Latin American Literature Commons^™

Representing Modern Female Villain: On Feminine Evil, Perverse Nationhood, And Opposition In Rómulo Gallegos’ Doña Bárbara And Salman Rushdie’S Midnight’S Children, Barbara Guerrero

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis aims to contribute to the scholarship on modern female villainy by further exploring the ways in which 20^th century female villains are represented as well as the functions they carry out in the text. In this study, I look at Rómulo Gallegos’ doña Bárbara from Doña Bárbara (1929) and Salman Rushdie’s Indira Gandhi from Midnight’s Children (1981). I argue that both villains are a combination of already-existing forms of evil in more recognizable contexts as well as a rejection of and opposition to modern values. Firstly, I examine how the villains both conform and resist the formula …

(Sub)Versions Of Banditry: Ferréz’S Re-Appropriation And Redefinition Of The Marginal Identity, Marissel Hernández-Romero

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study examines how Ferréz’s work is related to the 19^th and early 20^th century banditry narrative. The current study examines the evolution of the work of Ferréz and discusses his relevance in Brazilian and Latin America literature. However, this dissertation examines in what extent Ferréz’s work transgresses the genre in that he breaks its rules and departs from its traditions. Rather than being the voice of the elite put into the mouth of a lower-class bandit character, Ferréz’s bandits speak with the voice of the oppressed and subversively criticize the elite. His work is not viewed through …

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 …

Nepantla As Her Place In The Middle: Multilingualism And Multiculturalism In The Writings Of Sor Juana Inés De La Cruz, Nicole Lynn Gomez

Doctoral Dissertations

In this dissertation, I analyze a selection of Sor Juana’s works in the context of bilingual and bicultural studies. I infer that the author’s language acquisition and cultural sensitivity were interrelated, both affecting the other and influencing her writing. I argue that her bilingualism correlated with her cultural sensitivity and sympathy towards marginalized groups. In her works, the author employs a variety of strategies to denounce discrimination and repression as well as rhetoric that promotes tolerance of other cultures and resistance to oppression. I explore these strategies in her texts and apply relevant theory in order to fully analyze their …

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, …

A Daring Voice: Confessional Poetry Of The 1970s From Argentina And The United States, Julia Eva Leverone

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Daring to confront difficult socio-political realities on the page, Argentine and United States poets writing in the late 1960s and early 1970s strove against systems of silence. Implementing direct and indirect poetics, each set of poets embodied, in differing and overlapping ways, elements of the confessionalist mode, at once relational and witnessing. Their poetry in collections from these particular years reflected the risk in their auto-positioning as subjects within their poems and with complex relationships with their audience, and in their usage of language, sometimes fragmented, protective, or urgent. They committed personal experience to the page, and in conveying their …

Binding Freedom: Cuba's Black Public Sphere, 1868-1912, Alexander Sotelo Eastman

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

My dissertation studies the cultural, social, and political associations linked to the civil rights movement in Cuba during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which witnessed the abolition of slavery, the crumbling of colonialism and the entrance of black intellectuals into formal politics. I trace the emergence of a black public sphere and analyze the networks of communication among people of color in Cuba and the wider Black Atlantic through sources that include antislavery narratives, the black press, court cases and secret police records. I argue that people of color in Cuba, enslaved and freed alike, engaged in political …

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 …

“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 …

Medical Education Through The Fiction Of Julio Cortázar, Blake Barton

Chancellor’s Honors Program Projects

No abstract provided.

Constructing Marianismo In Colonial Mexico, Kathryn A. Buchanan

Chancellor’s Honors Program Projects

No abstract provided.

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 …

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 …

La Función Discursiva De La Antología De Poesía Centroamericana Puertas Abiertas Y La Configuración Del Sujeto Poético De La Generación Del Ochenta, Missael Duarte

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

El presente ensayo aborda la función discursiva de la antología Puertas abiertas (2011) desde el enfoque de los estudios culturales y analiza la configuración del sujeto poético en la generación del ochenta en los poetas antologados. El propósito de este trabajo es mostrar los criterios que sigue la antología antes mencionada en la tradición de las antologías de poesía centroamericanas.

Matilde Ros Leaves The Jungle, Susana Beatriz Camacho Vivar

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

When Matilde defies her mother and abandons her privileged life in a South American capital to fight for environmental justice in the Amazon jungle, she never imagines her journey will bring her right back to where she started. As she insists on freeing herself, four other women around her do the same, defining their freedom when class, gender and race may still get to tell them who they are.

El Más Fuerte De Los Ruidos, Gianfranco Giusseppe Languasco Bellido

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Tesis para optar por el título de Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing.

The Run, Jose A. Valdez

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Thesis is a fiction story about Mexican Americans involved in drug smuggling in the US

Brújula Quebrada, Julio Antonio Molinete

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Brújula quebrada o la reinvención del dolor, es un cuaderno de poesía en el cual se aborda el fenómeno del exilio, de la diáspora. Verso a verso es la historia de un diasporante signado por la angustia, el rechazo y el desprecio. Pero más que un poemario personal, deviene en un pedazo de la historia contemporánea cubana. Esa en donde los hijos de la Isla se ven obligados a escapar en pos de la libertad, un derecho que se hace esquivo aun en la tierra de la libertad.

Two Terms Of The Cuban Counterpoint: Transculturation In The Poetry Of Nicolás Guillén, Alanna L. Fulk

Honors Undergraduate Theses

The history of Latin America and the Caribbean was irreversibly altered by the arrival of the conquistadors, destruction of native civilizations and implementation of colonialism for hundreds of years. However, Spain also introduced the high culture of the baroque to Latin America and the Caribbean, which mixed with the cultures of native and African peoples, creating new, distinct forms of literary expression. Subsequent post-colonial cultural movements attempted to explore and reaffirm the variety of cultures that shaped both regions, including the movement of Afrocubanismo in Cuba, which occurred from 1910-1940. Afrocubanismo was a movement intended to incorporate African folklore and …

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 …

Motherland, Melanie Joy Mignucci

Senior Projects Spring 2016

A novella about Puerto Rico.

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Languages and Literature of Bard College.

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 …

El Espacio Como Constructor De Identidad En Los Cuentos De Julio Ramón Ribeyro, Anna Vanessa Torres Mallma

All Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Other Capstone Projects

The purpose of this study is to analyze the importance of spatiality in the works of Julio Ramon Ribeyro and how these spaces reflect on the city’s physical and architectural transformation related to the inhabitants. The centralism of Lima has been a social phenomenon that accompanies the Peruvian culture from the 1940s to the 1950s due to the first wave of modernization of the city. This modernizing movement involved tremendous changes in the environment of Lima’s residents. Through these massive transformations, the city of Lima became an alienating space full of new symbols and meanings that altered the social geography …

La Actitud Estoica Como Táctica De Subversión Y Reconstrucción De La Identidad Femenina En Tres Novelas De Piedad Bonnett Y Laura Restrepo, Deisy Esperanza Cañón

All Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Other Capstone Projects

In the following thesis, I analyze the role of women characters facing patriarchal oppressions in Piedad Bonnet’s literary works-Después de todo (2001) and El prestigio de la belleza (2010), and Laura Restrepo’s literary work La novia oscura (1999). The major characters in these three novels are immersed in a society where the division between the sexes appears as normal, natural, or inevitable. Pierre Bourdieu, Michel Foucault, Michel De Certeau, and Lucía Guerra provide the theoretical background for my investigation of how each of these characters (men and women) embodied the historical structures of the masculine order. This thesis identifies and …

Fronteras Entretejidas: Texto, Textil, Y La Formación De Una Narrativa Mestiza En Las Obras De Sor Juana Inés De La Cruz, Gloria Anzaldúa, Y Sandra Cisneros, Claire R. Billingsley

Senior Independent Study Theses

No abstract provided.

Indigenista Heroes And Femmes Fatales: Myth-Making In Latin American Literature And Film, Megan O'Neil

Theses and Dissertations--Hispanic Studies

This dissertation explores myth-making in Latin America by focusing specifically upon four Amerindian and mestizo figures: Doña Bárbara, mestiza protagonist of Rómulo Gallegos’ 1929 novel; Anacaona and Hatuey, Taíno caciques who first appeared in Bartolomé de las Casas’ Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias (1552); and Andrés Chiliquinga, indigenous protagonist of Jorge Icaza’s Huasipungo (1934). The present analysis examines the evolution of these myths from their original appearance to literary and film versions throughout the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries in the Caribbean and Andean regions. The project focuses upon the ways in which artists have interpreted these …

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 …