Spanish Literature Commons^™

Deconstructing Biopolitical And Performative Modes Of Gender In Spanish Science Fiction, Emma Navarro

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis investigates the distinctly Spanish works of science fiction created by Pedro Almodóvar and Elia Barceló through biopolitical and feminist frameworks. Utilizing the theories of feminist philosopher Judith Butler and sociologist Jemima Repo, we uncover associations between the fictional and theoretical that have seldom been studied in conjunction. The paper aims to demonstrate Almodóvar and Barceló’s unique narratives free from the confines of an unwavering gender stratum while simultaneously revealing the deteriorative effects of gender as a control apparatus. Deeply influenced by the post-Franco Madrid Movida movement, these creators exemplify the feminist ideals emerging from that progressive time, rejecting …

Desde El Fuego Que En Mí Arde: Performance, Literatura Y Cine Afro-Latinoamericano Producidos Por Mujeres Afrodescendientes En Perú, Cuba Y Brasil (1960–2000), Elena Ekatherina Chavez Goycochea

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines different films, literary, and performance art pieces created by contemporary afro-descendant women from Peru, Cuba, and Brazil after the sixties with emphasis on the most relevant works of Conceição Evaristo, Sara Gómez, Victoria Santa Cruz, and Lucía Charún-Illescas. I focus my research on the crucial role these artists played in the cultural identity formation of Latin America when inserting ‘race’ as a category of socio-political analysis and cultural production. How did their films, performances, and texts challenge national narratives and imaginaries after 1960? Although in the sixties, women improved their civil rights in different countries, the ‘mujer …

Auto®Ficción Latinx De Nueva York (1999–2020), Jacqueline Herranz Brooks

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This research on the intersection of Literary Criticism, Latino Studies, Persona Studies, and Performance Studies has led me to question the accepted definitions of autoficción (Doubrovsky, Gasparini, Alberca, Casas, Schlikers) and expand that definition into a more multifaceted and operational term. Hence, I created auto®ficción, a new term describing the hybrid creations of a group of underrepresented contemporary Latinx authors living/producing/circulating their work in New York City, during the first two decades of the 21^st Century. For these authors, their life experiences and quotidian uses of this city’s spaces are the subjects of their work. Auto®ficción draws attention …

Traditions And Transformations In The Work Of Adál: Surrealism, El Sainete, And Spanglish, Margarita J. Aguilar

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The Nuyorican movement was a cultural and intellectual movement beginning in the late 1960s through the 1970s that coincided with the era of civil rights struggle in the United States. The artists, writers, poets, and others in the movement were of Puerto Rican descent and resided in New York neighborhoods such as El barrio or Spanish Harlem, Loisaida or the Lower East Side and the South Bronx. The term “Nuyorican” was embraced as a badge of honor and pride by New York’s Puerto Rican community. It was during this time that cultural-specific institutions such El Museo del Barrio, Taller Boricua, …

Apocalipsis Cultural E Imaginación Política: El Caso De Madrid En El Periodo Entre Crisis (2008–2020), Natalia Castro Picón

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation studies the current Spanish economic, political, and social crisis and its representations through apocalyptic imaginaries. I seek to establish a fundamental political and cultural distinction between two models of these imaginaries traceable in representations of Madrid. On one hand, it looks at cultural discourses that display catastrophist projections of the present and the future, insisting on alarmistic and deterministic messages. On the other hand, it looks at other discourses that subvert this representation of the capitalist crisis as the end of the world, shifting the symbolic value of the apocalyptic imaginaries towards figurations of the end of capitalism. …

Inclinaciones Del Yo: Aproximaciones Desde El Afecto Y La Vulnerabilidad A La Literatura Y El Cine Autobiográficos De La España En Crisis (2008–2019), Salvador Gómez Barranco

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation explores the autobiographical literature and cinema produced in the context of a Spain in Crisis (between 2008 and 2019), using recent theories on affect (Brian Massumi, Sarah Ahmed ...) and vulnerability (Judith Butler, Adriana Cavarero…). Through comprehensive close reading, it examines three novels (Clavícula by Marta Sanz, Ordesaby Manuel Vilas and El amor del revés by Luisgé Martín) and three films (Mapa by Elías León Siminiani, True Love by Ion de Sosa, both representative of the Other Spanish Cinema, and Dolor y gloria by Pedro Almodóvar) in order to identify the “inclinations of the …

La Obra Dramatica De Lope De Vega: Temas Y Motivos Neoestoicos, Rosa M. Herrera-Rodriguez

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Neostoicism had a strong influence in Europe during the seventeenth century. This influence was reflected in philosophy, politics, art and literature. In this dissertation we first discuss the importance of stoicism and neostoicism in Europe and in Spain. Then we analyze the neostoic elements found in two plays of Lope de Vega: Barlaan and Josafat (1611) and El caballero de Olmedo (1620).

Una Isla, Dos Literaturas: Contrapunteo De La Literatura De La Isla Y La Diáspora Dominicanas (1965–2018), Jose L. Peralta

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Una isla, dos literaturas.

Contrapunteo de la literatura de la isla y la diáspora dominicanas (1965-2018)

by

Jose Luis Peralta Genao

Advisor: Carlos Riobó

The literary works written by Dominican Diaspora as well as the ones written in the island have been dealing with a very complicated phenomena grown as the result of Dominican massive emigration of twenty century, namely the definition of dominicaness (dominicanidad). In the search of a broader notion of this concept the idea of being Dominican gets build and transforms in different Dominican literary spaces. By searching national discursive elements that construct that Dominican identities in …

Lo Visible, Lo Invisible Y Lo Imaginable: Neoliberalismo Y Ciudad En Las Producciones Culturales De Posguerra En Centroamérica, Maria A. Leon Umana

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This project researches the radical change that the peace treaty of the 1990s brought to Central American societies in connection with economic models. Specifically, it examines the way in which the implementation of neoliberal policies has transformed the cities concerning the spatial and the social; consequently, resulting in an important urban shift in regard to postwar cultural productions. I build a theoretical model organizes the investigation in three representative examples of Central American urban imaginaries (The Visible, The Invisible, and the Imaginable) so as to enlighten and/or enrich the analysis of the region’s urban social realities—examined in detail in a …

Afectos En La Novela Española Contemporánea: Tematización De La Tercera Guerra De Los Balcanes Y Construcción Del "Otro", Isabel Dominguez Seoane

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation proposes an affective reading of contemporary Spanish literature whose topic is the third Balkan War. On the one side, it aims to showcase the political role of affects (fear, happiness and disgust) when representing the "other". On the other side, how Spanish public sphere has used the Balkans as a mirror to refer to Spanish political context.

Más Allá De La Comisión De La Verdad Y Reconciliación: Memoria, Cuerpo Y Producción Cultural De Mujeres En El Perú (2005–2013), Otilia M. Mendiolaza

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines literary and cinematographic works concerning the war between the Peruvian Armed Forces and the Peruvian Communist Party Shining Path (1980-2000) produced by contemporary women artists. In particular, it analyzes how these works reveal topics overlooked by the report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Peru (CVR) published on August 28, 2003. To do so, it studies the socio-political and cultural factors that contributed to the violation of human rights during the internal military conflict, especially of women, focusing on questions of memory, identity, and the body. The dissertation analyzes Rocío Silva Santisteban’s poetry collection Las hijas …

Después Del Exilio: El Regreso Y El Retorno En La Autoficción Latinoamericana Del Siglo Xxi, Joan C. Aguirre

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The present work analyzes the return—both the physical return and anticipated physical return— to the homeland after living in exile, the act of remembering caused by this process, and the metareflective role that the genre of autofiction plays in this interaction. The dissertation examines the twenty-first century autofictions of four Latin American countries: La casa de los Conejos by Laura Alcoba of Argentina; Memorias prematuras by Rafael Gumucio of Chile; ConPasión absoluta by Carol Zardetto of Guatemala; and El sueño del retorno by Horacio Castellanos Moya of El Salvador. These autofictions are part of an important corpus, one that offers …

El Caso De Mateo Alemán: La Interaccion Entre El Derecho Y La Literatura En El Informe De La Mina De Mercurio De Almaden Y El Guzman De Alfarache, Cristina Morales Segura

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In 1593, the Judge Mateo Alemán was in charge of inspecting the quicksilver mines of Almadén in Spain to report on the situation of its workers, prisoners of the Crown, and galley men forced to work in the mercury exploitation. After one month of work, the assignment was cancelled, Alemán was forced to retire from his research, and his work was lost in the archives of the Habsburgs. A few years later, in 1598, Alemán published his famous best seller, El Guzmán de Alfarache.

Alemán’s legal Report, finally found and published in 1966 by Germán Bleiberg, is a narrative text …

Una Enunciación Intersticial: La Poética Del Destierro De Carlos De Rokha, Mariana Romo-Carmona

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Una enunciación intersticial: la poética del destierro de Carlos de Rokha

The era of the Chilean vanguard, in early twentieth century, is currently experiencing a resurgence of interest and study. In particular, the popular uprisings of 1938 and significant advancement of women in cultural and social terms are pivotal, yet it was also the stage of state-sanctioned repression and violence, and in the ensuing decades, persecution of activists and marginalized individuals. My study of the work of the surrealist poet, Carlos de Rokha (1920-1962), highlights the close relationship in the creation of the literary canon with the definition of a …

Ansiedades Épico-Criollas Y El Mecenazgo De Indias En El Arauco Domado De Pedro De Oña, Andrea L. Fernandez

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Among the characteristics of epic poetry are the topic of war, love encounters, heroism of exemplary individuals, and the narration of events contemporary to the audience to reinforce a collective historical identity. Arauco domado by Pedro de Oña, born in Angol (modern Chile), reiterates these traditional expectations with its protagonist, characters, setting, and latter theatrical representations within the viceregal context. The poem was made possible by the sponsorship of García Hurtado de Mendoza y Manrique, IV Marquis of Cañete and Viceroy of Peru. If the title of “espíritu cesarino novelo” [Caesar’s new spirit] (V.76.3) corresponds to the patron, Pedro de …

El Negro Y El Haitiano En La Literatura Dominicana De La Diáspora, Juan Nicolás Tineo

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis analyzes the diverse representations of blackness and Haitian culture in the literary works of the Dominican diaspora. First, the texts of the Dominican diaspora that highlight Africa are analyzed in order to determine to what extent these works represent real historical and social phenomena accurately, and in what ways these texts question or present other realities that have not been studied by the critics. It may be said that the writers of the diaspora allude to their African heritage because it was in the United States that they discovered their true racial identities. It is because of this …

Mahoma En Dos Textos Aljamiados Del Siglo Xvi: La Filosofía Perenne Y El Monomito De Los Moriscos, Emil L. Cruz Fernández

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Besides highlighting the legitimacy of Islam, a religion that was prohibited by the Spanish Inquisition during the 1500’s, Aljamiado-Moriscoliterature has been distinguished by its secrecy, hybridity, ethnocentrism, proselytism, and emphasis on the chaotic reality of the clandestine social group considered to be the "last Moors" of Spain. The Spanish-Muslims or Moriscoswrote this underground literature in the Spanish language, utilizing Arabic characters. The work of historians and “moriscologists” such as L.P. Harvey, Luce López-Baralt, María Teresa Narváez, Vincent Barletta, among others, have examined the practical role and didactic value that —at various levels— these hybrid texts had for the …

Marginalidad Y Subversión En Tres Novelas De Juan Filloy De La Década De 1930, Sonia M. Tejada

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation focuses on the concepts of marginality and subversion in three novels written by Juan Filloy in the 1930s: ¡Estafen! (1932), Op Oloop (1934) and Caterva (1937). I study these novels in the context of the avant-garde movement of the 1920s and 1930s. I analyze the transformation that the concepts of marginality and subversion undergo when they are explored within the context of the avant-garde aesthetics, instead of that of social realism. I contrast Filloy’s approach to these themes with those of the novelists of the preceding decades. More importantly, I compare and contrast Filloy’s novels to Roberto Arlt’s …

Segunda Parte De La Historia General Llamada Índica (1572) De Pedro Sarmiento De Gamboa. Estudio Y Edición Anotada., Aleksín H. Ortega

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa’s History of the Incas (1572). A Critical Study and Annotated Edition.

by Aleksín H. Ortega

Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa wrote his polemic and undoubtedly political History of the Incas at the request of Francisco de Toledo (Viceroy of Peru, 1569-1581). Toledo wanted to deliver to the Spanish King a version of Incan history which could subsequently be used as an ideological tool in the search of legal and moral arguments to defend the Andean colonization by the Spanish monarchy. Since his arrival to the Peruvian territories, Toledo embarked on a long personal visit to …

Aurality As Methexis And The Rise Of Castilian Literature: The Case Of The Siete Partidas, Maristela Verastegui

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Participation is the engine of cultural production. In the case of literature, the privileged modality that enables participation is auditory perception. In order to articulate a theory of literary cultural production based on auditory perception, participation needs to be analyzed in the context of Platonic methexis, understood as an embodied experience facilitated by brain mechanisms of sensory processing and cognition, which manifest in specific ways in written texts. The Siete Partidas, the first complete and systematic legal code of the Western World, provides the perfect case study to test a theory of literary cultural production based on methexis via …

Huérfanos De Orfeo: Poesía Y Música En La Cultura De Los Siglos De Oro, Lorena Uribe Bracho

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation is an attempt to elucidate some aspects of one of the central issues in the history of lyric poetry, which is the complicated interlace of connections between poetry and music. It focusses on the case of early modern Spain, and it studies a large corpus of poetry in Spanish from 1500 to 1700. The corpus includes Renaissance and Baroque poems of many genres and from many sources, both printed and manuscript, by canonical and by lesser known poets, all of which engage with music and musical practice.

I address the questions of how music is involved in poetry’s …

Sacralizar Lo Efímero: Configuración Del Amante Y El Amado En Luis Cernuda Y César Moro, Lena R. Retamoso Urbano

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In this study I create a dialogue between two poets, Luis Cernuda from Spain and César Moro from Peru. I use two of their most representative books of poetry, Cernuda’s Los placeres prohibidos and Moro’s La tortuga ecuestre, to study the dialectics that take place between the lover and the beloved. My general hypothesis is that Los placeres prohibidos can be read as a prologue to the lyrical discourse of La tortuga ecuestre. To explore the bridge between these two poetic worlds, I analyze the various mechanisms through which Eros expresses itself.

Drawing on the work of Denis …

Genre, Representation, And Memory In Spanish Civil War Texts By Women From Spain And The United States, Jennifer Prince

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation seeks to addresses a lacuna in the androcentric Spanish Civil War literary canon by recovering women’s voices writing about the war from the 1930s to the present. It also examines the war stories women tell and how they represent themselves and others when writing about the Spanish Civil War. All of the seven authors examined here write through the lens of some distance—either as American citizens observing the war or as the descendants of the war’s survivors—but each with an intimate connection rooted in biology or ideology. The foundation of this dissertation is close reading and textual analysis …

Las Letras De Fernando De Pulgar, Nueva Edición, Estudio Preliminar Y Notas, Ana-Maria Zaharescu

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis intends to be a new edition of a text widely read in its time judging by the number of manuscripts and editions that circulated between the last quarter of the 15th century and the next. They are epistles directed to historical personalities of the end of the 15th century who played an important role in the politics and in the society of Fernando de Pulgar’s time. Along with political and diplomatic matters, the Letters express author’s personal feelings and reactions to the political or social situation of the fifteenth century Castile.

A new edition of Fernando de Pulgar's …

El Spill De Jaume Roig. Estudio De Relaciones Semióticas Con La Picaresca, Raul Macias Cotano

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The Spill is a literary work written in the Catalan dialect of Valencia in 1460 by Jaume Roig, a prestigious doctor whose personal and public life is well known. The book presents numerous parallels with Lazarillo de Tormes, the 1554 novel written in Spanish (or “Castilian”) that has traditionally been considered the start of the picaresque genre in Spain. These similarities are so striking that it makes critics wonder if Spill may be a precedent of Lazarillo de Tormes. This dissertation studies the possible relations between those two books. The similarities are mostly thematic, for which the lens …

Con Cuydadosos Descuydos Descubiertos: Una Aproximación A La Obra De José Camerino En El Marco De La Novela Del Siglo Xvii, Beatriz G. Acrich Cohen

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

When Cervantes publishes his collection of Novelas Ejemplares in 1613, he introduces a type of composition that lacked academic prestige and was not in any way regulated. Although Italian and Spanish writers had already dabbled with brief narrative fictions, it is the author of El Quijote who pushes the new genre in which he skillfully articulates the literary traditions. The success of his collection is immediate; numerous editions of his novellas in various Spanish cities are testimony of the bases which the author was setting, and he rapidly begins to be imitated. The readers enthusiastically receive and consume the short …

Cervantes' "Ocho Comedias Y Ocho Entremeses Nuevos, Nunca Representados": A Theater Of Tradition And Innovation, Michael K. Predmore

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study closely examines the eight interludes and eight full-length plays that Cervantes published in a collection on the thirteenth of September, 1615. Although these theatrical works were published together, the collection has seldom been examined in its entirety as a coherent unit. The purpose of this study, therefore, will be to re-cast a critical focus upon these theatrical works as a whole, in order to provide insight into Cervantes as both a playwright and as an inquisitive and unconventional thinker of his day. Typically, Cervantes was seen as a fairly conventional dramatist until around 1950, when a significant number …

Masculinidades En Crisis Y Prácticas De Resistencia Feminista En La Literatura Y El Cine Españoles De Autoría Femenina, Carmen Sanchis-Sinisterra

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines the representation of masculinity in crisis in films and novels by contemporary female authors of Spain. The films are El último viaje de Robert Rylands by Gracia Querejeta, Te doy mis ojos by Iciar Bollaín and La vida sin mí by Isabel Coixet. The novels are Amado amo by Rosa Montero, Los aires difíciles by Almudena Grandes and La conquista del aire by Belén Gopegui. The question this dissertation asks is if by introducing male characters that lack power, control and success the works promote practices of feminist resistance. The answer is that they do but, as …

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 …

Creating With Anger: Contemplating Vendetta. An Analysis Of Anger In Italian And Spanish Women Writers Of The Early Modern Era, Luisanna Sardu Castangia

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In the vast gamut of human emotions, anger is one of the most complex, provocative, and enduring. From Greek philosophers working in antiquity to today’s most recent theories on emotions, most scholars agree that anger has a multifaceted nature. This near universal agreement across the barriers of time and geography stems from the following facts: in order to exist, anger involves the participation of other emotions; anger does not have an opposite; anger leads an individual to engage in an act of self-analysis and in an evaluation of other individuals; and, finally, anger inspires action to right a wrong that …