Browsing by Subject "Latin American literature"
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Item “Altamente teatral” : subject, nation, and media in the works of Virgilio Piñera(2010-05) Cabrera Fonte, Pilar; Salgado, César Augusto; Lindstrom, Naomi; Richmond-Garza, Elizabeth M.; Rossman, Charles; Wilkinson, Lynn; Dominguez-Ruvalcaba, HectorThis study analyzes Virgilio Piñera’s concept of performance in relation to his representation of mass media products and technologies. The central argument is that Piñera’s notion of theatrical representation connects fiction with politics in subversive ways, challenging assumptions of naturalness at different levels, from that of the gendered self, to the family and the nation. To support this argument, the study focuses on Piñera’s representation of a variety of mass media genres as these inspire everyday life performances, mainly in Cuba but also in Argentina. While fictional models and sentimental narratives from the mass media most often convey oppressive conceptions of gender, family, and nation, the author’s representation of the media’s pervasive influence questions and denaturalizes those conceptions. Piñera stresses the disruptive potential of individual performance against the repetitive character of both the mass media industry and the social reenactments of its sentimental myths. His references to mass culture thus destabilize structures of power, including stereotypes of both sexuality and gender. The analysis shows that Piñera’s fictions exhibit important characteristics of queer aesthetics. The study comprises a time span of almost three decades, from the early 1940s to the late 1960s, and focuses on a selection of Piñera’s criticism, drama, poetry, and narrative. Within those texts, special attention is given to references to photography, radio programs, romance novels, movies, and popular music. The organization of Piñera’s texts in this study answers to both thematic and chronological considerations. Chapter 1 outlines the study’s objectives and methodology, also providing a background on critical studies about Piñera. Chapters 2 and 3 deal with plays and short-stories written before the 1959 Cuban Revolution. Chapter 2 examines texts that represent both family and nation in relation to a variety of mass media genres, from Cuban “radionovelas” to Hollywood gangster films. Chapter 3 focuses on two narratives, written in Buenos Aires, that address posing and self-representation in relation to issues of sexuality, masculinity, and power. Chapter 4 deals with a selection of poems written, for the most part, after 1959. In these poems, the literary use of photography stresses theatrical self-representation, often in direct resistance to revolutionary reformulations of masculinity in the figure of the “New Man.”Item Aspects of dead protagonists’ perspective in Spanish and Latin American novels(2012-05) Buckner, Tim; Pérez, Janet; Pérez, Genaro J.; Zamora, Jorge; Elola, IdoiaSince the classical ages to the modern times the dead have received attention in literary works from Dante’s Divine Comedy (1308-1321) to O’Brien’s The Third Policeman (1967) and from Shakespeare’s Hamlet (1604-1637) to Zorilla’s Don Juan Tenorio (1844). Many of these present dead characters in the literary works as though they were living. In contrast to these examples, many Neorealist novels in the mid-Twentieth Century Spain employ dead protagonists in their works by means of secondary characters who supply memory and perspective. Analogously during the mid-Twentieth Century in Latin America several novelists employ dead protagonists from a first-person perspective similar to the aforementioned literary precedents. This study seeks to actualize the use of dead protagonists in Spanish and Latin American novels during the mid-Twentieth Century by analyzing the narrative perspective and the space within the following novels: María Luisa Bombal’s La amortajada (1938), Elena Quiroga’s Algo pasa en la calle (1954), Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo (1955), Carlos Fuentes’s La muerte de Artemio Cruz (1962), Luis Romero’s El cacique (1963), Rodrigo Rubio’s Equipaje de amor para la tierra (1965), and Miguel Delibes’s Cinco horas con Mario (1966). The novels are studied in chronological sequence, which implies no ranking but allows the reader to examine similarities and differences over the approximately two decades in question.Item The brothelization of gender and sexuality in late twentieth-century Latin American narrative and film(2009-12) White, Burke Oliver; Domínguez Ruvalcaba, Héctor, 1962-; Salgado, César Augusto; Roncador, Sonia; Pereiro-Otero, Jose-Manuel; Gonzalez-Lopez, GloriaThe brothel has an important role in Latin American literature and film. The fictional brothel is expected to produce gender in both men and women, but these gendered identities are placed at the extremes within the bordello. This gender extremism creates opposition, or gender transgression, in the characters of twentieth-century Latin American narrative and film. Here I map the brothelized iteration of both genders through prohibitions, taboo, abjection, and violence within various texts and films. Much of the discipline of this cultural production of gender rests on the body. The body must bear the mark of its gender or the character risks violent consequences. Fatness plays an important role in this sexual economy, because fatness destroys gender, pushing the subject toward an androgyny that other characters reject or hate. Though the brothel has been studied before, it has not been analyzed from this gendered perspective.Item Editoriales globales, bibliodiversidad y escritura transnacional : un análisis de la narrativa de Enrique Vila-Matas y Roberto Bolaño(2013-05) Navarro Serrano, José Enrique; Lindstrom, Naomi, 1950-This dissertation explores from an interdisciplinary point of view the textual impact of globalization processes and their concurrent transformation of the cultural industry in the Spanish-language novel of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Here it is argued that the elimination of barriers to capital flows and foreign investment, in conjunction with changes in intellectual property laws and the implementation of new communication and information technologies, have led to the creation of multinational media conglomerates able to restrict the choices made by individuals on not only of what can be read, but also what can be listened to and watched. This work defends the idea that the metafictional frame found in works by the Chilean Roberto Bolaño (1953-2003) and the Spaniard Enrique Vila-Matas (1948) epitomizes a novel approach to transnational writing. In their narratives, both authors portray and resist globalization by proposing a bricolage of stateless literati scattered across the globe in search of enigmatic writers, tantamount in my interpretation to out of print or unpublished books. Coincidentally, both novelists began their career in the same independent publishing house, the Barcelona-based Anagrama, and were later published under major imprints. Moreover, these recognized novelists, both recipients of the prestigious Herralde and Rómulo Gallegos literary prizes, have become points of reference for the next generation of Latin American and Spanish authors.Item El mundo andino en la obra de Caesar Vallejo (The Andean world in the works of Caesar Vallejo)(Texas Tech University, 2009-08) Olascoaga, Jose F.; Perez, Alberto J.; Suppe, Julian F.; Beusterien, John L.This study considers the important presence of the Andean world in the literary works of the Peruvian writer, César Vallejo. Though his works are numerous, various, and complex, the appearance of his home town, the Andean landscape, the Inca heritage, and the human and social conflicts of the Peruvian inhabitant can be extensively found in them. This occurrence can be explained by the different tendencies of Peruvian indigenismo at his time, but also by Vallejo’s lively experience of the Peruvian sierra, and his particular thought and sensibility to the indigenous people and their land, history, and social issues. Based on Vallejo’s journalist chronicles and articles, this study identifies which indigenist and regionalist authors he admired the most and influenced his literary production. It also reveals Vallejo’s complex opinion about indigenismo which involves an ethnical identification with the native people, a profound sense of authenticity and autochthonism, and a responsible insertion in the creative spirit of the nation, as suggested by the positivist view of race. Vallejo’s complete works of poetry, narrative and theater have been analyzed under a thematic inquiry in order to establish which components of the Andean world are present. This study finds that remembrances of his home town, family, the Andean landscape, and bucolic life are mostly related to poetry. Evocations of the Inca civilization happen in his modernist poetry, especially in Los heraldos negros [The black heralds], the novel Hacia el reino de los Sciris [Towards the kingdom of the Sciris], and the drama La piedra cansada [The exhausted stone]. The social vindication of the Indians is induced by the novel El tungsteno [The tungsten] and the short story “Paco Yunque.†In Cuatro cuentos [Four short stories], other social issues arrive, manifesting a multiplicity of feelings. The overall appreciation of these findings shows that Vallejo’s indigenismo is mostly caused by his attachment and sensitivity to the Andean people and homeland, and that every tendency he endorses and genre he uses gives him the opportunity to emphasize some aspects of the indigenous world.Item Fictionalizing Juárez : feminicide, violence, and myth-making in the borderlands(2014-05) Castro Villarreal, Mario Nicolas; Guidotti-Hernández, Nicole MarieIn the early 1990s, a series of gruesome murders of young women in Ciudad Juárez, a city located in the U.S.-Mexico border, shook the political landscape of Mexico. A decade later, the strange and violent murders, known as the feminicides or feminicidios of Juárez, reached international infamy across hemispheres and continents. During this time, the city and the cases became the subjects of an extensive body of scholarship and of any imaginable artistic medium (narrative, poetry, theater, performance, music, and so on). Eventually, the complexity and overexposure of the cases and the sociopolitical conditions of Ciudad Juárez placed them at the center of a paradoxical debate: on one hand, the work of activists, feminists, and scholars of social sciences (like anthropologists and sociologists) studied the murders as a localized example of a larger phenomenon of mysoginistic violence; on the other, journalistic and media investigations of Juárez understood the murders as the products of specific agents (serial killers, murderers, drug cartels, amongst others) and the fractures within the Mexican Nation-State. And yet, despite the expansion and overlapping of these discourses, fictional representations of Juárez remained tangential to this intricate debate. Thus, this research explores the different ways in which writers, artists, and filmmakers deployed and negotiated existent perspectives on the feminicides within fictional environments. As a result of the vast amount of published work available on Ciudad Juárez, I narrowed the objects of my research through a transnational scope. The resulting sample of texts transverses borders (Mexico and the U.S.), continents (Latin America and Europe), genres (fiction and nonfiction), and mediums (literature and film). The first chapter explores the connections of Sergio González Rodríguez’s Huesos en el desierto and Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 through the theoretical framework of the possible worlds of fiction. The second chapter moves to issues of representation, gender, and race through the analysis of two novels written by Chicana scholars: Alicia Gaspar de Alba’s Desert Blood: The Juárez Murders and Stella Pope Duarte’s If I Die in Juárez. Finally, the third chapter focuses on film representations of Juárez and the feminicides in the form of Gregory Nava’s Bordertown and Carlos Carrera’s Backyard/El Traspatio.Item La novela policial alternativa en hispanoamérica : detectives perdidos, asesinos ausentes y enigmas sin respuesta(2008-05) Trelles Paz, Diego, 1977-; Lindstrom, Naomi, 1950-Despite the great popularity and increased prestige of classic detective fiction, as well as the American hard-boiled novel, since their introduction in the nineteenth century many readers and authors have perceived them as genres incompatible with Latin American realities. The inherent conventions of the whodunit, the presence of a detective whose legitimacy is never in doubt, and its conservative ideology, which presupposed the punishment of criminality and the reestablishment of the status quo, were incongruous in societies in which people had no faith in justice. The genre, then, was regarded as unrealistic for third world countries. In this way, in order to be plausible, the detective novel in Latin America needed a different approach. In broad terms, these pages propose the emergence of a new genre that can be observed in the works of contemporary authors such as Vicente Leñero's Los albañiles (1963), Ricardo Piglia's Nombre falso (1975), Jorge Ibargüengoitia's Las muertas (1977) and, most notably, in Roberto Bolaño's Los detectives salvajes (1998), which I consider the most prominent and complex example of this type. The present study examines how this innovative Spanish American detective fiction incorporates and restates some of the structures and conventions of the hard-boiled novel and shares some features of contemporary Spanish American fiction, while developing its own characteristics in contrast with both detective fiction schools. Due to the necessity of the native writers to adopt, formally and thematically, alternative approaches when creating credible detective stories, I have named this emergent genre: Spanish American alternative detective fiction.Item "Modernismo" and politics: criticism of United States expansionism in Latin America (1891-1905)(2005-08) Smallwood, David Andrew; Pérez, Alberto Julián; Oberhelman, Harley D.; Thatcher, George R."Modernismo" can be divided onto two distinct epochs: one from 1888 to 1898 that was shaped by French Parnassian and Formalist poetry, and the second epoch, after 1898, influenced by French symbolism and the socio-political conditions of Latin America. During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the United States caused and presented the most fear for Latin America with its expansionist ambitions. This dissertation will investigate the second epoch of "Modernismo" through discussion and analysis of three major writers: Jose Marti (Cuba, 1853-1895), Jose Enrique Rodo (Uruguay, 1872-1917), and Ruben Dario (Nicaragua, 1867-1916). From each writer's perspective and opinions, the reader will gain a greater insight into the frustration felt by Latin Americans as a result of United States aggressive policies toward the area. While the United States desired to establish world dominance, Latin Americans feared the expansionism would cause a loss of culture, history, and linguistic traditions for them. Each selected writer presented a type of "plan" for Latin American resistance against North American aggression and displayed a fear for Latin America's cultural and independent future.Item "Modernismo" and politics: criticism of United States expansionism in Latin America (1891-1905)(Texas Tech University, 2005-08) Smallwood, David Andrew; Perez, Alberto J.; Oberhelman, Harley D.; Thatcher, George R."Modernismo" can be divided onto two distinct epochs: one from 1888 to 1898 that was shaped by French Parnassian and Formalist poetry, and the second epoch, after 1898, influenced by French symbolism and the socio-political conditions of Latin America. During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the United States caused and presented the most fear for Latin America with its expansionist ambitions. This dissertation will investigate the second epoch of "Modernismo" through discussion and analysis of three major writers: Jose Marti (Cuba, 1853-1895), Jose Enrique Rodo (Uruguay, 1872-1917), and Ruben Dario (Nicaragua, 1867-1916). From each writer's perspective and opinions, the reader will gain a greater insight into the frustration felt by Latin Americans as a result of United States aggressive policies toward the area. While the United States desired to establish world dominance, Latin Americans feared the expansionism would cause a loss of culture, history, and linguistic traditions for them. Each selected writer presented a type of "plan" for Latin American resistance against North American aggression and displayed a fear for Latin America's cultural and independent future.Item Posttraumatic stress disorder in contemporary Colombian literature(2015-08) Flynn, Michael Anthony; Arens, Katherine, 1953-; Polit Dueñas, Gabriela; Salgado, César; Domínguez-Ruvalcaba, Héctor; Palaima, ThomasThis is a study of three contemporary Colombian novels using combat trauma theory as an interpretive model. Following the method of psychological literary criticism that psychiatrist Jonathan Shay used in his books Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character (1994) and Odysseus in America: Combat Trauma and the Trials of Homecoming (2002) to analyze the characters Achilles and Odysseus, I propose to analyze characters in Fernando Vallejo’s La virgen de los sicarios ‘Our Lady of the Assassins’ (1994), Darío Jaramillo Agudelo’s Cartas cruzadas ‘Crossed Letters’ (1995), and Juan Gabriel Vásquez El ruido de las cosas al caer ‘The Sound of Things Falling’ (2011) to extend Shay's theories of combat trauma to a broad cultural context. While Colombia has not been engaged in a conventional, state-to-state war, it has been at a constant level of large-scale internal violence for over fifty years, perpetrated by a complex mix of paramilitaries, guerillas, narcotraffickers, and state-sponsored organizations: Colombia has consistently ranked among the top countries in the world for rates of homicide and displaced peoples. Shay’s model allows me to argue this kind of radically epistemologically and phenomenologically destabilizing environment in which non-combatants as well as combatants live under the constant threat of violence as producing severe psychological trauma. These texts have an additional cultural-psychological function. Shay identifies as an effective coping strategy the victims' act of integrating the traumatic memory into a coherent narrative, in order to both regain authority over their consciousness and to give social testimony to the injustice of the traumatic event. I will show how the characters in the texts I analyze make themselves psychologically whole in direct relation to the success with which they can narrate the story of their own trauma: those who fail do so in large part because the discourses available to them are inadequate to articulate the profundity of the trauma; those who succeed do so because they have found a form and structure that allows them to construct a coherent narrative of Self that incorporates the traumatic memory of the nation's failure.Item The work of death in the Americas(2010-12) Sayre, Jillian J.; Kevorkian, Martin, 1968-This dissertation is a transnational study that argues that a structure of mourning, spoken through and effected by the historical romance, underlies the narrative of national culture as it emerges in the Americas during the early nineteenth century. The writing, consumption and preservation of these texts reveal not only the psychic life of community but also the material basis for that psychic life. Writing and reading, the production and circulation of texts, plays a crucial role in developing this psychic life, and the historical romance was particularly important in the Americas for imagining a national legacy. Current criticism emphasizes the sexual coupling and generative romantic structure of the marriage plot around which many of these novels circulate. This criticism emphasizes the somatic nature of the genre, the corporeal language of romance that is read in the tears of joy and grief spilled by its characters as well as its readers. But while I agree that a libidinal energy is at the heart of both the narrative and its readers’ responses, I argue that the focus on sexual coupling neglects to consider another bodily discourse: that of death and mourning. Mourning enacts a simultaneous identification with and desire for a lost object, a fetishistic relationship that brings together the Freudian “to be” and “to have” and so invests the lost object with both narcissistic and communal attachments. These texts offer their readers the bodies within the narratives, as well as the texts themselves, as the material of a cultural heritage, constructing a nativism that ties the subjects to the land and to the community through a shared lost artifact, their history. Through mourning a common object, the subjects become citizens, native Americans that distance themselves from Europe while supplanting the Amerindian. In combining modern studies of material culture with post Freudian psychoanalytic criticism, the dissertation works to make explicit the relationship between death, citizenship and textuality in order to show the cultural work of fictional historiography in the making of the American nations.