Spanish and Portuguese Language and Literature Commons^™

Historical Memory And Feminist Consciousness In Almudena Grandes’ Episodios De Una Guerra Interminable, Alba Fernández-Fernández

Dissertations

General Francisco Franco’s brutal dictatorship (1939-1975) was one of the darkest periods in Spain’s recent history. During this dictatorial regime, political detractors were mercilessly persecuted, tortured and massacred. In 1975, Franco died leaving the legacy of nearly four decades of repression and over 150,000 victims on his back. Spain then cautiously headed into a process of democratization, with fear and horror still etched on the country’s memory. While politicians promised a smooth transition to democracy, their insistence to look ahead meant Spaniards were asked to neglect the country’s painful past. No legal action was taken against those responsible for mass …

Género Y Sexualidad En Seis Novelas Del Siglo Xxi, Sandra Chang Raak

Dissertations

From its inception Latin American literature has used gender and sexuality as rhetorical devices to approach the topic of cultural identity. For instance, Hernán Cortés in his Cartas de Relación embodies a type of masculinity that overdetermined the lives of the Amerindian people. Centuries later, the modernismo movement headed by Rubén Darío reacted to a Latin American societal shift towards the prevalence of a materialistic culture brought about by the advent of industrial civilization. During the 1960s Latin American literature experienced a rapid blooming that has come to be known as El Boom. Both landmarks, modernism and El Boom …

La Sexualidad Como Vehículo De La Identidad De Género, Sexual Y Nacional En La Novelística Panhispánica Del Siglo Xxi, Leticia Isabel Espinoza

Dissertations

The search for identity in twentieth-century Spanish-language literature has primarily been seen through the rewriting of history to better suit new generations. For instance, One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel García Márquez’s novel about the origins of Colombia and Latin America, fictionalizes historical facts and rewrites history to question the very identity of Latin American countries. However, the search for identity in twenty-first-century Spanish language novels is unique in the sense that it does not look for identity through history, but through sexuality. Due to the lack of research in this area, the purpose of this study is to demonstrate …

Panorama Novelístico De Escritoras Ecuatorianas En El Siglo Xxi, Karina Ortiz-Pacheco

Dissertations

During the last three decades the literary production of women writers in Ecuador has been increasing considerably. Even with this growing number of novels, the academic community has taken a minimal interest in this new fiction. Existing research has only briefly mentioned the works of female Ecuadorian writers. In response to this lack of academic research, my dissertation examines the novels written by female Ecuadorian writers in the twenty-first century. My analysis focuses on the overlapping themes found in these novels, as well as the differences that exist among them and that distinguish each of the individual novels. This dissertation …

Virtual Communities Of Practice For Non-Native K-12 Spanish Educators As Professional Development, Javier Gerardo Gómez

Dissertations

Many world language and culture educators are non-native speakers of the language they teach. Although the current face-to-face professional development sessions do a good job in helping educators acquire technology tools to implement in their world language classrooms, professional development lacks in target language enrichment and providing ongoing collaboration among world language educators who are geographically dispersed. Additionally, the cost of attending state-wide, regional, and national world language professional development is very expensive and thus many world language educators cannot take part in these trainings. Consequently, many world language educators do not have the professional training they need to improve …

The Self-Directedness, Metacognitive Awareness, Self-Efficacy Beliefs, And Grammatical Competence Of College Students Studying Spanish, Juan Guillermo Loaiza

Dissertations

Differential performance is a frequent issue in formal education in general and in second language education in particular. Three variables that may have an effect on college language learners’ performance were identified in the literature on adult education and second language acquisition, namely, self-directed learning, metacognitive awareness, and self-efficacy beliefs. The relationship among those three predictors as well as their relationship with academic performance (in the form of college learners’ grammatical competence in Spanish) was explored using a multiple regression analysis. The statistical analysis showed that none of those three variables predicted learners’ grammatical competence in Spanish. However, participants’ answers …

Nationalism, Universality, And Globalization: Notes On The Narrative Of Three Guatemalan Authors, Marcie Noble

Dissertations

This dissertation examines various works of literature produced by three Guatemalan authors: Miguel Ángel Asturias (1899-1974), Augusto Monterroso (1921-2003), and Rodrigo Rey Rosa (1958) in order to trace a trajectory in the narrative written by Guatemalans from a nationally focused literature to one that is increasingly global. The first chapter provides an overview of the study and clarifies the terminology applied throughout the dissertation. In chapter two I analyze El Señor Presidente (1946), Hombres de maíz (1949), and Mulata de Tal (1963) as key examples of Asturias’ nationally focused works, which continually represented and mythologized Guatemala. In chapter three I …

Social Networks, L2 Pragmatics, And Spanish Hasta As An Aspectual Marker With And Without Negation: Student Understandings, Judgments, And Uses, Mikela Zhezha-Thaumanavar

Dissertations

This dissertation investigates how social networks influence understandings, judgments, and uses of L2 pragmatics. The pragmatic target is the particle hasta ‘until’ as it is used orally and in writing to mark inception with and without negation in Spanish. This study examines how L2 students of Spanish understand, judge, and use hasta when they are members of social networks in university Spanish classes based on (a) pedagogy practice, (b) class level, and (c) mode of expression, and when, outside of university Spanish classes, they are integrated into social networks that involve exposure to different dialectal varieties of Spanish.

Data were …

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" …

El Género Detectivesco Y Su Representación En La Novela Mexicana Del Sigloxxi, Maribel Colorado-García

Dissertations

This dissertation analyzes the resurgence of detective fiction in Mexican novéis of the twenty-first century and focuses on the writers' artistic intentions in creating complex texts that contrast the less experimental literature of the Post-Boom. The revival in the popularity of the crime novel in México has emerged, in part, because of the deep societal problems the country faces (such as political corruption, drug cartels, and economic crises), and the sense of powerlessness often experienced by its citizens when confronting such problems. From an aesthetic standpoint, a renewed approach to this genre springs from the novelists' constant quest to represent …

La Mujer Española Escritora De Su Propia Experiencia Carcelaria, Berta Carrasco De Miguel

Dissertations

This dissertation examines the role of women prisoners during the Spanish Civil war (1936-1939) and the Francoist regime (1939-1975) as represented in different literary genres such as the testimonio (testimonial narrative), autobiography and the fiction novel. In the first chapter, I analyze the concept of womanhood created by Francisco Franco 's regime through the person of Pilar Primo de Rivera. In the second chapter I study three texts written right after the dictatorship: Desde la noche y la niebla by Juana Doña, Las cárceles de Soledad Real compiled by Consuelo García and En el infierno: ser mujer en las cárceles …

Alvar Nuñez Cabeza De Vaca Y Sus Narrativas Sobre La Exploracion Del Rio De La Plata (1540-1545), Maria Del Pilar Lopez-Castilla

Dissertations

Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca remains one of the most enigmatic and audiences on both sides of the Atlantic, from the ruling elite to the wider public, are given the tools to understand and shape the new spheres of public life. Writing becomes a powerful tool in the shaping of a new reality, and as such, it must be studied with extreme care, so that a modern reader is able to discern where history ends and fiction or manipulation of history begin. The contact and constant negotiations for power between the two worlds cause a restructuring of the old discursive …

Representaciones De La Memoria De La Guerrilla Antifranquista En La Novelística Española Contemporánea, Nuño Castellanos

Dissertations

In the last few years a very controversial concept known as "the recovery of historic memory" has become of utmost importance in certain social and political spheres in Spain. This matter has been addressed by a law approved in July of 2006 during the socialist government under Rodríguez Zapatero. This law recognizes the efforts of those who in 1936 defended the Republican democracy, those who were persecuted by Franco regime and suffered internal and external exile, and those who fought against dictatorship and in defense of the fundamental liberties that Spaniards enjoy today. This complicated process of memory recuperation is …

Estadounidenses And Gringos As Reality And Imagination In Mexican Narrative Of The Late Twentieth Century, Jessica Lynam

Dissertations

The representation of North Americans in contemporary Mexican narrative texts is frequent, complex and worthy of study. The present dissertation makes no pretense of being a comprehensive catalogue of “gringos” in Mexican narrative; it can be better seen as a cross-section of Mexican literature concerning people from the United States published during the final two decades of the twentieth century. My intention is to explore how this Mexican narrative has characterized non-Mexican Americans and contextualize these visions in terms of their cultural and historical origins. In this study I analyze six texts authored by both men and women, border authors …

Representations Of Latin-American Immigration To Spain In The Late Twentieth And Early Twenty-First Century Narrative And Cinema, Alicia Arribas

Dissertations

As migration movements are becoming more common in our global community, Spain, traditionally an emigrant country, has attracted large numbers of immigrants. This dissertation explores the way in which late twentieth and early twenty-first century narrative and cinema construct discursive representations of Latin American immigration in Spain. The works studied include selections from three anthologies of short stories: Lavapiés, Inmenso estrecho and Inmigración, emigración e interculturalidad ; the novels Salsa by Clara Obligado, Madre mía, que estás en los infiernos by Carmen Jiménez, Las obras infames de Pancho Marambio by Alfredo Bryce Echenique and Nunca pasa nada by José Ovejero; …

Inroads Toward Contemporary Latina Literature: Poetry And Criticism, Adela Josefina Najarro

Dissertations

No abstract provided.