La novela del burdel: Hacia una poetica del espacio prostibulario en la narrativa hispanoamericana

The brothel, as a ‘symbolic location’ was the object of analysis in this dissertation, ascribable to its unusual and recurrent presence in Latin American narrative. The brothel was presented as a scenario, with polyvalent implications of both the space itself, as well as the different archetypes of the characters who occupy it. ^ Our analysis showed how the brothel functions as a cultural entity, social archetype, power center, mythical place and symbolic space, where man plays out his utmost dominant self. To achieve this, the analysis focused on sifting through the concepts of machismo, economic and political power, and the configuration of the ‘house’ as emblematic elements of Latin American culture. ^ The four novels chosen to underwrite this analysis were representative of the historical time frame, from Colonial times to the present, highlighting all the most distinctive features. These, in turn, led the reader to the inescapable fact that owing to certain characteristics of Latin American culture, the brothel maintains its raison d'être as a space that represents existential situations, and that far from converting itself into an anachronism, it will continue to thrive in the most significant achievements of Latin American prose. ^

Relectura del discurso narrativo de las primeras tres decadas de la Republica Cubana en el contexto de los rasgos de la picaresca

The purpose of this dissertation was to study the narrative discourse of three Cuban novelists who produced their works from 1902 to 1933, using a typology that reveals a picaresque view of Cuban society. Focusing on La conjura and La manigua sentimental by Jesús Castellanos (1879–1912), Las honradas and Las impuras by Miguel de Carrión (1875–1929), and Generales y doctores and Juan Criollo by Carlos Loveira (1882–1928), this dissertation identified and defined picaresque traits and elements in the characterization, contrasting main and secondary, male and female characters, at all social levels. ^ The study considered the theories of the Spanish picaresque novel proposed by Antonio Maravall, Américo Castro, Claudio Guillén, Marcel Bataillon, and other critics, in order to delineate a model of traditional picaresque behavior, which was then applied to the analysis of each character. Sociopolitical and cultural conditions, as well as the psychology of the Cuban collective as presented by the authors, were also analyzed to pinpoint similarities and differences between the traditional Golden Age rogue and the characters created by the authors. ^ Critics who have studied the influence of the Spanish picaresque genre on the Latin American novel make no reference to any of the authors or novels included in this study. Key analyses, however, identified the presence of characters that use picaresque modes of behavior as a means to manipulate the structures of power in order to survive and as a futile attempt to achieve their ends within a socioeconomic context that is undergoing a significant transition. Castellanos' characters use their picaresque behavior mainly to attain a higher social status. Carrion concentrates on picaresque behavior in women as a means to manipulate the dominant male society, while Loveira's picaresque characters are mainly interested in securing a position of political power. ^

Hacia una poetica del Neobarroco: La vision de la historia en Jose Lezama Lima, Reinaldo Arenas y Severo Sarduy

Most of the critical studies of Baroque novels written in Spanish America during the 1960s and 1970s are characterized by a limited examination of their formal and stylistic representations. This dissertation explored the way in which certain writers developed a new Baroque tendency, the so-called Neobarroco, that presented a particular vision of history. José Lezama Lima, Reinaldo Arenas and Severo Sarduy developed innovative fictional and historiographic perceptions as alternative discourses to understand and perceive the cultural intricacies of Cuba and the New World. Their novels posited an elaborated poetic theory of history that can be summarized by the principle of supratemporal analogies, interweaved by a "metaphoric subject" that makes possible the conception of "imaginary eras". Since this poetry arises from a network of metaphoric correspondences, the image is conceived as a cultural creation that acts upon reality. ^ Although this study traced the trajectory of their writings from the point of view of their own essays, our focus was on the act of recovering the past as reshaped forms that are present in the memory. Paradiso, El mundo alucinante and De donde son los cantantes exemplified the attempt to place Americanness within the realm of poetics and history as one single discourse constructed by a combination of self-consciousness and historiographic meditation. ^ Basing my thesis on postmodernist theory (Ihab Hassan, Brian McHale, Linda Hutcheon) and philosophies of history (Michel Foucault, Hayden White, Keith Jenkins, Dominick LaCapra), I argued that the antagonistic paradoxes faced by postmodernism were reconcilable tendencies of the Neobarroco prior to the actual debate on the postmodern condition. The aesthetic trend initiated by these writers and their reading of history confronted the official historiographic discourse, thus empowering a contemporary voice in the current debate on historical skepticism. ^

Ecfrasis: Escritura y pintura en el costumbrismo argentino

This dissertation examines the discursive practice of Argentine costumbrista texts from a novel perspective. In (re)reading the works of selected prominent writers from the late colonial period to the end of the Nineteenth Century, including those of Alonso Carrió de la Vandera, Emeric Essex Vidal, León Pallière, Lucio Vicente López, Lucio V. Mansilla, and Pastor Obligado we focus on the presence of ekphrastic enunciations with a view toward linking the plastic, painterly dimensions of the prose to parallel representations by artists of the same period. Thus the costumbristas are studied in tandem with the watercolors, oil paintings and lithographic compositions of artists such as Carlos Enrique Pellegrim, César Hipólito Bacle, Raymond Monvoisin and Hipólito Moulin. The resulting comparative study of the two arts---the verbal and the pictorial---illustrates the notion described by W. J. T. Mitchell that a literary text may well "represent a work of visual or graphic art." And thus, it provides us with visual, spatial motifs that enhance its powers of representation. ^ In developing our focus on ekphrastic representations we have followed the theoretic studies of Murray Krieger, Jean H. Hagstrum, James Hefferman, John Hollander, W. J. T. Mitchell, Johann Gottfried Herder, and Wendy Steiner among others, all of whom in various ways take their cue from Horace's Ut pictura poesis and the notion that poetry, that is literary discourse, can be likened to a panting and that in both arts there is a refractive quality that makes literature a spoken vehicle of expression and painting a silent, complementary voice. ^ In studying the literary and plastic discourses comparatively what becomes evident is that they share cultural and ideological concerns that center around the notion of self-definition, national identity, and the relation of the individual to the incipient national community (Benedict Anderson). These concerns are highlighted via the depiction of customs, mores, dress, work habits, professions, and social classes. In late colonial literature and painting and especially in the Nineteenth Century, which constitutes the defining period of Argentine political independence, the confluence of the two disciplinary discourses addresses, and underscores the issues of socio-political empowerment in the new Argentine nation. ^

Poetica de la brevedad en Borges

Although he did not write copious novels, endless essays, or long poems, Jorge Luis Borges is considered one of today's best modern writers. His works have never been more than ten pages long. The purpose of this dissertation is to demonstrate that the willing use of concise expression in Borges's writings is inscribed in a poetic worldview of great implications. This view is based on the synthesis of philosophical, literary, and cultural issues that Borges interprets, discusses, refutes, and re-elaborates with a new conjectural approach. ^ This dissertation is based on a methodological review of all his current scholarly work and on a thorough examination of the four volumes of his Complete Works, edited by Emece, in 2002. His pantheistic vision, the epiphanic moments, and his love/hate relationship with language, conform an aesthetic of resounding silence that enlightens the hidden aspects of his brief masterpieces. ^ Even though Borgesian studies flood the library he once imagined, they have been presented in an isolated manner. This dissertation establishes a link among the various aforementioned aspects as studied by Borges scholars, and demonstrates the powerful influence of Borges's illuminating and precise vision. ^ Paradoxically, the poetry of brevity in Borges's works is filled with allusions to the things that Borges silences, because, from a panoramic pantheism, his words almost reach an epiphanic enlightenment that flashes between preterit and future nothingness. ^ By replacing extension with intensity, and mastering the art of omission, Borges's laborious work reaches power and concentration that only the very greatest talents can achieve. His delicate verbal conciseness provides his readers with a virtually infinite freedom of imagination because it exposes them to the chaotic world of mythical probabilities, where an instant encompasses eternity. ^

El discurso del poder y la lucha de contrarios en la narrativa de la esclavitud en Cuba y Estados Unidos

This dissertation explores the behavior of prejudiced discourse in the most representative narratives against inhumane slavery written in Cuba and the United States in the nineteenth century: Autobiografía de un esclavo, by Juan Francisco Manzano; Francisco, by Anselmo Suárez y Romero; Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, by Frederick Douglass; and Uncle Tom's Cabin, by Harriett Beecher Stowe. This study deals with the identification between race and slavery that occurred in the American continent, using racial prejudice to justify the enslavement of human beings. Such concepts were maintained, diffused and perpetuated by the dominant discourse. ^ In the nineteenth century, intellectuals from both Cuba and the United States were highly influenced by the modern philosophical ideas rooted in the European Enlightenment. These ideas contradicted by principle the "peculiar institution" of slavery, which supported a great deal of the economy of both nations. This conflict of principles was soon reflected in literature and led to the founding of Cuban and African-American narrative respectively. The common exposure to slavery brought together two nations otherwise highly dissimilar in historical and cultural circumstances. Based on the theories of discourse by Foucault, Terdiman, and van Dijk, the analysis of the discourse displayed in these literary works helps understand how discourse is utilized to subvert the dominant discourse without being expelled or excluded by it. This subversion was successfully accomplished in the American narratives, while only attempted in the Cuban works, given Cuba's colonial status and the compromised economic loyalties of the Delmontino cenacle which produced these works. ^

Latinoamericanismo y modernidad en la obra ensayistica de Arturo Uslar Pietri

This dissertation follows the political and literary ideas of the late Venezuelan writer Arturo Úslar Pietri. Analysis of his essayistic production focuses on his reflections on three major topics: universality, Latin Americanism, and Venezuelan national identity. By "universality" I refer to Úslar's reflections on general human culture and the way in which the crises of many ethical, philosophical, and scientific postulates of modernity are felt and expressed by this author through his critical appraisal of 20th-century history and culture. His most extensive and controversial reflections are those on Latin American identity, historical, socio-cultural and political processes, and philosophical thought, configuring what might be called a Latin American "rationality." National reflections follow the author's ideas on three topics: oil and its (mostly negative) impact on all aspects of Venezuelan life, the rescue of national history as a means to construct a Venezuelan identity, and the quest to identify/configure a national "subject" akin to the new rationality. My conclusion examines the essay-novel relationship as a compendium of Úslar's ideas and public political practices, as illustrated in his novels, where changing global realities are reflected in the most concrete aspects of Venezuelan daily life.^

Entre el terror y la irrealidad: La narrativa poetica postmoderna de Reinaldo Arenas

This study focuses on the works of Cuban writer Reinaldo Arenas, one of the most prolific and controversial Latin American authors in the second half of the twentieth century. First, I propose Arenas as the creator of the Cuban revolutionary novel (a term coined by critics when referring to the narrative written after the revolution), within the scope of postmodern historiographic metafiction and against the trend of the official revolutionary novel promoted by the political establishment. Through the analysis of the five novels of the pentagony and other texts, my study follows the tragic journey of the antihero protagonist, from adolescence into adulthood, registering the correlation between his existential crisis and the narrative historical discourse. Contemporary Cuba from 1959 onwards—the historical-political circumstances that afflicted and overwhelmed him the most—becomes the point of reference to deconstruct reality and reaffirm the existence of a “self” threatened by the violence of a totalitarian discourse. Out of the fragments of this reality, Arenas undertook a radical reconstruction in which he inverted and questioned every inherited cultural value, as well as the power structures. Within this context, Arenas projects what I call “the Cuban hideous unreal”, an ontological and literary vision antagonistic to the carpentirean concept of the American “marvelous real”. ^ Despite the ostracism Reinaldo Arenas suffered for ten years, this study shows how he established through his work a meditative dialogue with himself and the common man. This perspective formulates a permanent literary and philosophic reflection with thinkers and writers of his country and the West, as the basis for a rejection of the Cuban reality. The resultant interdisciplinary and postmodern dialogue constitutes one of the most significant and distinctive contributions of his work. ^

Representación de la mujer transgresora en la novelística de la Cuba republicana

This dissertation explored the subversive feminine discourse in the most representative novels of the first quarter of the twentieth century in the newly born republic of Cuba. Drawing on the feminist theories of Simone de Beauvoir, Toril Moi and Pierre Bourdieu, these women were analyzed in the context of their time, their class level and their race. Because it is oppressive and theoretically unsatisfactory to reduce women to their general "humanity" or to their "femininity", my purpose was to analyze them as human beings in a "specific situation" and show how they curtailed the laws that patriarchy has prepared for them. The novels studied were: Doña Guiomar, by Emilio Bacardí; A fuego lento, by Emilio Bobadilla; La manigua sentimental, by Jesús Castellanos; Las honradas, by Miguel de Carrión; Las impuras, by Miguel de Carrión, and Ecué-Yamba-O, by Alejo Carpentier. Women will obtain freedom and independence from patriarchal control, symbolic power, symbolic violence, and hypnotic power when they are educated and have obtained a working position in society similar to men or by joining the political struggle in their community, in their country, or in the global organizations.

El discurso costumbrista colombiano del siglo XIX: Instrumento ideológico idealizado

Based on critical ideas from Michel Foucault, Benedict Anderson and Doris Sommer, this study analyzes the nation building function of the article of custom and manners and its literary mode "costumbrismo" in the Colombian literature of the 19th and beginning of the 20 th centuries. The discursive techniques and devices used in " costumbrismo" were put into effect by the Colombian intelligentsia to create a sense of national identity. Authors like, Ricardo Silva, José Caicedo Rojas, José David Guarín, Ignacio Gutiérrez Vergara, Eugenio Díaz, Juan de Dios Restrepo, José María Vergara y Vergara, Jorge Isaacs, José Eustaquio Palacios, José Manuel Marroquín, Tomás Carrasquilla, and José Eustasio Rivera became detailed observers that sometimes criticized and at other times just described customs and manners of different social classes and institutions. Through journalistic and literary discourse depicting regional customs and manners, these regionalist writers pretended to provide an objective and actual image of Colombian society, articulating, instead, a subjective message which expressed and reinforced their particular sense of nation based on a liberal or conservative political agenda. This discourse was used to shape the ideology of the republic thorough the idealization of a particular view of the nation.

La utopía interior: Superación del dualismo en los ensayos de Ernesto Sábato

My research attempts to demonstrate how Sábato’s essays have pursued a progressive path that reflects the evolving process of his vision. In light of his essays, I will delineate the themes of solitude, death, desperation, robotization of man, and finally, hope as the antithesis. In my analysis I examine the model created in Sartre’s Existentialism. I also visit the model followed by Nicholas Berdyaeff, who at least offers the possibility of salvation in a world conceived by and for Nothingness. I investigate how these and other tendencies had an initial influence on the essays studied in my research. I concentrate on those essays whose discourse is conditioned by the philosophical foundations of a being that inquires and discerns, discovers and denounces, and finally struggles with the impossibility of reaching the absolute. This foresight, at times apocalyptic, at times utopian, is already present in Sábato’s early works. In my study I attempt to establish how Sábato, in oscillating between the demonic and the romantic, the infernal and utopian, constructs his vision of the world through the symbiotic intertwining of both the fictional and essayistic genres. I focus on an author compromised by a constant debate with the paradoxes and dichotomies that, according to Sábato himself, define Modernity.

Propuestas para una reconceptualización surrealista y postmoderna de la sexualidad femenina en los textos de Cristina Escofet e Isabel Allende

Female sexuality has commonly been viewed as the passive counterpart of male sexuality. Building upon Adrienne Rich's theory of compulsive heterosexuality, I would suggest that the fundamental location of this problem lies within the subconscious. Cristina Escofet's stance on this issue is to argue in favor of a deconstruction of Jungian archetypes, revealing their constructed rather than intrinsic character. In this dissertation, I study representative texts by Escofet and Isabel Allende and show not only how they depict patriarchal compulsive heterosexuality, but also try to reconceptualize female sexuality through surrealist and postmodern techniques such as self-reflection, dialogue with our double or Other, and sensorial perception. These techniques are designed to create a new epistemology of jouissance and excess, as defined by contemporary French theory. The significance of my study resides in the interdisciplinary analysis of female sexuality in Hispanic feminist writers. The first chapter proposes that surrealism, postmodernism, and feminism are theoretical frameworks which create new paradigms for social change. In their feminist philosophies, Escofet and Allende emphasize the use of subconscious knowledge as a means of helping them understand the world and create alternative realities. The second chapter shows how Escofet and Allende deconstruct the mysoginist archetype of Eve, which has been largely responsible for identifying women's sexual identity with the disreputable qualities of the femme fatale and whose mirror-image has long plagued women. In accordance with this stereotype, Lillith (Adam's sexually active ex-partner), has typically been portrayed as the negative Other, and for generations the she-devil myth which surrounds her has resurfaced in the media, where she assumes the role of innumerable evil female characters. In the third chapter, I examine how class and race differences have been used to intensify the demonization of different types of sexuality. In the same manner as Lillith and Eve, black and indigenous characters express dissent by retelling their stories in words and performance, and by seeking to form a dialog with their readers. The last chapter deals with the importance of the senses for female characters as they try to create their own sexuality from the fragmented bodies we find in surrealist and postmodern art. In this section we shall see how Luce Irigaray and Hélène Cixous's theories about multiple sexualities are in evidence when Escofet and Allende reconceptualize female sexuality. As no previous scholarship has analyzed the use of the subconscious, the senses, and performance when understanding female sexuality in Latin American literature, this dissertation seeks to provide a tentative exploration of the issues that may help to open up a new field of research in Hispanic feminist cultural studies.

Representation of people of color in the nineteenth century slavery novel in Cuba and Brazil

This dissertation explores the similarities and differences which characterize the depiction of people of color in certain representative nineteenth century Cuban and Brazilian slavery novels as a function of the authorial approach of each territory's literary tradition toward the issues of slavery, racial prejudice, and people of color. The selected texts, derived from the peak periods in slavery literature of each territory, include Francisco , by Anselmo Snárez y Romero; Sab, by Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda; Cecilia Valdés , by Cirilo Villaverde; A escrava Isaura, by Bernardo Guimarães; O mulato, by Aluísio Azevedo; and Bom-Crioulo, by Adolfo Caminha. While the present study explores the enslavement, abuse, and discrimination of people of color as a consequence of a deep-seated discourse of power, privilege and racial superiority, it focuses more extensively on the representation of people of color, particularly in their capacity to constructively appropriate the cultural values of the white dominant group and recognize their identity as ambiguous. ^ Said's theories of Orientalist discourse and geography and formation as well as Dube's perspective on subaltern-oriented studies provide a theoretical framework for exploring the response of slavery writers whose common exposure to slavery but dissimilar socio-political contexts generate some startling findings. Crafted within a period of political repression, fear of black revolt, factional in-fighting as well as strong socioeconomic ties to the slaveholding class, the Cuban texts generally fashioned an approach to slavery as one marked by moderation, reform, and cultural counter discourse and consequently depict people of color with a more passive but culturally authentic outlook. On the other hand, the Brazilian response to the issue of slavery, steeped in an ideological amalgam of liberalism, positivism, republicanism, and abolitionism, is characterized by overt opposition to slavery and a representation of people of color that is less concerned with cross-cultural input but reclaims their humanity as highly educable and socially mobile persons in search of greater freedoms. Ultimately, there is a shared message of higher significance couched in the worthwhile mission of raising slaves to the level of men. ^

Buried voices: Genres and types of female authorship during the Spanish American colonial period (sixteenth to eighteenth centuries)

This dissertation analyzes various types of non-canonical texts authorized by women from a wide spectrum of classes and races in the Spanish colonies. The female voice, generally absent from official colonial documents of the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteen centuries, left a gap in the complex subject of women's history and social participation. Through the study of personal letters, autobiographies, journals, court documents, inquisitorial transcripts, wills and testaments, edicts, orders, proclamations and posters, that voice is recovered. Thus, the Indigenous, Spaniards and African women and their descendants who lived during this period left their written legacy and proof of participation. Beginning with a thorough history of the native woman's interest in writing, this study focuses on how women of all social levels utilized the few means of writing available at their disposal to display a testimonial, critical and sometimes fictional narrative of their surroundings. ^ This investigation concludes that it is necessary to change the traditional image of the passive women of the colonies, subjected to a patriarchal authority and unable to speak or grow on their own. The documents under study, introduced women who were able to self represent themselves as followers of the tradition while at the same time their writings were denying that very same statement. They passed from the private arena to the public one with discourses that confessed their innermost feelings and concerns, challenged the authority of the Inquisitor or the Governor, exposed their sexual freedom and transvestite narratives, successfully developed stratagems that challenged the official ideology of the oppressive religious environment and established their own authority reaching at last the freedom of their souls. ^

The problematics of mestizaje in the Indigenist Peruvian novels of "Yawar Fiesta" (1941) by Jose Maria Arguedas, "El mundo es ancho y ajeno" (1941) by Ciro Algeria, and "Los rios profundos" (1958) by Jose Maria Arguedas

This study was a critical reassessment of the problematics of mestizaje in three representative texts pertaining to the Indigenist Peruvian narrative: Yawar Fiesta (1941) by José María Arguedas; El mundo es ancho y ajeno (1941) by Ciro Alegría; and Los ríos profundos (1958) by José María Arguedas. As this investigation demonstrated, Alegría's and Arguedas' writings went beyond the reach of Indianism and orthodox Indigenism, which were prevalent during the first decades of the twentieth century, to emphasize, the values of the Indian peasantry as well as those of the mestizo and mestiza: the products of Indian and white unions, who were also considered representatives of the Peruvian culture. ^ The first chapter traced the historical process of mestizaje and demonstrated how the discursive practice of this mestizaje was expressed in the Indigenist Peruvian narrative. The chronological organization of the chapters in this dissertation paralleled the evolution of this narrative.^ The relevance of my research lies on the important contribution it makes to the field of Indigenist literature, by seeing mestizaje as both a reconstruction and a reinterpretation of the idea of nation, identity and cultural interchange. In Alegría's and Arguedas' novels, the Indigenous reality was not only seen as an isolated phenomenon, but also as the dichotomy of European versus Indian values. As a result, Indigenist narrative presented a true and all encompassing world; therefore, Alegría's and Arguedas' narrative deepened our understanding of the aspects of a multicultural society.^ In order to accomplish this analysis, research was conducted in areas such as history, languages, ethnology, ethnography, anthropology, folklore, religion, and syncretism. My study was based on works such as Antonio Cornejo Polar's heterogeneous literatures, Mijail Bajtín's conception of dialogism and polyphony, Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities, Angel Rama's notion of transculturation, Homi Bhabha's liminal space, Walter Ong's study of orality and literacy, and Julia Kristeva's theory of abjection, among others.^