Spanish and Portuguese Language and Literature Commons^™

Anita Brenner’S Vision: A Transnational Search For Mexican Jewish Identity, Gina Malagold

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation traces U.S.-Mexico cross-border networks during the cultural Renaissance of early 20^th century influenced by artistic and intellectual encounters in post-revolutionary Mexico. I explore from a transnational perspective the representation of Mexican-Jewish identity in post-revolutionary Mexico through the lens of Mexican-American Jewish anthropologist, artist, and journalist Anita Brenner (1905-1974). In my dissertation, Anita Brenner’s Vision: A Transnational Search for Mexican Jewish Identity, I expand on the notion of mexicanidad and reframe the cosmopolitanism of the time and its manifestation in the United States, arguing that Brenner’s contributions were instrumental in linking Mexico to the larger map of …

Crisis Y Paradojas: Subjetividades Femeninas En La Literatura De Autoayuda Para Latinas, Aida Roldan-Garcia

Doctoral Dissertations

"Crisis y Paradojas" examines the construction of modern Hispanic femininity in self-help literature aimed at U.S. Latinx women. The work is divided into three thematic sections and begins with an analysis of two texts belonging to this ethnic niche: The Maria Paradox: How Latinas Can Merge Old World Traditions With New World Self-Esteem by Rosa María Gil and Carmen Inoa; and The Latina’s Bible by Sandra Guzmán. The first part explores the origins of the new Latinx woman of the 1990s and 2000s within contemporary Latinx literature and introduces the main characteristics of Latinx women's self-help literature. The second section …

Memories And Trauma Of An Absent Past- Women Filmmakers In Argentina, Nicholas P. Pezzote

Doctoral Dissertations

This work analyzes the relationship between personal and historical memory in five Argentine films made after the end of the country's last dictatorship. All are directed by, and feature, women. Besides approaching the topic of memory, this work examines how patriarchy influences narratives of both personal histories and, more broadly, of history in: Camila (María Luisa Bemberg, 1984), Un muro de silencio (Lita Stantic, 1993), Los rubios (Albertina Carri, 2003) and La mujer sin cabeza (Lucrecia Martel, 2008). Trauma and the handing down of memory—issues that appear in all of the chosen films—are approached from a critical feminist perspective. At …

Attitudes And Oral Proficiency In Heritage Speakers Of Brazilian Portuguese, Flávia Terra Cunha

Doctoral Dissertations

A Heritage Speaker (HS) has traditionally been defined as someone who grew up in a place where the language spoken by the general population (a.k.a. the dominant language) is different from the language spoken at home by their family (a.k.a. the heritage language). Though there are many variations on the definition of a HS, data from a variety of disciplines, from education to sociolinguistics and language acquisition, seem to agree on the fact that HSs are extremely heterogeneous as a group when it comes to their level of proficiency in the heritage language. This study contributes to this question by …

The Dangerous/Endangered Modern Woman In Four Interwar Spanish Novels (1917-1936), Holly Villines

Doctoral Dissertations

The Modern Woman was a figure perpetually discussed in the early twentieth century, as she embodied the increasingly public role and greater mobility of women in industrialized cities. A century later, historians and literary critics still explore the significance of this female archetype, who was at the center of debates regarding feminism and changing gender dynamics, because the Modern Woman’s defiance of social conventions opened the way for the independent lifestyle and freedoms of women today. Yet, still left unexplored is the image of the Modern Woman as both dangerous and in danger and what this contradictory depiction reveals about …

Examining Variability In Spanish Monolingual And Bilingual Phonotactics: A Look At Sc-Clusters, Katerina A. Tetzloff

Doctoral Dissertations

Current models of generative phonology have failed to address the variability that is observed in bilingual language patterns patterns. This dissertation addresses exactly that issue by examining the perception of Spanish sC-clusters in Spanish monolinguals and English-Spanish bilinguals. Surface sC-clusters in onset position are prohibited in Spanish and are repaired by inserting a prothetic /e/ (sC $\rightarrow$ esC). English differs in that it allows sC-cluster onsets, and the structure of the sC-cluster has been shown to differ based on the sonority profile (i.e., s+stop clusters are bisyllabic, s+liquid clusters are tautosyllabic). A batch version of a Harmonic Grammar Gradual Learning …

Manuel González Prada En La Intimidad: Una Mirada A Su Universo Personal A Través De La Correspondencia De Luis Alberto Sánchez, Alfredo González Prada Y Adriana De Verneuil, Odalis Patricia Hidalgo

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation focuses on the epistolary communication between Alfredo González Prada, Luis Alberto Sánchez and Adriana de Verneuil between the years 1925-1943. The correspondence reveals unfamiliar aspects in the life of the controversial Peruvian writer, Manuel González Prada (1844-1918). I argue that in order to better understand his work and personal life it is necessary to study the voices that were close to him, and in charge of the publication of his posthumous work. The correspondence also opens the discussion of the literary work of Luis Alberto Sánchez in Don Manuel (1930). Sánchez’s book constructs Prada’s heroic character within a …

Resituando El Cuerpo Femenino A Través De La Memoria Histórica Y La Ficción: Carlota De Bélgica Y Eva Perón En Las Novelas Noticias Del Imperio De Fernando Del Paso Y Santa Evita De Tomás Eloy Martínez, Krysheida Ayub - Unzon

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation analyzes the body and the memory of Charlotte of Belgium and Eva Perón in the historical novels Noticias del Imperio (1987) by the Mexican writer Fernando del Paso and Santa Evita (1996), by the Argentine Tomás Eloy Martínez. Through the conformation of these historical characters as literary protagonists, we observe how both are endowed with a new historical meaning from the articulation of fictional narratives that differ from traditional historiographical texts. From the analysis of the corporality and the memory of the female characters, we will attend to the resignification of the historical texts and their fictional ramifications …

Defining Black Masculinities: Intersectional Analyses Of Gender, Race And Sexuality In Caribbean And Latin American Literature, 1955 To Present, Jerry Eugene Scruggs Jr.

Doctoral Dissertations

The objective of my dissertation is to define and construct parameters for analyzing the Afro-descendant male experience in four specific texts: Mi compadre el General Sol [General Sun, My Brother] (1955), Adire y el tiempo roto [Adire and Broken Time] (1967), Sortilégio II: mistério negro de Zumbi redivivo [Sorcery 2: Black Mystery of Resurrected Zumbí] (1979), and Negro: Este color que me queda bonito [Black: This Color Looks Good on Me] (2013). Black masculinities are distinct and this study sets five parameters: 1) Sexual Prowess, 2) Contentious relationship with the White woman, 3) Violence and Toxic Masculinity, 4) Emotive Numbness, …

Espacios En Disputa: Crónica De Desplazamientos Y Reocupación Urbana En El Raval Y El Casc Antic De Barcelona (1964-2014), Elisabet Pallas

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation analyzes plays and documentary films that illustrate the forced displacement of urban citizens from Barcelona’s oldest neighborhoods El Raval and El Casc Antic between 1964 and 2014. Grounded on theories from Sociology and Urban and Cultural Studies, the project surveys the various political mechanisms that enforce and legitimize the territorial, cultural, and corporeal expropriations that deploy tactics such as the criminalization of poverty and the passing of local laws restricting the use of public spaces. Through a close analysis of documentaries such as Ciutat Morta (Ortega y Artigas, 2014), El forat (Peña, 2004), En construcción (Guerín, 2001), …

Cuerpos Clandestinos E Indocumentados: Narrativas Transfronterizas Centroamericanas En La Literatura Y El Cine, Sara D. Rico Godoy

Doctoral Dissertations

The reality of migration is a phenomenon that has been present in the world for centuries. Latin America is mainly where immigrants in the United States reach high scales. However, Central America explicitly sees a shift in the ways people decide to migrate nowadays, for instance, in caravans with thousands of walkers. This dissertation analyzes six Central American contemporary works in narrative and four film productions: two film features and two documentaries. The purpose is to explore the significance of mobilities and their influence on perspectives of identity and the different narratives of migration and how these are portrayed in …

'Y Mi Rebelión Se Convirtió En Arte’ Raúl Salinas Y Su Poesía Política: Una Historia Literaria Chicana, Santiago Vidales

Doctoral Dissertations

In this dissertation I present a literary history of poet and revolutionary Raúl Salinas. Born in 1934, Salinas left a major legacy for Latinx and Chicanx letters. I focus on narrating, for the first time in Spanish, the relationship between his prison radicalism and his poetic production. The time Salinas spent as a political prisoner in Leavenworth Penitentiary (1967-1972) was foundational to his political transformation and (re)education. Along with members of the Black Panthers, AIM, Puerto Rican Nationalists, and other radicalized Chicanos, these inmates formed study groups, networks of support, and established a newspaper to both combat the oppressive conditions …

Asturleonés Medieval; Una Aproximación Sincrónica Y Diacrónica A Sus Rasgos Fonéticos Diferenciales Y Su Dominio Lingüístico, Alfonso Hernanz

Doctoral Dissertations

Unlike other romance varieties in the Iberian Peninsula Middle Ages, the Asturleonese dialect didn’t get to evolve into a fully differentiated language system due to several historical and sociocultural issues that thwarted its historical development. However, the distinctive features of the dialect survived until present time featuring a complex dialectal system along the geography of the ancient Kingdom of León. This research focuses on the building of the Asturleonese Linguistic Domain and the phonetic characterization of its distinctive phonetic features from a synchronic and diachronic perspective with the purpose of identifying in medieval documents, from IX to XIV centuries, the …

Surrogate Histories: (De)Mythifying The Franco-Female In Transitionary Spain, Christina Beaubien

Doctoral Dissertations

Within the context of Franco Spain, academic scholarship has proven that the regime manipulated collective history via both active remembering and active forgetting in order to construct legitimacy and a national identity. Moreover, much of the regime’s mythology was based on predetermined concepts of gender difference that was exacerbated by the influence of the Catholic church. In this way, what it meant to be female during the Franco dictatorship was a large part of what came to be the nationalized-gender-mythology of the regime, or rather – myths that constructed the Franco-female. On the one hand, the regime constructed mythology …

The Production And Perception Of Subject Focus Prosody In L2 Spanish, Covadonga Sanchez

Doctoral Dissertations

New information can be introduced in discourse through different strategies, including syntactic and prosodic ones. This project provides an account of the syntactic and intonational strategies used for focus-marking in Peninsular Spanish, Mainstream American English and L2 Spanish using parallel experimental designs and a unitary method of analysis within the Autosegmental-Metrical framework for the study of intonation. It provides a comprehensive description of specific phonological categories and their phonetic implementation not only in monolingual speech, but also as they develop in the L2 grammar of Spanish learners with different experiences with the target language, following the premises of the L2 …

Rhotic Variation In The Spanish Spoken By Puerto Ricans In Puerto Rico And Western Massachusetts, Alba Arias Alvarez

Doctoral Dissertations

The Spanish trill is known to present a wide range of phonetic variation in Puerto Rican Spanish (PRS), attested not only on the island but in the diaspora. Combining auditory and acoustic analysis, this research project studies acoustic data on onset /r/ in Holyoke, MA, the city with the largest per capita population of Puerto Ricans living outside the island. The aim of this dissertation is to analyze whether there is trill variation in the PR community in Holyoke, and, whether it mirrors the variation found in Puerto Rico. Special attention is paid to glottal, velar, or uvular /r/ realizations. …

Bodies Under Siege: Intersections Of Warfare And Hiv/Aids, Daniel Nevarez Araujo

Doctoral Dissertations

Analyzing works by Juan Goytisolo, Rabih Alameddine, and Derek Jarman, this dissertation studies the similarities of war and AIDS as sensorial experiences socially located and complexly embodied. This study looks at the ways bodies engage with, are affected by, and respond to both war and AIDS, specifically within the AIDS/War Narrative; that is, narrative spaces that foreground both experiences simultaneously. Influenced by Mark Paterson’s notion of felt phenomenology and positioned at the nexus of Comparative Literature, Disability Studies, and Husserlian phenomenology, this dissertation studies texts that exhibit an awareness of the phenomenal characteristics governing the experiences of AIDS and war, …

Kiskeyanas Valientes En Este Espacio: Dominican Women Writers And The Spaces Of Contemporary American Literature, Isabel R. Espinal

Doctoral Dissertations

We can learn and gain a lot by putting Dominican women writers at the center of our attention. Yet they rarely have that place. This dissertation looks at Dominican women authors who have lived and written in the United States —Josefina Báez, Marianela Medrano, Yrene Santos, Aurora Arias, Nelly Rosario, Annecy Báez, Ana Maurine Lara, Raquel Cepeda— and how they fit within the spaces of contemporary American society, and more broadly within world flows of peoples and cultural productions. I draw on the theories and methodologies of Gloria Anzaldúa and her generation of feminists of color, as well as subsequent …

La Influencia De Boccaccio En La Literatura Catalana Medieval (1390-1495). Un Estudio De La Imitación Literaria En Bernat Metge, Bernat Hug De Rocabertí Y Joan Roís De Corella, Pau Cañigueral Batllosera

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation studies the impact of the works by Giovanni Boccaccio on Catalan medieval literature. The influence of Italian literature in medieval Iberian writing is traditionally understood as a key component of a wide-ranging cultural process of transition from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance. The works of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, the tre corone, played a crucial role in that process. Boccaccio, in particular, became a model for the writing of a variety of literary genres, from misogynistic poetry to chivalric romances. His works, both in Latin and Italian, featured in the most remarkable libraries of the period …

Documental Autoetnográfico De Posmemoria. Una Aproximación Al Pasado Franquista Desde La Perspectiva De Género, Maribel Rams

Doctoral Dissertations

This doctoral dissertation analyzes two autoethnographic documentaries recently produced in the Iberian Peninsula, Inner Memory (2002) by María Ruido and Swimming (2008) by Carla Subirana, where the quest for origins and familial truth constitutes a trope to deal with issues of collective historical memory and national identity. Both authors narrate an unsolved family history within the context of the Spain’s traumatic past: 1) María Ruido’s estrangement from her parents, Galician economic exiles during the years of development; 2) the ghostly presence in Carla Subirana’s family of her grandfather, who was executed in 1940 for being an anti-Francoist guerrilla fighter. My …

"Al Gaucho Que Llevo En Mí, Sacramente, Como La Custodia Lleva La Hostia”: Ideología Política Y Literatura Gauchesca En El Contexto Cinematográfico De La Revolución Argentina, Ramiro Garcia-Olano

Doctoral Dissertations

This doctoral dissertation studies Manuel Antín’s Don Segundo Sombra (1969), the cinematographic adaptation of Ricardo Güiraldes celebrated “novela de la tierra” of the same title, in the context of the so called “Revolución Argentina”, the military dictatorship that ruled this country between 1966 and 1973. This investigation seeks to shed light on the political struggle for control of the “gauchesca” literary genre that was taking place at this time in the Argentinean cinematographic field. In a time of rampant nationalism, the different political actors that were vying for political power saw in the “gaucho”, who by then had come to …

Pronoun Variation In Cavite Chabacano: Creole/Non-Lexifier Contact Situation, Sheryl Lynn Bernardo-Hinesley

Doctoral Dissertations

Cavite Chabacano is one of the Philippine Creole Spanish varieties that emerged during the Spanish colonial occupation of the Philippines. It is a Spanish-lexified, Tagalog-substrate contact language spoken in Cavite City in the Manila Bay region. An evaluation conducted by Lesho and Sippola (2013) using the UNESCO framework for assessing language vitality indicates that the creole variety is critically endangered. The number of Cavite Chabacano speakers is currently in decline due to the position of Tagalog being the majority language in Cavite City. Pronominal variation in the speech of Cavite Chabacano speakers and language shift from Cavite Chabacano to Tagalog …

Itinerância(S) Poética(S): Jorge De Sena E Cecília Meireles, Susana L. M. Antunes

Doctoral Dissertations

Based on the idea of itinerancy as a vital element of human existence, this doctoral dissertation examines and reevaluates the corpus of poems integrating Jorge de Sena’s and Cecília Meireles' “travel poetry,” proposing poetic itineraries bearing their own itineraries. Chapter 1 presents some considerations about the concept of travel in literature, as well as theoretical concepts related to the idea of travel, some of them discussed theoretically by the two poets. Reflecting on the privileged relationship that human movement inscribes in space creating new meanings, Chapter 2 presents the Senian and Meirelian physical spaces connected with their “travel poems,” taking …

Tragicomic Transpositions: The Influence Of Spanish Prose Romance On The Development Of Early Modern English Tragicomedy, Josefina Hardman

Doctoral Dissertations

The critical origin story for early modern English stage tragicomedy has frequently centered around Italian playwright and theorist Giambattista Guarini, who offered a tragicomic model in his play Il pastor fido (The Faithful Shepherd) and in his treatises on the genre. While Guarini’s impact on playwrights such as John Fletcher is undeniable, tragicomic critics have generally ignored the pervasive influence of Miguel de Cervantes’ work on seventeenth-century English playwrights. This project is the first sustained study of the influence of Cervantean prose romance on the development of early modern English tragicomedy. By looking at English tragicomedies with Spanish …

Para Donde Miran Los Ojos: Confluencias Entre Locura, (Des)Identidad Y Violencia En La Obra De João Guimarães Rosa, Silvina Ocampo Y Luis Martín-Santos, Giseli C. Tordin

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation studies the representation of madness in the literary works of three twentieth-century authors, namely, João Guimarães Rosa (from Brazil), Silvina Ocampo (from Argentina), and Luis Martín-Santos (from Spain). The first chapter argues that madness in Ocampo’s “El castigo”, Rosa’s “Buriti”, and Martín-Santos, Tiempo de silencio, reveals a series of conflicts between tradition and modernity, rather than the alleged symptoms of an individual suffering from a mental illness. After comparing the three works, it is evident that the decisions of their characters reproduce certain values idealized by authoritarian cultures. The second chapter discusses Rosa’s “Substância”, Ocampo’s “La casa …

Diversidad Y Comunidad: La Propuesta Del Grupo De Guayaquil En Tensión Perenne Frente A La Modernidad, Patricio Paúl Peñaherrera Cevallos

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation contributes to the study of Ecuadorian literature from the first fifty years of the twentieth century, not just as an isolated discourse, but as part of a multidisciplinary project of re-reading the nation-building project through literature. In that regard, the literary works of The Grupo de Guayaquil are examined as a primary resource to understand how the hegemonic social forces of the period imposed their one-dimensional perspective about the nation without considering the views held by those communities often referred to as subalternized. Special attention is given to how these same works of fiction constituted an expression of …

Back From Oblivion: Society And Literature In Ventura Ruiz Aguilera’S Ecos Nacionales And Proverbios Ejemplares, Bruce Milton Cole

Doctoral Dissertations

Ventura Ruiz Aguilera (1820-1881) enjoyed great popularity and influence throughout the mid- 19th century in Spain. He was most famous for his book of poems Ecos nacionales (1849), which was inspired by the people. Although he continued to attract attention amongst literary critics, shortly after his death Aguilera’s popularity declined. This investigation explores the representation of society in both Aguilera’s Ecos nacionales and his prose collection Proverbios ejemplares (1864). By reexamining these two texts, I reveal how Aguilera’s works partake in discussions of both literary and social issues with an emphasis on progress and modernity.

When Aguilera published Ecos nacionales …

Desaprendiendo Las Múltiples Significaciones De Emiliano Zapata: Hacia Una Lectura Decolonial., Andrea Perales Fernández De Gamboa

Doctoral Dissertations

My research examines how the image of General Zapata, the southern leader of the Mexican Revolution (1910-1920), has been utilized in diverse representations of Mexican cultural production of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. According to my analysis, the different versions that Zapata has been given correspond to a diverse set of ideologies and local and state values that varied across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. From the construction of the post-revolutionary state in the 1920s to contemporary literature, the figure of the southern hero has embodied the traits that constitute a national hero, in spite of the fact that he …

Comunidad Y Escritura En La Temprana Edad Moderna Española Teresa De Cartagena, María De Santo Domingo Y Teresa De Ávila (1420-1582), Borja Gama De Cossio

Doctoral Dissertations

My research focuses on the literary production of women in the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance. My dissertation studies the life and works of three religious women in their respective communities: Teresa de Cartagena, Sor María de Santo Domingo, and Santa Teresa de Ávila. I examine how these women interact with other members of their orders, thus creating symbolic, intellectual, and emotional communities. I argue that their contact with friends and enemies inside and outside of their order and the church displays a variety of empowerment strategies. To deploy these series of strategies, religious women fashioned images of themselves …

Moving Against Clothespins:The Poli(Poe)Tics Of Embodiment In The Poetry Of Miriam Alves And Audre Lorde, Flávia Santos De Araújo

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation examines literary representations of the black female body in selected poetry by U.S. African American writer Audre Lorde and Afro-Brazilian writer Miriam Alves, focusing on how their literary projects construct and defy notions of black womanhood and black female sexualities in dialogue with national narratives and contexts. Within an historical, intersectional and transnational theoretical framework, this study analyses how the racial, gender and sexual politics of representation are articulated and negotiated within and outside the political and literary movements in the U.S. and Brazil in the 1970s and 1980s. As a theoretical framework, this research elaborates and uses …