Languages, Literatures, & Cultures
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Item 'Irishness' in Caribbean and Latin American Literature: The Diasporic and Liminal(2017) Glynn, Douglas Michael; Cypess, Sandra M; Spanish Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)My dissertation examines representations of the diasporic Irish within the varied literary imaginaries of the Caribbean and Latin America and argues that these representations create a literary paradigm surrounding ‘Irishness’. The project begins by offering a racialized historical overview of the Irish commencing with the conquest of Ireland and following up to the modern day. I then relate observations elucidated by this overview to current conceptions of Irish identity while specifying many of the diaspora spaces to which the transatlantic Irish arrived. I utilize a transamerican approach to literature which permits cross-cultural and multilingual readings of texts that would otherwise remain in isolation to each other. Putting my study into dialogue with scholars like Robin Cohen, William Safran, Avtar Brah and Laura Zuntini de Izarra, I define the terms ‘diaspora’ and ‘diaspora space’ while seeking to underscore the corollaries between these concepts and representations of the Irish in diaspora. After establishing the ways in which I understand and use these terms, I employ the works of Victor Turner and Sandor Klapcsik, among others, to lay down my theoretical framework of the liminal and liminality. In doing so I directly interconnect theories of diaspora and liminality which provides a unique theoretical perspective, and later interject my own nascent theory of the ‘figure’ to better deconstruct the Irish characters under study. Reading a selected corpus of literature from writers such as American-Guatemalan Francisco Goldman, Cuban Zoé Valdés, Jamaican Erna Brodber, Mexican Patricia Cox, American Carl Krueger, and Argentines Rodolfo Walsh and Juan José Delaney, through the liminal process allows me to analyze literature from multiple perspectives while decentering previous literary criticism that has not recognized this multiplicity embedded in liminal readings of narratives. Over the breadth of the project I look to these and other scholars in my efforts to (re)define, dissect, work and wield the terms ‘diaspora’, ‘liminal’ and ‘liminality’ in a variety of fashions, adding to them my own ideas of perpetual liminality, while extracting and examining the representations of ‘Irishness’ found through each of my textual analyses.Item Crossing Borders: Guillermo Gómez-Peña.(2011) Bolikowska, Agnieszka A.; Cypess, Sandra M.; Spanish Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In Performing Borders: Guillermo Gómez-Peña, I examine selected interdisciplinary and multi-media work of contemporary Mexican-American artist Guillermo Gómez-Peña. I develop an alternative set of strategies for reading across-the-border(s) identitarian, artistic and pedagogical encounters in the work of Gómez-Peña. Drawing upon ideas of archive, identity and body in cultural studies, I analyze various performative acts of the artist; varying from visual arts representations, performance art études, public art interventions and the written word. As I juxtapose Mexican, Latin American and Latina/o discourses on identity in Gómez-Peña's work, I aim to see where they overlap and where they differ. Moreover, I search for where Gómez-Peña is creating an identity that is informed by a globalized, cosmopolitan visual culture. I give an account of Gómez-Peña's dialogue with two important identitarian discourses on the Mesoamerican past on both sides of the US-Mexican border: those of Octavio Paz and Aztlán. I analyze the way Gómez-Peña transforms and furthers these two discourses through his reinterpretation of pre-Hispanic codices. Furthermore, I offer a reading of Gómez-Peña's somatic work through its uncanny similarities with the Gonzalo Guerrero figure and discuss a possibility of an identitarian paradigm shift. I examine how Gómez-Peña's performance work reinterprets two theater conventions: Augusto Boal's Forum Theater and the Mexican carpa. I offer a reading of the "Performative Town Meeting" staged at the Smithsonian in the 1990s, and show how Gómez-Peña blends Boal's engaged theater matrix with carpa's ludic conventions to provoke a conversation about the role and limits of performance art. The dissertation concludes with an analysis of an experimental series of workshops that I taught using Gómez-Peña's performative methodology. I examine how the identitarian discussions in Gómez-Peña's work translate into a dynamic classroom scenario as I suggest inherent links between performance and teaching.Item Chaotic Topography in Contemporary French and Francophone Literature(2010) Wittrock, Mary Cobb; Eades, Caroline; French Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Chaos theory proposed by Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers illuminates new conclusions about narrative structures in contemporary French and Francophone literature. Espousing an order-out-of-chaos paradigm, my tutor texts by Annie Ernaux, Frankétienne, and Jean-Philippe Toussaint demonstrate how the contemporary notions of identity, gender and genre are innately chaotic but simultaneously offer innovative insights into how these entities are being (re)conceived and (re)presented. Scientific, philosophical, and cultural models of chaos described by Prigogine, Deleuze and Glissant respectively, offer a means to understand the world in order to frame a contemporary cultural topography. Liberated limits of the novel, poetry, and diary genre, viewed through the concept of chaotic "noise", represent richness of information rather than a dearth in order. With Prigogine's Arrow of Time, identity is found in the future not in the past suggesting a non-linear development that is plagued with uncertainty but possibilities. Consequently, identity in contemporary literature is located in others and not in the self challenging traditional notions of this concept. Bifurcation points serve as nodes of "textual instability" revealing themes and trends questioning the function of language, identity and generic transitions in contemporary literature. Through the concept of strange attractors, women, men, language and places within these chaotic tutor texts serve as points of order to which chaotic narratives consistently return advocating the creative force of non-gendered chaos. Accordingly not only can the notion of identity, love and language be viewed as fractal within their own textual space, but the texts themselves transcend generic boundaries. Finally, the contemporary cultural topography is expanding to include electronic literature as an area of critical study. Due to the medium of transmission, i.e., the computer code, electronic literature presents chaotic form and content and challenges traditional notions of `reading' a text. Consequently, the reader interacts with the computer code causing the `narrative' to bifurcate resulting in multiple, unpredictable reading experiences. Chaos theory thus offers a pertinent tool through which to read and interpret this genre. Electronic literature's literariness, viewed through chaos theory, is defined as what changes instead of what remains constant.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.