Latin American Literature Commons^™

Poetic Illiteracy And Cultural Insularity: The Crisis Of Cultural Nationalism In Virgilio Piñera's La Isla En Peso, Stephen A. Cruikshank

The Quiet Corner Interdisciplinary Journal

The twentieth-century Cuban poet Virgilio Piñera was both a radical and rebellious writer who wrote against the national discourses of his time. In his acclaimed poem La isla en peso Piñera challenges the Neobaroque discourse of Cuban identity by describing Cuba as 'insular' rather than innovative. The following article argues that La isla en peso, like a prophetic letter, seems to have foreseen seventy years earlier what the modern literary critic Abraham Acosta has recently described as a "threshold of illiteracy," that is, a disruption or illiterate interference of one's critical reading by exposing the contradictions of cultural nationalism. …

La Quebrada Y La Costa Peruanas En Voces Narrativas A Mediados Del Siglo Xx: María Rosa Macedo Y Sara María Larrabure, Ricardo N. Fernández

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Each of the two female writers at the crux of this dissertation, María Rosa Macedo (1909-1991) and Sara María Larrabure (1921-1962), wrote an unparalleled novel: respectively, Rastrojo (1944) and Rioancho (1949). Their primary and complementary narratives overlap in the sociocultural, historical and political context of the first half of 20^th-century Peru. This study proposes to demonstrate how the given premise of their link, particularly in portraying the coastal region they both know intimately, is in line with what Antonio Cornejo Polar (1989) calls "La totalidad literaria como totalidad social". To what extent these two authors contribute to such …

Global Ecologies And The Environmental Humanities: Postcolonial Approaches Edited By Elizabeth Deloughrey, Jill Didur, And Anthony Carrigan, Joshua Bartlett

The Goose

Review of Elizabeth Deloughrey, Jill Didur, and Anthony Carrigan's Global Ecologies and the Environmental Humanities: Postcolonial Approaches.

Toma Y Daca: Transculturación Y Presencia De Escritores Chino-Latinoamericanos, Huei Lan Yen

Purdue Studies in Romance Literatures

En la segunda mitad del siglo XIX, decenas de miles de trabajadores chinos emigraron a Cuba, Perú, México y Panamá en busca de una vida mejor. En los países donde residieron, los chinos y sus descendientes optaron por asimilarse contribuyendo de manera significativa al desarrollo económico de la sociedad de acogida mediante su participación laboral en la agricultura, el transporte y otras industrias. Asimismo, en el ámbito literario, artístico, religioso y político también aportaron al devenir cultural de estos países.

En Toma y daca: Transculturación y presencia de escritores chino-latinoamericanos, uno de los primeros estudios de la tradición literaria …

Ciudad Letrada Y Poder En La Novela Del Caribe Hispánico Contemporáneo: La Noche Oscura Del Nino Avilés, Bachata Del Ángel Caído Y La Cazadora De Astros, Amilkar Ernesto Caballero

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation analyzes Edgardo Rodríguez Julia’s La noche oscura del Niño Avilés, Pedro Antonio Valdez’s Bachata del ángel caído, and Zoé Valdes’s La cazadora de Astros from the perspective of the intersection between intellectuality and power. Its main thesis is that these three writers are “political” writers who postulate “possible worlds” to reconfigure the divisions of the Social world carried out by power vectors in their respective nations. These reconfigurations are based on “detour” strategies that attempt to deconstruct the canonical aesthetic forms and the discourses of truth established by those vectors. The first chapter analyzes the way the three …

Origén E Influencia De La Figura De Simón Bolívar En Los Escritores Modernistas Hispanoamericanos, Wilson Anaya

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The purpose of my thesis is to examine the various ways in which the writers of Latin America’s Modernist movement were influenced by Simon Bolivar’s ideology. At the same time, I will illustrate how these authors utilized throughout their literary discourse the image of the most important and iconic historical figure of South America’s independence wars against Spain. Throughout this thesis I will evaluate several literary works of modernist Latin-American authors such as the Cuban José Martí, the Venezuelans Rufino Blanco Fombona, Manuel Diaz Rodriguez, César Zumeta, the Colombians José Asunción Silva, Guillermo Valencia and José María Rivas Groot, the …

Fragmentation And Multiplicity In Cuban-American Identity: In Cuba I Was A German Shepherd By Ana Menéndez And Memory Mambo By Achy Obejas, Daimys E. Garcia

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Maria Lugones offers a new way of perceiving the world, which makes visible that fragmentation is not a valuable and transgressive understanding of identity, as Western philosophy and some political theory suggests. What Lugones believes in, as a strategy of resistance to the dominant gaze, is multiplicity – mestizaje. Using Lugones’s framework, this thesis will look at the different aspects of Cuban-American characters in In Cuba I was a German Shepherd by Ana Menéndez and Memory Mambo by Achy Obejas. Each novel offers insight into how characters develop and understand themselves (and others) when they use language that shows that …

Gritos En El Desierto: Denuncia Y Resistencia En Las Obras De Las Escritoras Wayuu Estercilia Simanca Pushaina Y Vicenta Marí­A Siosi Pino, Lindsay H. Perwak

Dissertations and Theses

The way we read and interpret literature is frequently influenced by factors that operate beyond the scope of the average reader's awareness. In this thesis, selected works by two Wayuu writers, Estercilia Simanca Pushaina and Vicenta Maria Siosi Pino, are analyzed and interpreted in an attempt to unveil some of these behind-the-scenes agents and issues, as well as explore how the stories' classification in the children's literature genre reveals a deep-rooted colonial tendency to infantilize indigenous individuals in contemporary Colombia.

Despite the fact that the two authors, both mestizo women who self-identify with the Wayuu indigenous group of northern Colombia, …

José Tamayo In Spanish America, 1949-1951, Carey Kasten

Teatro: Revista de Estudios Escénicos / A Journal of Theater Studies

“José Tamayo in Spanish America, 1949-1951” relies on previously overlooked archival material from Spain and Spanish America to reconstruct the performance schedule and study the financial management and critical reception of the Lope de Vega Company in Cuba, Puerto Rico and Colombia. In doing so, it sheds new light on Tamayo’s administration of the artistic agenda and fiscal needs of his company’s international tour, helping us to understand how Tamayo built and cultivated his growing fame, at home and abroad, in the early part of his career. The performance calendar featured in the article’s appendix provides a previously unavailable comprehensive …

Subjective Identity Takes Flight: Magical Realism In Birdman, Kelly Kramer

Montview Journal of Research & Scholarship

Analysis of magical realism in the film Birdman.

“Between The Yes And The No”: Alternative Ontologies And Literary Depictions Of Mysticism In Borges And Mahfouz, David Shane Elder

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Since the advent of the modern era and the subsequent age of Enlightenment, the rational tradition has enabled the West to assert command of a large area of the globe and its population. While advancing the conditions of living for many, rational structures have also been used to control and repress others. The theosophy of the medieval Islamic mystic Ibn al-ᶜArabī, with its basis in irrational thought, offers a counterpoint to the rational and empirical traditions, the Social orthodoxies to which these epistemologies contribute, and the ontologies with which these epistemologies and orthodoxies are correlated. Yet mystical expression is very …

The Stories Of Junot Díaz: Genre And Narrative In Drown And This Is How You Lose Her, Luis Fernando Marin

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines how Junot Díaz creates and constructs his literary alter-ego and narrator, Yunior de las Casas, and examines the Social and cultural aspects, such as race, ethnicity, and gender, that condition or influence Yunior’s construction. I argue that Díaz uses the short story as a subversive genre and modernist narrative techniques, such as shifts in space-time and focalization, to reflect Yunior’s diasporic, fragmented subjectivity. My analysis includes narratological and generic readings of Drown and This Is How You Lose Her, with a brief look at The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, paying particular attention to Yunior as …

Conexiones Transatlanticas: Expandiendo Limites En El Mundo Hispano (1890-1910), Argelia Garcia Saldivar

Open Access Dissertations

Este trabajo examina las transformaciones a patrones socio-culturales en el mundo hispano, que permiten a la mujer incorporarse a la fuerza productiva; como producto de la presión ejercida por comunidades de escritoras en foros internacionales sobre el atraso educativo y cultural que sufre la mujer. En esta disertación se estudia una economía que gira alrededor de las necesidades de la mujer promovida por la prensa periódica, que además de fortalecer la industria cultural y de entretenimiento, también auto-educa a la sociedad sobre la necesidad de educación profesional, mejora de condiciones laborales y apertura a espacios comerciales y profesionales para la …

Malestar En El Eje Horizontal: Iconografía De Ruptura En Neuva Corónica Y Buen Gobierno (1615), De Felipe Guaman Poma De Ayala, Karina Elizabeth Vázquez

Latin American, Latino and Iberian Studies Faculty Publications

Durante la última década, los estudios coloniales producidos en el contexto de la academia norteamericana han abogado por llevar adelante una agenda descolonizadora. Este cambio de perspectiva ha propiciado la incorporación de textos marginales al canon literario colonial, así como la revisión de los presupuestos ideológicos y culturales que subyacen en los análisis críticos. Este nuevo rumbo tiene coma propósito abordar la experiencia de la conquista y la colonia considerando sus secuelas en las políticas culturales y territoriales que los Estados-Nación posteriores aplicaron sobre las comunidades indígenas. El texto de Guaman Poma ingresa al campo de los estudios coloniales en …

Josefa Acevedo De Gómez: Estudio Y Edición Anotada De Cuadros De La Vida Privada De Algunos Granadinos Copiados Al Natural Para Instrucción Y Divertimiento De Los Curiosos, Biografía Del Doctor Diego Fernando Gómez Y Ensayo Sobre Los Deberes De Los Casados, Mélida Sánchez

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Josefa Acevedo de Gómez (1803-1861), a Colombian author, wrote biographies, poetry, and books and sketches of manners and customs. My dissertation presents a study and annotated edition of three of her prose works: Cuadros de la vida privada de algunos granadinos copiados al natural para instrucción y divertimiento de los curiosos [Scenes of the Private Life of New Granadines for the Instruction and Entertainment of the Curious] (1861), Biografía del doctor Diego Fernando Gómez [Biography of Doctor Diego Fernando Gómez] (1854), and Ensayo sobre los deberes de los casados [Essay on the Duties of Married …

Foundational Frustrations: Incest And Incompletion In Cirilo Villaverde's Cecilia Valdés, Thomas Genova

Spanish Publications

This article explores the evolution of author Cirilo Villaverde’s racial republican thinking as it develops through the three Cecilia Valdés texts. Contending that—precisely because the incest trope is absent from the 1839 works—an examination of the two earlier versions of the story can shed light on the troubling place of consanguinity in the 1882 novel, I consider the three Cecilia texts in light of the genre that theorist Doris Sommer terms “foundational romances,” or, works in which marriage between members of opposing factions in the national body acts as an allegory for national consolidation. After situating Villaverde in the context …

Reimaginando A Bolívar En La Cultura Latinoamericana, Eglee Teresa Rodriguez-Bravo

Wayne State University Dissertations

Since the nineteenth century, the phenomenon of nation-building in Venezuelan society has focused on finding a figure such as Simón Bolívar, who could represent the birth of the nation and the liberal values that the Creole society–Creole refers to people of European stock born in the Spanish colonies–embraced after succeeding in the Emancipation movements. Simón Bolívar plays a central role in the construction of Venezuelan national identity, as well as that of Colombia and other Andean nations. Venezuelan society–the masses and the elite–is devoted to Bolívar’s cult. However, in the 1960s historical practice evolved from “great men” stories to what …

"A Bastard Jargon”: Language Politics And Identity In The Brief Wondrous Life Of Oscar Wao, Rachel Norman

Faculty Publications

This essay explores Junot Díaz's only full-length novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, through the theoretical lens of sociolinguistics and examines the ways in which Díaz has attempted to overcome the publishing industry's complicity in maintaining the nation's ethnocentric expectations in regards to English as the only acceptable language of publication. By introducing the work of several sociolinguists into the discussion, examining the use of African American Vernacular and “nerdish” alongside the Spanish, and reviewing Díaz’s relationship with his editors, I provide a more nuanced reading of the ubiquitous code-switching throughout Oscar Wao and suggest that beyond …

The Art Of Well-Regulated Freedom: Rousseau And Cortázar, Braden M. Goveia

Undergraduate Honors Theses

Jean-Jacques Rousseau was one of the most influential philosophers of eighteenth-century Europe. In 1762 Rousseau published his treatise on education titled Emile. In Emile, Rousseau argues that people require an education that returns them to themselves. He demonstrates how he could take on an ordinary boy (Emile) as his pupil and experiment with the possibility of raising him into an autonomous adult, both morally and intellectually. In 1963, Julio Cortázar published Hopscotch in its original Spanish title Rayuela. Cortázar wrote Hopscotch in a way that allows the reader to decide what role, if any, the last ninety-eight …

De Neruda A Parra: Un Análisis De Los Aspectos Estéticos Y Socio-Políticos Que Construyen La Chilenidad En La Época Contemporánea, Julia M. Lindberg

Honors Undergraduate Theses

Español: Esta investigación tiene el propósito de buscar, identificar y resaltar características estéticas y socio-políticas en la literatura chilena que unen o explican factores constituyentes de la chilenidad en la época contemporánea. Más en concreto, comenzaré por introducir un panorama actualizado del Chile de hoy, ahondando un poco en la historia del país empezando con la Guerra del Pacífico en 1879, cuando se nota por primera vez que el caso chileno es fundamentalmente divergente de los demás países del continente. Este antecedente militar y político germinal es suficiente para alcanzar la época en que me he de entrar en esta …