Metahistoria nacional y metaficcion biografica en "Historia de Mayta", de Mario Vargas Llosa

The thesis explores Mario Vargas Llosa's Historia de Mayta in light of recent studies of Latin America's new historical novel (Menton, Juan-Navarro) and in connection with contemporary literary theory (Waugh, Stonehill) and new trends in the philosophy of history (White, Foucault). In my study, I focus on three major levels of analysis: (1) significant events in Peruvian history to which the novel alludes; (2) biographical elements that strongly evoke the lives of Ernesto "Che" Guevara, Jacinto Renteria, and Vargas Llosa himself; and (3) the self-referential devices that aim at questioning the validity of empirical analysis in both fiction and history. The allegorical dimension of the novel's view of modern Peruvian politics, its biographical component, and the self-consciousness of its historiographic approach make of Historia de Mayta both a metahistory of Peru and a biographical metafiction. The thesis ultimately reveals the problematic borderline between fiction and reality, the novel and history.

Incursión en el espacio ontológico de las novelas “La ninfa inconstante” de Guillermo Cabrera Infante y “Todos se van” de Wendy Guerra

This thesis examines the phenomenological projection of space in two Cuban novels: La ninfa inconstante (2008) by Guillermo Cabrera Infante (1929–2005), and Todos se van (2006) by Wendy Guerra (1970–). Both novels are paradigmatic of two generations of Cuban writers who portray the city of Havana as a backdrop against which to project socio-political and biographical narratives. To problematize ethical and political omissions in the novels, this work incorporates disciplines such as philosophy, urbanism, architecture, sociology and literary theory. Through the concepts of prominent phenomenologists, such as Gaston Bachelard, Martin Heidegger and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, amongst others, this study evaluates how space becomes a construction to ambivalent dynamics of truth telling within contrasting, suffocating sociopolitical contexts. In addition, it explores how these phenomenological spaces are defined in relation to power. For instance, the Cuban Revolution, and its aftermath of more than 52 years, brings forth a sense of displacement and placelessness. The novels present and develop both authors’ spatial consciousness (that we call “ontological space”), which is not necessarily a container of three-dimensional objects, but instead, fictional emergent constructions. This thesis concludes that literature can become a meaningful space to cope with unbearable realities.

Metahistoria nacional y metaficción biográfica en Historia de Mayta, de Mario Vargas Llosa

The thesis explores Mario Vargas Llosa's Historia de Mayta in light of recent studies of Latin America's new historical novel (Menton, Juan-Navarro) and in connection with contemporary literary theory (Waugh, Stonehill) and new trends in the philosophy of history (White, Foucault). In my study, I focus on three major levels of analysis: 1) significant events in Peruvian history to which the novel alludes; 2) biographical elements that strongly evoke the lives of Ernesto "Che" Guevara, Jacinto Rentería, and Vargas Llosa himself; and 3) the self-referential devices that aim at questioning the validity of empirical analysis in both fiction and history. The allegorical dimension of the novel's view of modern Peruvian politics, its biographical component, and the self-consciousness of its historiographic approach make of Historia de Mayta both a metahistory of Perú and a biographical metafiction. The thesis ultimately reveals the problematic borderline between fiction and reality, the novel and history.

A Musicology for Literary Language

This study analyzed the reader's relationship to the sounds embedded in a written text for the purpose of identifying those sounds' contribution to the reader's interpretation of that text. To achieve this objective, this study negotiated Heideggerian phenomenology, Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis, linguistics, and musicology into a reader response theory, which was then applied to Edgar Allen Poe's "The Raven." This study argues that the orchestration of sounds in "The Raven" forces its reader into a regression, which the reader then represses, only to carry the resulting sound-image // away from the poem as a psychic scar.