Arts and Humanities Commons^™

"The Whole Foundations Of The Solid Globe Were Suddenly Rent Asunder": Space Place And Homelessness In Poe's "The Narrative Of Arthur Gordon Pym" And Melville's "Benito Cereno", Francis H. Hill

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

My project examines the phenomenon of the hazy spaces on the periphery of the antebellum imagination that, while existing geographically at the very fringes of daily American life, are nonetheless active in the conceptualization, production, and representation of an idiosyncratic American sense of space: an anxiety of spatial fragmentation, formlessness, and modulation. In particular I am interested in Poe's “The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym” and Melville's “Benito Cereno,” both of which deal with American transoceanic travel to the proximity of Antarctica and its surrounding seas. These gothicized nautical fictions demonstrate an important dialectic playing out in these extreme spaces: …

Constructing Childhood: Place, Space And Nation In Argentina, 1880-1955, Melissa Malone

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

During the vastly transformative stages of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, notions of the urban and definitions of childhood mutually intersected to create and define a modern Argentine landscape. The construction of new urban environments for children defined and reflected larger liberal elites’ definitions of childhood writ large. To better understand the production of this modern childhood in Argentina, this dissertation examines its other through the spatial-discourses behind constructions of childhood for the socio-economic lower classes - children who largely did not meet the expectations of the elite.

I employ the use of both published and archival sources, …

The Central American Question: Nicaraguan Cultural Production And Francisco Goldman's The Ordinary Seaman, Oscar A. Gonzalez

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This study examines the cultural production and political history of Nicaragua from the 1960s to the early 1990s and interprets Francisco Goldman’s The Ordinary Seaman alongside Central America’s literary boom period, the nation-building project of the revolutionary letrados, and race relations between Nicaragua’s Pacific region and its two autonomous sectors of the Atlantic coast. It is argued that Central American ways of seeing are colored by the interplay between a revolutionary past, the myth of the pure Indio or mestizo, and the erasure of national identity in the US contact zone. Rather than recuperating a Central American identity, it …

Asterisms, Erica N. Kenick

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

ASTERISMS is a collection of lyric poetry that seeks to express a sense of awe for the natural world by exploring themes of science, art, and the self. By combining physics and metaphysics, scientific terminology and musings on love, ASTERISMS argues that these seemingly-disparate fields of knowledge can harmonize in unexpected ways.

In its style, the collection draws from the works of Dorianne Laux, Pablo Neruda, and Annie Dillard. Most of the poems are written in free-version and are tied together by images of astronomy and wilderness, both modern and prehistoric. Poems about classical music appear as interludes meant to …