Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Literature and society Latin American literature'

This dissertation explores the question of indigenous development and its literary representation through an investigation of depictions of growth in novels from the United States and Peru where boys mature, perhaps, into men. I find that texts with adolescent characters intimately connected to indigenous communities challenge western concepts of maturity and development as presented in the traditional Bildungsroman. Specifically, I read José María Arguedas’s Los ríos profundo s (1958) and Sherman Alexie’s Flight (2007) as parodies of the genre that call into question the allegory of a western civilizing mission with its lineal trajectory of growth in which the indigenous is relegated to an uncivilized time before modernity. I describe the protagonists of these novels as inconceivable saviors; inconceivable in that the West cannot imagine them, as indigenous, to be the saviors of the nation (i.e., its protectors and reproducers). They are border-thinkers who live in-between epistemological spaces and the stories of their lives serve as kinds of border- Bildungsromane, narratives of growth that arise in the blurred time/space of a border culture, or Bil(dung)sroman, stories of the abject or expelled. Arguedas’s and Alexie’s narratives confront the issue of race, a problem that allegories of the consolidation and development of the nation (e.g., Bildungsroman and foundational fictions) evade through magical means by turning the form into a fetish and presenting fetishized fetal origins that offer reassurances of legitimacy for the western narrative of modernity and the nation-state. That is, the traditional form acts like a talisman that magically disappears the fragmentation of coloniality by providing a history to hold on to, creating an origin that does not really exist. Instead of conforming to the model of the genre or rejecting it, Arguedas’s and Alexie’s texts yield to the power of the original form, appearing to tell the familiar story while carrying a subversive message. Their power derives from the uncertainty inherent in this mimesis. In this way, these novels encourage readers to question the maturation process as conceived and represented in the west and in western literature and to consider alternative paths and formations of self.

Esta investigación explora, a través de la novela de El sueño del celta (2010) de Mario Vargas Llosa, una nueva postura sobre lo que implica ser un héroe. El cuestionamiento que surge sobre el concepto heroico es lo que posibilita examinar la composición heroica del personaje principal de El sueño del celta, Roger Casement. Se conceptualizó al personaje como un héroe moderno, ya que el rasgo que lo identifica es su carácter contradictorio. Para demostrar la caracterización de Casement como héroe moderno se estudiaron diversas instancias narrativas que representaban tanto los rasgos heroicos como antiheroicos. También se examinó la ambigüedad del personaje a través de sus textos escritos y por medio de la construcción narrativa de la obra.

A través de este estudio se llegó a la conclusión de que Roger Casement, forma parte de la disgregación épica del héroe que propuso Mijaíl Bajtín. Según la teoría de Bajtín, Casement como héroe novelesco se caracterizó como un personaje inconcluso y con múltiples matices. Lo que permitió demostrar que los géneros literarios como la épica y la novela pueden influenciar en cómo se constituyen los personajes heroicos. En fin, en esta investigación se cuestiona la conceptualización del héroe tradicional trabajada por Hugo Francisco Bauzá en su libro El mito del héroe: morfología y semántica de la figura heroica y por Joaquín M. Aguirre en su artículo Héroe y sociedad: El tema del individuo superior en la literatura decimonónica. Tanto Bauzá como Aguirre sostienen que el héroe clásico manifiesta juicios elevados de valor, no son cobardes ni sienten miedo, sino más bien exteriorizan los rasgos heroicos más elevados. Entre ellos, el móvil ético de su acción, la transgresión, la ilusión, el sentido de mediación, el valor, el deseo de vencer, el sentido de búsqueda, el valor que los demás le otorgan, entre otros.

No obstante, la nueva postura heroica que presenta El sueño del celta propone que el verdadero heroísmo no consiste en carecer de miedo, sino en superarlo. Ya que el verdadero héroe es aquel que, a pesar de ser consciente de todas sus deficiencias, como el miedo y la debilidad, logra superar y enfrentar los problemas. Son estas características las que permiten presentar a Roger Casement como un héroe en contraposición al héroe tradicional al mostrar un carácter contradictorio y aproximarse a la ambigüedad de la condición humana.

I argue in this dissertation that Thornton Wilder is a poeta doctus, a learned playwright and novelist, who consciously places himself within the classical tradition, creating works that assimilate Greek and Latin literature, transforming our understanding of the classics through the intertextual aspects of his writings. Never slavishly following his ancient models, Wilder grapples with classical literature not only through his fiction set in ancient times but also throughout his literary output, integrating classical influences with biblical, medieval, Renaissance, early modern, and modern sources. In particular, Wilder dramatizes the Americanization of these influences, fulfilling what he describes in an early newspaper interview as the mission of the American writer: merging classical works with the American spirit.

Through close reading; examination of manuscript drafts, journal entries, and correspondence; and philological analysis, I explore Wilder’s development of classical motifs, including the female sage, the torch race of literature, the Homeric hero, and the spread of manure. Wilder’s first published novel, The Cabala, demonstrates his identification with Vergil as the Latin poet’s American successor. Drawing on feminist scholarship, I investigate the role of female sages in Wilder’s novels and plays, including the example of Emily Dickinson. The Skin of Our Teeth exemplifies Wilder’s metaphor of literature as a “Torch Race,” based on Lucretius and Plato: literature is a relay race involving the cooperation of numerous peoples and cultures, rather than a purely competitive endeavor.

Vergil’s expression, sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt [Here are the tears of the world, and human matters touch the heart] (Vergil: Aeneid 1.462), haunts much of Wilder’s oeuvre. The phrase lacrimae rerum is multivocal, so that the reader must interpret it. Understanding lacrimae rerum as “tears for the beauty of the world,” Wilder utilizes scenes depicting the wonder of the world and the resulting sorrow when individuals recognize this too late. Saturating his works with the spirit of antiquity, Wilder exhorts us to observe lovingly and to live life fully while on earth. Through characters such as Dolly Levi in The Matchmaker and Emily Webb in Our Town, Wilder transforms Vergil’s lacrimae rerum into “Our Tears.”

"Find Yourself Here" argues that since transmigrants often form profound connections to place, we can develop a nuanced account of transmigrant subjectivity through innovative fiction by migrants who describe their own neighborhoods. The authors studied use their own hometowns as both setting and stylistic inspiration, deploying various formal techniques to mirror the fictional location to the real one, thus literarily enacting the neighborhood. I construct a neighborhood geography from each work, by traveling on foot, interviewing the neighbors and local historians, mapping the text’s fictional setting upon the actual spaces it references, and teasing out connections between place, narrative form, and migrancy, to demonstrate how excavating the locale illuminates the text. My methodology is interdisciplinary: it incorporates recent sociological studies of transnationalism by Linda Basch, Patricia Pessar, and Jorge Duany, tenets of Human Geography, and the work of Latino literary theorists including Raúl Homero Villa and Mary Pat Bray on space in narrative. My literary neighborhood geographies—of Salvador Plascencia’s El Monte barrio, Junot Díaz’s New Jersey housing development, Sandra Cisneros’ Westside Chicago, and Helena María Viramontes’ East Los Angeles—sharpen Latino literary criticism’s long-standing focus on urban and regional spaces in narrative by zooming in on neighborhood streets, while building on contemporary theories of transnationalism to analyze the broader cultural implications of local migrancy. By grounding the effects of transmigrancy in concrete locations, “Find Yourself Here” presents a comprehensive vision of the US Latino immigrant experience without generalizing from its myriad versions and numerous sites.

Antipoetry, a form of poetry developed by the Chilean poet Nicanor Parra, instances a privileged example of a self-regulatory trait of the poetic genre which responds to poetry’s need to destroy itself in order to renew itself. This need reveals a structural mechanism or a logic of autoimmunity, which informs the possibility of language and, moreover, of all living beings.

Antipoetry’s departure from the Nerudean poetic tradition justifies the use of a colloquial language that also preserves and continues Neruda’s interest in opening a space for the “popular” in poetry. Against Neruda, Antipoetry also consciously repels romantic and heroic aesthetic principles and ideas.

Parra’s aesthetic principles, however, do not result solely from avoidance. Parra is a realist poet heavily influenced by physics. His poetry needs to mirror reality. The principles of relativity and indetermination play major roles in his poetic experimentations, and will come to the aid of Antipoetry’s need to create in times of censorship. Parra’s experiments with language are in large measure interpretations of the laws of physics. In this regard, his scientific realism is related to Gertrude Stein’s work. The poetry and poetics of the latter provides a touchstone and a constant reference in Autoimmunity in Antipoetry.

Like all artistic expressions during the Chilean military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, Antipoetry was forced to negotiate what could be said with what the poet wanted to say. The necessary negotiation that Parra’s poetry needed to undergo gave rise to many experiments with language, including systematic ambiguity, contestation of the authority of the author, and of his own authorial control over his poetry. The use of masks, the multiplication of referents, and the systematic use of contradiction name some of Antipoetry’s tools for obstructing the univocal determination of meaning.

Antipoetry’s systematic explorations toward the creation of a poetry that attempts to fight all forms of dogmatism nevertheless reaches a limit in its figuration of gender. Antipoetry’s gender politics makes concessions to a type of gender dogmatism (sexism and homophobia) that contradicts the antipoetic program and reveals an inherent fear of gender contamination that jeopardizes Antipoetry’s most fortunate aspects.

This dissertation explores the work of Colombian writer Evelio Rosero (1958), whose work-like many of his nation's generation, but with a radically new aesthetic and ethic proposal—focuses on violence and on the disappearance of people in the context of the armed conflict that has ravaged Colombia for the last thirty years.

Despite having a long and consistent literary career that started in the early eighties and having received prestigious awards, Rosero continues to be almost unknown both nationally and internationally. My dissertation contends that such lack of recognition is serious and that current conversations about Colombian literature and the representation of violence more broadly cannot be done without taking into account his disruptive work. Through a careful analysis of Rosero's most representative novels—Señor que no conoce la luna, En el lejero and Los Ejércitos—I examine the literary techniques the author uses to produce a space—both literary and political—that neither justifies nor exacerbates violence.

Based primarily on the concept of the spectral put forth by Jacques Derrida in Specters of Marx, on Mieke Bal's position on political art and on Jean-Luc Nancy's construction of rebellion in Noli me tangere, I demonstrate how Rosero's novels highlight the discourses and mechanisms that put into place and even sanction the violence they supposedly lament.

The dissertation is divided in three chapters. Chronologically organized, each one examines one of Rosero's most representative novels.

In the introduction I contextualize Rosero's literary work within the larger efforts to represent Colombia's violent situation. I argue that by focusing on disappearance, ambiguity and spectrality Rosero avoids the most common and problematic pitfalls of such texts. I take the position that by doing so Rosero gives visibility to the many ways in which a state of violence is (re)produced and represented -both aesthetically and politically—signalling a complicity (not necessarily deliberate) between the two.

The first chapter analyzes Señor que no conoce la luna. I argue that by focusing in the way los vestidos enslave and torture los desnudos due to their dual genitalia, Rosero shows the artificiality and arbitrariness of our social constructions and highlights how they are used to infringe extreme violence to a particular group of people. I contend that in the unregulated circulation of erotic desire Rosero finds a way out of this structure of abjection.

The second chapter deals with the radical "spectralization" that takes place in En el lejero. I take the position that Rosero's emphasis on the difficulty of identifying people and spaces, and his refusal to stabilize meaning are effective tools in dismantling a system of oppression and violence while opening a space for agency and solidarity.

The third and last chapter studies Rosero's most famous novel, Los Ejércitos. I read the novel's contrast between moments of intense visibility and instances of extreme obscurity and confusion as a way to underscore the violent nature of certain ways of looking at things and people. Rosero's insistence in our bonds with, and responsibility towards, what can no longer, not yet, be seen or heard is key to create a space for the political that is not based on violence and exclusion.

To conclude, I argue that through Jacques Derrida's "impure impure history of ghosts" Rosero develops an aesthetically astonishing and politically crucial way of re-counting and accounting for the violence that a prolonged state of warfare continues to (re)produce in Latin America.

Esta disertaciôn conecta la teorfa de la transculturaciôn narrativa de ´Angel Rama con la tradiciôn intelectual latinoamericana que aportô sus caracterfsticas mâs distintivas. Las teorfas de Rama fueron influidas por dos tradiciones latinoamericanas. Una es de carâcter polftico y tiene su origen en la Reforma de Côrdoba de 1918. La otra, de carâcter epistemolôgico y se remonta a la década de 1930, cuando comienza el culturalismo en Latinoamérica. Mi investigaciôn se ocupa de un grupo de intelectuales uruguayos que trabajaron en torno al semanario Marcha [1939-1974]: Carlos Quijano [1900-1984], Julio Castro [1908 -desaparecido en 1977] y Arturo Ardao [1912-2003]. También me ocupo de dos intelectuales brasile˜nos, Antonio Cândido [1918] y Darcy Ribeiro [1922-1997], quienes continuaron con la tradiciôn culturalista que inauguraron en Latinoamérica autores como Gilberto Freyre [1900-1987] y Fernando Ortiz [1881-1969]. Recuperar las redes intelectuales que acompa˜naron el proceso de articulaciôn de la transculturaciôn narrativa nos permite comprender mejor las tesis de Rama por dos razones. Primero, porque enmarca esta teorfa dentro de algunos de los debates polfticos y culturales mâs importantes de la Guerra Frfa. Y segundo, porque se aproxima a la manera como Rama comprendiô la historia latinoamericana y su coyuntura polftica y socio-cultural durante las décadas de 1960 y 1970.

El objetivo de la teorfa de la transculturaciôn narrativa es describir el proceso por el cual las manifestaciones literarias latinoamericanas pasan de la dependencia a la autonomia cultural. Como el proceso descrito se despliega dentro de la estructura social, para comprenderlo es necesario analizar la interacciôn entre las obras literarias y la sociedad que las rodea, de esta forma las ciencias sociales –antropologia, sociologia, economia– son instrumentos de anâlisis indispensables para comprender una obra o tradiciôn literaria. Este marco general de anâlisis es descrito por Rama como el culturalismo.

En el caso de Rama, una lectura desde los estudios literarios puede dar por sentado que el culturalismo fue tan sôlo un método de anâlisis alternativo al estructuralismo francés. Aunque esta perspectiva sea en parte correcta, no es del todo precisa. El culturalismo al que se refiere Rama es el mismo que practicaron los cientistas sociales en Latinoamérica desde la década de 1930. Recuperar la historicidad de la transculturaciôn narrativa no solo nos permite comprender la genealogia de esta teoria sino recuperar y hacer visibles algunas tradiciones intelectuales contra-hegemônicas que desarticulô la Guerra Fria en Latinoamérica.

This dissertation studies how the melodramatic mode shapes the approach to political violence in six novels: Libro de Manuel, by Julio Cortázar, El beso de la mujer araña, by Manuel Puig; Historia de Mayta, by Mario Vargas Llosa; Estrella distante, by Roberto Bolaño; La hora azul, by Alonso Cueto; and La vida doble, by Arturo Fontaine. Beyond the realm of sentimental formulaic melodrama, I define this term as the interpretation of events after subjective emotions. By studying these novels, I propose that the melodramatic imagination has become the most employed set of tropes for the interpretation of public and private interactions in contemporary fiction. My analysis exposes how literary writing addresses commercial, political, and artistic aspirations through a combined use of strategies such as moral polarization, pathos, emotional interpretation, scenic emplotment, and sensationalism.

Chapter One analyses the connections between political violence and melodrama in Latin American literatures and cultures. Chapter Two is a study of Cortázar’s Libro de Manuel, a novel which fictionalizes what I call melodrama of the revolutionary, an emotional, uncritical identification with leftist urban subcultures. Chapter Three studies Puig’s El beso de la mujer araña to illustrate the existence of reactionary practices in progressivist and queer sectors, limiting their capacity to generate political change. Chapter Four is an analysis of Vargas Llosa’s Historia de Mayta, a dystopian diatribe against leftist politicians in which a melodramatic understanding of experience appears in both dominant and marginal sectors. Chapter Five studies Bolaño’s Estrella distante, a novel in which the search for a neo-avantgardist artist obsessed with the use of corpses as material allows the dramatization of melodrama in artistic sectors, leading to the normalization of totalitarianism. Chapter Six is a reading of Cueto’s La hora azul, a novel in which national reconciliation becomes a middle-high class subjective conflict, interpreting historical experience in terms originated in audiovisual melodrama. Chapter Seven analyzes Fontaine’s La vida doble, in which the voice of a former revolutionary and intelligence agent reinforces the idea that leftist convictions are futile, normalizing emotions that normalize material and symbolic inequity. Finally, the last section summarizes this work’s contributions.

This thesis explores the possible creation of a new categorization of American Literature as presented in the Andean novel El pez de oro: Retablos del Laykhakuy (1957) by Gamaliel Churata. In El pez de oro, Gamaliel Churata presents a strategy for the recuperation of native Andean cultural agency that enables the Andean subject to reclaim traces of their ancestral past under more verisimilar and verifiable terms. Churata argues that through a recuperation of native language and its infusion into the body of the major colonial language, Spanish, the Andean subject is equipped with a new culture producing tool that enables the recuperation of language, agency, history, and, ultimately, representation and inclusion within cultural and political institutional frameworks. By introducing his own function of bilingualism, vernacular language, and mythological infusions into the body of colonial letters, Gamaliel Churata is able to destabilize and disrupt colonial historical and textual authority to the point where the invented concept of America and the colonial product of American identity can be re-examined. Through this examination emerges a new option for the categorization of American identity as an aesthetic construct. Within this new categorization of aesthetic American identity, the Andean subject can begin his own process of self-identification through his native language toward the production of a future Andean American subject.