Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Frida's Daughter, Myrta Vida

Theses

The purpose of my creative writing is to highlight a group of U.S. citizens still woefully underrepresented in literature proper: the Latinx middle class. I’m keenly interested in exploring Puerto Rican and first- and second-generation Latinx immigrant stories. Even though some of the experiences from these groups have been elegantly visited by writers such as Giannina Braschi, Sandra Cisneros, Junot Diaz, Julia Alvarez, and others, there are nuances to the Latinx middle class experience that are yet to be uncovered. Being stuck in the cultural, linguistic, socio-economic, and political middles in a country that has recently taken a largely nationalist …

Todas Las Muertes De Lázaro, Diego Murcia

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

TODAS LAS MUERTES DE LÁZARO es una novela negra que habla de corrupción, ansias de poder, ambición y decepción. En este libro, el tema de la muerte es una excusa para hablar de todo un paí­s, El Salvador, y sus contradicciones a través del cinismo, el humor y el escepticismo. Su personaje principal, El Pí­tbul, es una representación del desamparo generalizado que el ciudadano común tiene de las instituciones del Estado. Este detective se embarca -por orden presidencial- en una búsqueda misteriosa que le requiere dar con un amo del disfraz. A medida que el investigador se interna en los …

Mapa Provisonal De La Literatura Hispanoamericana De Entre Siglo (Xx-Xxi): Una Mirada Al Camino Literario Actual, Claudia Lorena Márquez-Reséndiz

Dissertations

Globalization has dramatically transformed many aspects of our life. Media and technology have advanced significantly in the last two decades. At the same time, migration has increased at an unprecedented pace. Literature reflects and expresses the social, economic, political and cultural factors that are occurring at any given time. My dissertation focuses on a novelistic production of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. This body of literature carries within a particular structure of feeling that has emerged in our global era.

In chapter one, I undertake the reading of three novels that discuss and question the concept of "national" …

Creation And (Re)Presentation Of Historical Discourse In Isle Of Passion By Laura Restrepo, Daniela Melis

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Published in Colombia in 1989, but neglected until the author’s later distinction, Laura Restrepo’s first novel, Isle of Passion, focuses on historical facts, as well as on the issues that arise when the impact of events is articulated in official discourse. This study—drawing from Walter Mignolo’s idea of decolonial theory—explores how Restrepo’s attempt to rewrite history following “an-other logic, an-other language, an-other thinking” contributes to the decolonization of knowledge, being, community interests, and cultural heritage. The novel’s plot centers on a minor event in international history: the territorial dispute over the island of Clipperton, which was encountered by an …

Al Cuerpo Lo Que Pida, Lucia Sanchez-Llorente

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Al cuerpo lo que pida, is a novel that addresses the old topic of disloyalty in contemporary Mexico City society. It narrates in first person the inner-conflict of the protagonist, Mercedes Santamaria, who tries to lead a double life. On one hand she is in love with her husband, Fernando, and on the other hand, she is incapable of stopping her impulses with other men, which puts her marriage in jeopardy. She turns to her late grandmother, as an alter ego, for advice.

En Los Ojos, El Vacío, Camilo Castillo-Rojas

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

En los ojos, el vacío is a fiction novel.

Is the story of two men, Antonio Valbuena and Leandro Cubillos, who make a journey to their old town, localized at the countryside. There they have to collect the remains of one corpse, Antonio's son, who was murdered by an illegal armed group.

Gendered Quests: Analysis, Revelation And The Epistemology Of Gender In Neera's "Teresa", "Lydia" And "L'Indomani", Silvia Valisa

Silvia Valisa

This essay is devoted to Milanese fin-de-siècle writer Neera, more specifically to the three novels composing her “ciclo della donna giovane” (the young woman’s cycle). I examine the striking similarity of the epistemological projects of the three heroines, i.e. their attempt to combine an analytical project with a revelatory structure in order to overcome their contradictory status of narrative subjects and social objects. I consider these projects "gendered" in that they are quests disturbed by a structural and epistemological bias that forecloses a full access to experience and knowledge. The different outcomes of the quests are determined by these women’s …

Borders Of The Self In Alfredo Véa's The Silver Cloud Café , Roberto Cantú

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

I am proposing an analysis of a novel by Alfredo Véra, Jr., The Silver Cloud Café (1996). As the author of a narrative trilogy that includes La Maravilla (1993), and Gods Go Begging (1999), Véa has produced, in The Silver Cloud Café, a novel that is central to the trilogy's interpretation. In my analysis, I discuss how Véa's novels question borders of the self—understood as ethnic or racial—through notions of a personal education (in La Maravilla, Alberto's; in The Silver Cloud Café, Zeferino's) in which characters count on the pedagogical guidance of Yaqui shamans, manongs from the …

Maria Vargas Llosa's El Hablador As A Discourse Of Conquest , José Castro Urioste

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

In this article I study how Mario Vargas Llosa's El hablador proposes to deconstruct indigenist narrative and promotes the assimilation of Indian cultures under the model of modernity. In this sense, the novel El hablador is written as a discourse of conquest in which the construction of the self—through the evocation of various oppositions—represents an allegory of modern nation. I begin my article with the analysis of the notion of discourse of conquest, as well as one of its most reiterated images of power, the "civilization-barbarism" dichotomy. I follow this with an analysis of the oppositions through which the representation …

Literary Invention And Critical Fashion: Missing The Boat In The Sea Of Lentils, Elzbieta Sklodowska

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

In pursuing the relation of Sea of Lentils (1979) to the Spanish American literary canon, I argue that while Benítez-Rojo's novel did not fall into the category of the already canonized—and therefore was spared a parricidal gesture of the Post-Boom writers—neither did it belong amidst the previously marginalized texts. I suggest that Sea of Lentils concentrates its internal critique of language and representation around the process of remembering in a manner that is radically at odds not only with the "traditional" historical novel, but with the official voice of the ascendant testimonio as well. Moreover, the notion of memory as …

Ideology And Structure In Giardinelli's Santo Oficio De La Memoria, Gustavo Pellón

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

The article studies the most recent novel by Argentine novelist Mempo Giardinelli from the point of view of its polyphonic structure. Santo Oficio is compared to one of its models, William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, and the respective modern and postmodern aesthetics ofboth novels are discussed. Giardinelli's approach in this ambitious novel is contrasted with that of major authors of the Latin American Boom. A family tree of the Domeniconelle family, the protagonists of Santo Oficio, is included.

Numa And The Nature Of The Fantastic In The Fiction Of Juan Benet, David K. Herzberger

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Perhaps the most rewarding critical approach to the novels of Juan Benet is one that encompasses the irrational and seeks to reveal the mysterious— one that can be closely identified with the notion of the fantastic. The view of the fantastic developed in the present study is based on a synthetic modification of the precepts of Todorov and Rabkin, and places emphasis on the hesitation of the reader when confronted with a diametric reversal of the laws of the text. Both the literary theory and prose fiction of Benet can be closely linked to the fantastic: the former through Benet's …

El Ingenioso Hidalgo Don Quijote De La Mancha, Dorothy Flammer

University of the Pacific Theses and Dissertations

This book is being edited at the suggestion of colleagues who feel a great need for a Spanish reader with the the following qualifications:

1. A good connected story from Spanish Literature
2. Subject matter suitable for adolescents
3. Sufficiently simple for use in Beginning Spanish

This is an edited version of Part One, and consequently is simplified and cut. Many authorities prefer to wait until students get to college so that they may be introduced to the great masterpiece in its original. In as much as the average high school student does not take more than two years of Spanish, this system …