Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Hasta Que La Muerte Los Separe: La Representación De La Violencia Machista En La Literatura Y El Cine Hispánicos Contemporáneos, Anna M. Martija Perez

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Violence against women is a worldwide social problem that is far from being eradicated. Sociologists and psychologists have studied this complex issue rooted in the unbalanced distribution of power between the sexes and writers have portrayed it in their works since the Middle Ages to present. This dissertation provides a comparative study of recent representations of male violence in fictional and non-fictional works produced in different Hispanic countries. The works analyzed include: Icíar Bollaín´s film Te doy mis ojos (2003); recent documentaries such as Home Truth (2017) and Las tres muertes de Maricela Escobedo (2021); shortfilms like Disonancia (2005) and …

Son For Everybody: Exploring Afro Cuban And African American Relations Through Langston Hughes’ Translations Of Nicolas Guillén’S Poetry, Hayley R. Fernandez

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this thesis was to analyze the translation decisions made in Cuba Libre, Translated from the Spanish By Langston Hughes and Ben Frederic Carruthers, and to explore the contemporary image of Nicolás Guillén as expressed in recent projects regarding his work and legacy. Particular attention was paid to the historical and social frameworks Guillén employed in his own work and the same frameworks he and his poetry have been associated with in recent years. The larger importance of this piece was to take a look at how international Blackness existed and was worked with in literature at the …

Otherness, Peronism, And Violence In Juan Diego Incardona's Saga Celinense, Sergio L. Andruccioli

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Juan Diego Incardona is one of the most relevant voices in the so-called “Nueva Narrativa Argentina” (New Argentinean Narrative)”—a literary movement originating circa 1983 that has renewed Argentinean literary production and redefined historical identity in Latin American literature. Through an analysis of Incardona’s Villa Celina (2008), El campito (2009), Rock barrial (2010), and Las estrellas federales (2016)—a quartet known as “Saga Celinense”—this dissertation explores a new cartography (not seen before in Argentinean literature) of the peripheral slums away from the Capital City as hotbeds of a strong political ideology—namely, Peronism. These communities have been historically marginalized, ignored, and made invisible …

Primitivismo Y Poesía Femenina En El Cono Sur: Gabriela Mistral, Alfonsina Storni Y Juana De Ibarbourou, Ramon Muniz

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Primitivism is a philosophical attitude and artistic view based on the search for origins. It is linked to a simpler conception of life and has been used as a strategy to critique modernity through literature and art, as well as a means to subvert traditional and academicist paradigms in cultural production. Although most scholars have considered Primitivism as a problem of Western ideology, Erik Camayd-Freixas, Marianna Torgovnick, and Ben Etherington have shown that Primitivism is present in all cultures and that its strategies have been deployed to deal with racial, ecological, economic, artistic, and gender issues.

My dissertation analyzes the …

Fronteras Hispánicas: Identidades Fronterizas Y Diálogo Intercultural En La Literatura Y El Cine Contemporáneos, Claudia Battistel

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Border-crossings —both geographical and metaphorical— are a fertile territory for critical and fictional discourses that explore the forging of gendered personal, social, and cultural identities. The notion of the border becomes a political, material, discursive or symbolic limit, a space of conflict, resistance and negotiation, where power relations are articulated. In this dissertation I analyze the following border-crossing narratives and films: The House on Mango Street, by Sandra Cisneros; Jo també soc catalana and El último patriarca, by Najat El Hatchmi; Retorno a Hansala, by Chus Gutiérrez, and Sin dejar huella, by María Novaro. My study …

Modernización Y Espacio Urbano: El Protagonismo De La Ciudad En La Literatura Latinoamericana De Fin De Siglo (1880-1920), Gabriela Carolina Escobar Rodríguez

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Urban space has played a prominent role in late nineteenth century and early twentieth century Latin American literature and culture due to the historical and political importance that cities have had and to the relevant role they played in the passage of Latin-American to modernity at the end of the nineteenth century. In spite of this, the fin de siècle´s city novels have not received the attention they deserve. They have often been misclassified (the Latin American urban novel has been studied almost exclusively as a phenomenon of the second half of the 20th century) and/or ignored even though they …

What's Past Is Prologue: Transforming Trauma, Rewriting Identity In Gloria Anzaldua's "Borderlands/La Frontera" And "Light In The Dark/Luz En Lo Oscuro", Richard Edward Riley

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Gloria Anzaldua’s Borderlands/La Frontera and Light in the Dark/Luz en lo Oscuro are widely acknowldged as groundbreaking texts across Latinx literary canons, invoking selfhood, spirituality, activism, and politics as a queer woman of color writer.

Her language around self-dispersion is still undertheorized in what it owes to traumatic experiences discoverable in the self, body, world, and culture Anzaldua hails from. The extent of colonizing and kyriarchal damage in her work has been recognized; but the exact character of how these breakages and corresponding imperatives to regenerate oneself resemble a traumatic shock remains to be written about.

This thesis sketches frameworks …

Masculinidad Y Nación: Modelos Alternativos De Masculinidad En Las Obras De Juan Goytisolo Y Mario Vargas Llosa, Jose M. Morcillo Gomez

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation focuses on the construction of national discourse from a gender perspective and examines how the concepts of nation and masculinity intersect each other in the works of Spanish writer Juan Goytisolo (1931-2017) and Peruvian Nobel laureate Mario Vargas Llosa (1936). This study sheds light on how fiction and real life events are interconnected in some of the novels and autobiographical works of both authors. The works analysed include: Señas de identidad (1966), Reivindicación del conde don Julián (1970), Juan sin tierra (1975), Coto vedado (1985), and Carajicomedia (2000) by Goytisolo, as well as La ciudad y los perros …

Memoria, Identidad Y Literatura Del Yo: Narrativas De La Segunda Generación De Escritores Exiliados Por La Guerra Civil Española, Juan Antonio Godoy

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The victory of the dictator Francisco Franco, after the Spanish Civil War (1936- 1939), resulted in the political repression of thousands of citizens who had been loyal to the Republican government, and the exile of more than 200,000 civilians. The studies of Spanish Civil war exile literature have paid more attention to the first generation of exiled writers. However, the purpose of this dissertation is to study the construction of the self in the autobiographical and auto-fictional works written by the second generation. These authors -- born between 1920 and 1938-- left Spain as children and reached adulthood in different …

Queering The Clown Prince Of Crime: A Look At Queer Stereotypes As Signifiers In Dc Comics’ The Joker, Zina Hutton

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The goal of this thesis is to explore the way heterosexism and homophobia are present in the coding that has created an implied and monstrous queer identity for the Joker, present in many versions of the character over the past forty years. Through close readings of several of the Joker’s most iconic appearances, queer theory texts, and analytical essays on pop culture, this paper will analyze the use of queer signifiers present in the comics and the way that these portrayals of the Joker are rife with harmful and heterocentric perceptions of what comic creators have seen as necessary signifiers …

Depictions Of Fear In Lev Tolstoy's Sevastopol Sketches And Stephen Crane's The Red Badge Of Courage, Ralph Willard Schusler Jr

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this thesis was to examine and compare two iconoclastic works dealing with war as experienced by combatants. So much of modern war fiction takes this perspective that one is hard pressed to imagine a time when such was not the case; the watershed was marked in the above named works by the aforementioned writers, which, and who, were first in putting readers inside the heads of common soldiers facing mortal danger. These pioneering authors opened the door to modernist writing about boundary situations involving existential threat, as well as the psychological reactions they evoke – especially fear. …

The Crafting Of The Self In Private Letters And The Epistolary Novel: El Hilo Que Une, Un Verano En Bornos, Ifigenia, Querido Diego, Te Abraza Quiela, And Cartas Apócrifas, Angelica A. Nelson

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The inherent flexibility of the letter form or epistolary mode of writing frees the writer within the framework of salutations and closings to use vocabulary and language to create, to omit or to invert conventional constraints imposed on women by a patriarchal society. The letter begins as a blank page but becomes the space for writing one’s personal thoughts and emotions to the absent other in a communicative effort to minimize the separation.

This dissertation examines the female narrator in actual letters written during the Spanish emigration to the New World in the sixteenth century and four epistolary novels written …

The Symphony Of State: São Paulo's Department Of Culture, 1922-1938, Micah J. Oelze

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In 1920s-30s São Paulo, Brazil, leaders of the vanguard artistic movement known as “modernism” began to argue that national identity came not from shared values or even cultural practices but rather by a shared way of thinking, which they variously designated as Brazil’s “racial psychology,” “folkloric unconscious,” and “national psychology.” Building on turn-of-the-century psychological and anthropological theories, the group diagnosed Brazil’s national mind as characterized by “primitivity” and in need of a program of psychological development. The group rose to political power in the 1930s, placing the artists in a position to undertake such a project. The Symphony of State …

Turn Me On Or Off: A Study On Epigenetics And Merleau-Ponty In Angela Carter’S “The Lady Of The House Of Love”, Solsiree Lynn Skarlinsky

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This study aims to trace points of intersection between the too often divorced disciplines of literature, continental philosophy, and the hard sciences in Angela Carter’s “The Lady of the House of Love.” In short, this thesis will not only explore how such conversations surface within the short story, but will also serve as an explication of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of body and space, and the theory of epigenetics. Through these explications, the thesis itself will also gear one discipline towards the other as both theories intimately bind the environment with the body, and the body with the environment. Thus, …

We Are Standing In The Nick Of Time: Translative Relevance In Anne Carson's "Antigonick", Michelle Alonso

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The complicated issues surrounding translation studies have seen growing attention in recent years from scholars and academics that want to make it a discipline and not a minor branch of another field, such as linguistics or comparative literature. Writ large with Antigonick, Carson showcases the recent Western push towards translation studies in the American academy. By offering up a text that is chaotic in its presentation, she bypasses the rigid idea of univocality. By giving the text discordant images, she betrays the failed efficacy of sign and signification, and by choosing a text to be performed and mutually participated …

Women Creators: Artistry And Sacrifice In The Novels Of Virginia Woolf, Issel M. Guigou

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines different facets of feminine artistry in Virginia Woolf's novels with the purpose of defining her conception of women artists and the role sacrifice plays in it. The project follows characters in "Mrs. Dalloway," "To the Lighthouse," and "Between the Acts" as they attempt to create art despite society's restrictions; it studies the suffering these women experience under regimented institutions and arbitrary gender roles.

From Woolf’s earlier texts to her last, she embraces the uncertainty of identity, even as she portrays the artist’s sacrifice in the early-to-mid twentieth century, specifically as the creative female identity fights to adapt …

What We’Ve Got Here Is A Failure To Communicate: A Postmodern Analysis Of Representations Of Higher Education In Cinema, Carlos E. Gonzalez

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The primary purpose of this study was to explore representations of higher education in film. In order to achieve that objective this study consisted of a narrative analysis of the themes that emerged in films regarding higher education. This study focused on films from the 1950s to the present. The narratives that emerged from the analysis of the films were compared and contrasted to the scholarly literature regarding higher education. The analysis of the films also included juxtaposing the film narratives to the work of postmodern theorists such as Michel Foucault in order to inform the claims made by the …

The World In Singing Made: David Markson's "Wittgenstein's Mistress", Tiffany L. Fajardo

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In line with Wittgenstein's axiom that "what the solipsist means is quite correct; only it cannot be said, but makes itself manifest," this thesis aims to demonstrate how the gulf between analytic and continental philosophy can best be bridged through the mediation of art. The present thesis brings attention to Markson's work, lauded in the tradition of Faulkner, Joyce, and Lowry, as exemplary of the shift from modernity to postmodernity, wherein the human heart is not only in conflict with itself, but with the language out of which it is necessarily constituted. Markson limns the paradoxical condition of the subject …

On Record: Soundscapes As Metaphor And Physical Manifestation Of Memory In Early Holocaust Novels And Contemporary Criticism, Mariane Stanev

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis compares two perspectives on the production of Holocaust memory: a novel that leads up to The Holocaust in Britain and one that reflects the hindsight perspective of a liberator in the Soviet Union. The novels are Virginia Woolf’s BETWEEN THE ACTS and Vasily Grossman’s LIFE AND FATE. The analysis offers a locus of analysis for the diasporic literary energy created by the catastrophe in the 20^th and 21^st centuries. The project offers a theorized standpoint on the role of literature on official historical archives. Proposing a method through which contemporary readers can engage the diasporic event …

La Representación De La Masculinidad Y La Violencia De Género En La Novela Española De La Posguerra, Alfredo M. Pastor

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

While it may be argued that aggression against women is part of a culture of violence deeply rooted in Spanish society, the gender-related violence that exists in today’s Spain is more specifically a legacy of Franco’s dictatorship (1939-1975). Franco’s Spain endorsed unequal gender relations, championed patriarchal dominance and power over women, and imposed models of hegemonic and authoritarian masculinities that internalized violence by rendering it a feature inseparable from manhood and virility.

This dissertation provides a comprehensive analysis of masculinity and gender violence in Franco’s Spain, by analyzing the novel as the primary cultural vehicle of social criticism and political …

Hispanic Orientalism: The Literary Development Of A Cultural Paradigm, From Medieval Spain To Modern Latin America, Svetlana V. Tyutina

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation offers a novel approach to Hispanic Orientalism, developing a dynamic paradigm from its origins in medieval and Renaissance Iberia during the process of the Christian Reconquest, to its transatlantic migration and establishment in the early years of the Colony, from where it changed in late colonial and post-Independence Latin America, and onto modernity.

The study argues that Hispanic Orientalism does not necessarily imply a negative depiction of the Other, a quality associated with the traditional critique of Saidian Orientalism. Neither, does it entirely comply with the positivist approach suggested in the theoretical research of Said’s opponents, like Julia …

Mothers And Their Children: Harry Potter And Melanie Klein, Kristina Mur

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis analyzes the mother-child relationship in the Harry Potter novels by using Melanie Klein’s object-relation based theory. I argue the mothers and their relationship with their offspring represent fragments of a whole complicated psyche. The characters are not analyzed as individuals, but instead as pieces, sometimes multiple pieces, of a whole psyche. When these characters and novels are taken together, a whole, multi-faceted person comes into view. Rowling depicts both good and bad mothers, and children who characterize different positions according to Klein. These positions are the paranoid-schizoid position with Harry Potter and the depressive position with Sirius Black …

Accepting The Failure Of Human And State Bodies: Interactions Of Syphilis And Space In "Hamlet" And "The Knight Of The Burning Pestle", Laura E. Radford

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this thesis is, first, to explore the presence and meaning of Foucault’s heterotopia within William Shakespeare’s “Hamlet”and Beaumont and Fletcher’s “The Knight of the Burning Pestle.” The heterotopia is a privileged space of self-reflection created by individuals or societies in crisis. In each play, the presence of crisis is explained though the metaphor of syphilis; to which individual characters respond by entering the reflective space of the heterotopia in order to countenance and “cure” their afflictions. The second purpose of this thesis is to examine the ways in which the crises acted upon the stage reflect …

The Enchanter's Spell: J.R.R. Tolkien's Mythopoetic Response To Modernism, Adam D. Gorelick

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

J.R.R. Tolkien was not only an author of fantasy but also a philologist who theorized about myth. Theorists have employed various methods of analyzing myth, and this thesis integrates several analyses, including Tolkien’s. I address the roles of doctrine, ritual, cross-cultural patterns, mythic expressions in literature, the literary effect of myth, evolution of language and consciousness, and individual invention over inheritance and diffusion. Beyond Tolkien’s English and Catholic background, I argue for eclectic influence on Tolkien, including resonance with Buddhism.

Tolkien views mythopoeia, literary mythmaking, in terms of sub-creation, human invention in the image of God as creator. Key mythopoetic …

Post-Revolutionary Post-Modernism: Central American Detective Fiction By The Turn Of The 21st Century, Gael Guzman-Medrano

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Contemporary Central American fiction has become a vital project of revision of the tragic events and the social conditions in the recent history of the countries from which they emerge. The literary projects of Sergio Ramirez (Nicaragua), Dante Liano (Guatemala), Horacio Castellanos Moya (El Salvador), and Ramon Fonseca Mora (Panama), are representative of the latest trends in Central American narrative. These trends conform to a new literary paradigm that consists of an amalgam of styles and discourses, which combine the testimonial, the historical, and the political with the mystery and suspense of noir thrillers. Contemporary Central American noir narrative depicts …

Teachers’ Experiences In And Perceptions Of Their12th-Grade British Literature Classrooms, Keisha Simone Mcintyre-Mccullough

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this study was to understand the experiences and perceptions of 12th-grade literature teachers about curriculum, Post-Colonial literature, and students. Theories posed by Piaget (1995), Vygotsky (1995), and Rosenblatt (1995) formed the framework for this micro-ethnographic study. Seven teachers from public and private schools in South Florida participated in this two-phase study; three teachers in Phase I and four in Phase II. All participants completed individual semi-structured interviews and demographic surveys. In addition, four of the teachers were observed teaching.

The analysis yielded three themes and two sub-themes: (a) knowledge concerned teachers’ knowledge of British literature content and …