Teoría y práctica del neobarroco en Severo Sarduy

This dissertation analyzes the theory and practice of the Cuban postmodern writer Severo Sarduy (1937–1993) from his early adult years in Cuba to his exile period in Paris, France, where he lived until his death. By studying his narrative through the light of his theoretical essays, this paper demonstrates that the author created his own type of reading model—from and for Sarduy. His literary work is influenced by three major elements: (post)structuralism, psychoanalysis, and Buddhism, which combined form what Sarduy himself called the Neobarroque style. The Sarduyan writing is a transgressive exercise expressed through his concept of simulación. This style breaks with the traditional art concept of mimesis (the representation of reality in the western world), and therefore with the correspondence between the signifier and the signified. Sarduy does not intend to represent reality but to go beyond it, achieving by his technique of signifying exhaustion to represent absence itself. The Neobarroque of Severo Sarduy is an aesthetic of the empty signifier based on the reckless expenditure, and ultimately exhaustion, of the artifices of language that precipitates in a signifier chain towards the infinite. His language does not transmit a message but it signifies itself, that is, a means without an end. Paradoxically, this signifier chain produces an excess of metaphors beyond the material limits of language and its support, the page. The space beyond language is the hipertelic technique inherited by Sarduy from his literary master, José Lezama Lima. This is also the empty space of no signification or nonsense in which occurs the depersonalization of the speaking subject; in Buddhist terminology this becomes the dissolution of the ego. The Sarduyan language is determined by a Lacanian psychoanalytic erotic drive (pulsion) known as the Barroquean desire, a death drive which directly relates to the exile condition of the author. But the genesis of this desire lies in a primordial desire of encounter with his origin: mother, maternal language, paradise, God. That is the reason why Sarduy not only poses an aesthetic question but also an ontological one. This other dimension of the Sarduyan writing is based on a liberating drive that permeates all his work—an ontological liberation expressed through language. The empty space created in the text provides the subject with the possibility of fusion with the all. Ultimately, Sarduy strives for a language that goes beyond the symbolic limits towards a place of constant dissolution, evanesce, and death-horror vacui. This corroborates the Sarduyan statement: “la simulación enuncia el vacío y la muerte.”

Youth and power in the village hybrid chiefdoms in Fiji

The purpose of this study is to provide an alternative approach in analyzing social hybrid situations. The study is based on fieldwork conducted in 1995 in the village of Nasautoka, Fiji. The suggested analysis for hybrid cases is based on Anthony Giddens's structuration theory, with an emphasis on the concept of "agency" and "signification" rules. Giddens conceptualizes agents as both knowledgeable and reflexive. The agent is not viewed as passive and impotent as he paces through social life. Signification rules are extremely useful in analyses of symbolic orders, and shed light on the meaning of both "new" and "old" symbols as they manifest themselves simultaneously in Nasautoka. Of paramount importance is that these new symbols are unfolding beside the "old" symbols represented by the vanua. The vanua is a Fijian social structure with both sociocultural and physical dimensions. The current hybrid is exemplified by two merging structures and by the contrasting reactions of three groups within the village.

Pioneers in the study of motion

From the multitudinous streets of Mexico City through the lonely highways of the United States, this collection of poetry charts strategies of representation across complex territories of culture and gender. These poems represent dialogues and negotiations with popular and poetic narratives of the Americas, as well as individual quests for identification against a backdrop of postmodern and postcolonial concerns. The effect is like that of a collage that elicits the reader's participation in order to produce individual signification. The figures alluded to in these pieces enact the struggle to situate the self within multiple registers of discourse and identity, as well as to establish a site from which to speak.

Taking Issue with History: Empathy and the Ethical Imperatives of Creative Interventions

The purpose of this thesis was to contribute to a dialogue that considers the relationship between history, literature, and empathy as a literary affect. Specifically, I explored sites of literature’s transformative potential as it relates to cultural studies and the ethics of deconstruction. Via a deconstructive, post-colonial reading of Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, I considered how subjects in our current socio-political moment can feel history. Emerging from a post-structurally mediated engagement with history, signification, and feeling, I argued that empathy, as it is contentiously presented in the context of deconstruction, is not necessarily a reductive or essentialist approach towards relating or “being-with” an-other. Instead, I proposed that the act of reading historiographical novels that take constructions of the Atlantic Slave Trade to task might generate an affective empathy, which could in turn engender a more empathetic relationality and way of being-in-the-world.

Ghost Tree Social

GHOST TREE SOCIAL tells a coming out story of sorts. In terms of style, many of the poems are short, imagistic lyrics, though some are extended catalogues. Specific natural images—lakes, rivers, and snow—are often contrasted with cultural markers. The imagistic poems are thinking through the work of Sylvia Plath. The catalogue poems shift between diaristic, narrative, and critical modes, responding to the poetry of Elizabeth Bishop and the essays of Edouard Glissant. Voice-driven fragments disrupt the more traditional lyric poems. The fragments fall between formal lyrics like confetti from a gay club’s rafters; or the fragments hold the lyric poems in bondage. The lyric poem then re-signifies as form through resonances with the other discursive and poetic form of the fragment. Following critical writers such as Adrienne Rich and Audre Lorde, the re-signification of lyric form reflects the need for new signs for self and community organized queerly as opposed to more typical binary categories—man or woman, living or dead, rich or poor, white or black—where the first term is privileged and the second term often denigrated.