes mechanical technology, along with biological hybridization, as tools of imperialism and societal improvement at a pivotal moment leading up to the industrial revolution.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 ANTÍGONAS EXILIADAS DE LA GUERRA CIVIL DE LAS ESPAÑAS (1936-1999): CONCHA MÉNDEZ Y ERNESTINA DE CHAMPOURCIN(2019) Bort Caballero, María de la Luz; Naharro-Calderón, José María; Spanish Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) left a marked influence on the culture and literature of contemporary Spain. After Franco violently toppled the Second Spanish Republic, those with progressive ideas were persecuted, executed, and more than a half a million were forced into a nearly forty-year diaspora. These displacements left diverse traces buried in private memories and certain literary and cultural practices. Despite active research in the last four decades, there are still untapped questions and silences. Particularly, works by exiled women writers and intellectuals that have been relegated to the margins. They offer unexplored spaces of memory and insights into the experiences of forced uprootings. Through poets Concha Méndez (1898-1986) and Ernestina de Champourcin (1905-1999), this thesis delves into geographies of memory, and seeks to broaden the relevance of poetry written in exile, biased by the male canon and its scholarship. It posits the recognition of fresh and close readings of repression and resistance while looking through the violet lenses of equity. These poets refused to abandon their own voices or be silenced due to their marginalized condition as women and exiles. The figure of the classical archetype, Antigone, and the dialogic theories of María Zambrano, allow for a further exchange with these authors’ poetry, oral testimonies and remembrances. The entombment of Antigone, for Zambrano, represents both a challenge and a liberation where expulsion is redeemed by the affirmation of the feminine self. Even though these women were banished to the same location, Mexico, D.F., Concha Méndez offers insights into the study of the plight of her terminal exiles. Meanwhile, Ernestina de Champourcin represents the possibility of interrogating a reconstruction of exile as she attempts a definite return to Spain. However, both voices and experiences coexist within the trauma of loss, solitude, survival, a search for refuge, and the reinvention of oneself. They call for a review and rethinking of categories such as inner exile, and propose new multidisciplinary lenses in order to read alternative discourses of exodus in a feminine mode.Item MARKET BEHAVIOR IN THE POST-TRANSITIONAL NARRATIVE OF RAFAEL CHIRBES AND BELÉN GOPEGUI(2018) Giller-Wilde, Anne; Naharro-Calderon, Jose Maria; Spanish Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation attempts to identify pertinent literary strategies found in the Spanish capitalist contemporary narrative. Having traced patterns like the stock market’s pendular movements in the Spanish post-Franco Transitional narrative of Rafael Chirbes and Belén Gopegui, this thesis considers similar thematic and stylistic repetitions deriving from the 19th Century Spanish Realist and Naturalist Novel and the Post-War period of the Civil War (1939-1975), characteristics which manifest themselves cumulatively in the novels of Chirbes and Goegui. Taking into account economic and market theories, and borrowing R.N. Elliott’s wave theory terminology for charting of market data and analysis of numerical data over time, the thesis considers qualitative literary fluctuations analogous to the temporal structures of stock market prices which occur through the history of trading. Due to differing experiences in the aforementioned periods, male and female authorship are considered separately in the two periods anterior to the post-Franco Transition. The dissertation also relies on theories of memory, history and group psychology, concepts close to formulations found in theories such as those of Prechter, Frost, Ortega y Gasset, Ricoeur, etc. It proposes that the novels of Chirbes and Gopegui, because of their discernible temporally ascending intertextual articulation, are analogous to the fifth wave of Elliott’s five-wave market cycle, which he termed social movement and whose momentum was stimulated by collective social emotion or Prechter’s social mood. In Chirbes and Gopegui, the underlying social mood is one of indignation and resentment whose manifestation can be traced from the late 19th-Century, to the Post-War period under the dictator Francisco Franco, culminating in the Post-Transitional novel, in which a generational rift rooted in socio-economic inequality is indicative of the unhealed wounds from the Spanish Civil War. The novels from the three time periods are also of an economic nature, treating human engagement with money and its consequences. Chirbes’ and Gopegui’s protagonists are theoretically a return to the universal protagonist in the novels of Benito Pérez Galdós, but who embody the socio-economic concerns of the 21st Century, completing a literary social movement.Item POETIC MINERALOGY: NEW STONES FOR “THE LOOSENED HAND” BY MARTÍN ADÁN. RECONSTRUCTION AND INTERPRETATION(2017) Monsalve, Maria Monsalve; Aguilar Mora, Jorge; Spanish Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Poetic Mineralogy: New Stones for “The Loosened Hand” by Martín Adán. Reconstruction and Literary Interpretation is an innovative research project in the field of literature and digital humanities that aims to collect, interpret, and make available the verses of the long and neglected poem “La mano desasida” [The Loosened Hand], by the Peruvian poet Rafael de la Fuente Benavides, better known by his pseudonym Martín Adán (1908-1985), a fundamental, yet understudied figure in Latin American literature. “La mano desasida” was written in fragments around 1950 on a variety of unusual surfaces, including napkins, cigarette papers, and notebook pages that Adán himself never put together. Collecting the verses of “La mano desasida” has been a challenge for decades and many scholars allude to the poem as a mystery or labyrinth. Portions of the extensive fragments were published in the 1960s, with a more but not entirely complete version comprising some 200 pages produced in 1980. Many verses remain as yet unpublished, and scholars continue to piece the text together, seeking to determine if there is a proper order. The structure of the poem relies on interruption, division, and incompleteness, which reveals a deep understanding of how fragments express totality, an idea that was crucial during the German Romanticism. The poem, set in the ruins of Machu Picchu, recreates the ancient conversation between Man and Stone, a key concept in the Andean culture.Item ENTRE EL DESEO Y EL PUDOR, EL AMOR HEREOS EN LA NOVELA SENTIMENTAL: GRISEL Y MIRABELLA DE JUAN DE FLORES(2017) Eldredge, Ginette Alomar; Benito-Vessels, Carmen; Spanish Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In the studies about Medieval Spain, only men were believed to be susceptible to amorous passion or lovesickness. I propose that a more nuanced and complete understanding of women’s roles and actual behavior can be reached by analyzing the same medical and philosophical treatises that deny them the possibility of suffering from lovesickness. In fact, my readings of texts such as Grisel y Mirabella (ca. 1475), Celestina (1499) and Tristán de Leonís (1501), demonstrate that women’s behavior in literary representations is guided by the same symptoms experienced by lovesick men, symptoms that women sometimes suffer even more intensely than men. The topic of women’s lovesickness and the rhetorical devices used to depict the power and influence of women in medieval Spanish literature has not been formally studied due to the misjudgment that this malady was an exclusively male condition. This study shows that women's roles in Juan de Flores' sentimental romance Grisel y Mirabella (1495) were influenced by lovesickness or amor hereos. I also discuss how linguistic and narrative theories, as well as historical rhetoric about sexuality from the time of this text, helps us to understand how lovesickness influenced the female discourse created by Juan de Flores in the late Middle Ages. In doing so, I argue that the female characters were an alterity of power to their real counterparts in society. In some narratives they are resistant within the text, in others they struggle to act upon their desire without fearing the moral and social consequences.Item Legados de Guerra Civil en "Las Españas": infancias, exilios y memorias.(2017) Gomez-Martin, Maria; Naharro-Calderón, Jose María; Spanish Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation examines Spanish Republican Exile’s second generation‘s literary production in Mexico after the Civil War (1936-1939): a selected group among “the children of war,” born in the homeland before 1934. Even if they diverge in literary genres or stylistics, all these authors share their own traumatic traces and violent conflict experiences. Therefore, it is essential to analyze the effects of this trauma in order to understand the lost Spanish imaginaries that these children recreated in their works. Likewise, it is fundamental to acknowledge their nepantla liminal condition (a náhuatl word for “in between”). Their double alienation and shared lack of Spanish and/or Mexican identities allowed them to recreate a new space where fiction and reality, memory and imagination converged. Specifically, these revised interpretations of selected works (Carlos Blanco Aguinaga, José de la Colina, Manuel Durán, Tere Medina Navascués, Nuria Parés, Luis Rius, Enrique de Rivas, Roberto Ruiz, Tomás Segovia, and Ramón Xirau) are based on exile as existential discourse transfigurations, as well as their own transient beings’ complex introspections. But we also highlight Roberto Ruiz’s resistance to traumatic expatriations by projecting a narrative of transnational transcendence. KEYWORDS: Spanish Civil War legacies, children, exile, second generation, trauma, memory exiles, memories.