Entre la provincia y el mundo. Modernidad e innovacion en la narrativa de Lino Novas Calvo

Lino Novás Calvo (1903–1983) is by many considered the best Cuban short story writer. Critics acknowledge his major contribution to the modernization of narrative prose in that country. With Cayo Canas and La Luna Nona, the short story achieved a language of its own, a precise technique, an acute outlook and an awareness of its own individual art form. Nevertheless, his novels and short stories have not received the recognition and the distribution they deserve, in part because his books have not been reprinted. ^ The purpose of this dissertation is to analyze the innovative character of Novás Calvo's work. From the starting point of traditional discourse, he gathered together the main tendencies that until then co-existed in Cuban literature (realism, social criticism, criollismo, Afro Cuban themes and cosmopolitism) and renewed them with modern contributions, mainly assimilated from American authors writing between the two World Wars. He based himself in a concept of realism that does not limit itself to recreating reality and that eludes language localisms and the portrayal of environments. He brought Cuban characters and themes to his stories which at the same gave them a universal dimension. Novás Calvo participated in debates which amounted to a rupture between tradition and localism and brought universality to the Cuban short story. This achieved the aesthetic syncretism imposed by modernity. ^

Friends of the Everglades

Marjory Stoneman Douglass delivering presentation, April 3, 1973. Marjory Stoneman Douglas was born on April 7, 1890. In South Florida she is best known for her environmental advocacy passionately fighting for the protection and preservation of the Florida Everglades. As a writer, her most influential book was the book The Everglades: River of Grass (1947), which redefined the popular conception of the Everglades as a treasured river instead of a worthless swamp. Moving to South Florida to pursuit a career in journalism, she began writing for the Miami Herald newspaper and then worked as freelance writer, producing over one hundred short stories that were published in popular magazines. Throughout her long life (lived until age 108), she received numerous awards, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom and was inducted into several halls of fame. She died on May 14, 1998. A statue of her invites visitors at Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden in Miami, Florida to sit with her statue and contemplate the garden. Two South Florida public schools are named in her honor: Broward County Public Schools' Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School and Miami-Dade County Public Schools' Marjory Stoneman Douglas Elementary School.

Friends of the Everglades

Charles Perry shaking hands with Marjory Stoneman Douglas in front of easel with map of Florida. Charles Edward Perry (Chuck), 1937-1999, was the founding president of Florida International University in Miami, Florida. He grew up in Logan County, West Virginia and received his bachelor's and masters's degrees from Bowling Green State University. He married Betty Laird in 1960. In 1969, at the age of 32, Perry was the youngest president of any university in the nation. The name of the university reflects Perry’s desire for a title that would not limit the scope of the institution and would support his vision of having close ties to Latin America. Perry and a founding corps opened FIU to 5,667 students in 1972 with only one large building housing six different schools. Perry left the office of President of FIU in 1976 when the student body had grown to 10,000 students and the university had six buildings, offered 134 different degrees and was fully accredited. Charles Perry died on August 30, 1999 at his home in Rockwall, Texas. He is buried on the FIU campus in front of the Graham Center entrance. Marjory Stoneman Douglas was born on April 7, 1890. In South Florida she is best known for her environmental advocacy passionately fighting for the protection and preservation of the Florida Everglades. As a writer, her most influential book was the book The Everglades: River of Grass (1947), which redefined the popular conception of the Everglades as a treasured river instead of a worthless swamp. Moving to South Florida to pursuit a career in journalism, she began writing for the Miami Herald newspaper and then worked as freelance writer, producing over one hundred short stories that were published in popular magazines. Throughout her long life (lived until age 108), she received numerous awards, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom and was inducted into several halls of fame. She died on May 14, 1998. A statue of her invites visitors at Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden in Miami, Florida to sit with her statue and contemplate the garden. Two South Florida public schools are named in her honor: Broward County Public Schools' Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School and Miami-Dade County Public Schools' Marjory Stoneman Douglas Elementary School.

Friends of the Everglades

Charles Perry and Marjory Stoneman Douglas in front of easel with map of Florida. Charles Edward Perry (Chuck), 1937-1999, was the founding president of Florida International University in Miami, Florida. He grew up in Logan County, West Virginia and received his bachelor's and masters's degrees from Bowling Green State University. He married Betty Laird in 1960. In 1969, at the age of 32, Perry was the youngest president of any university in the nation. The name of the university reflects Perry’s desire for a title that would not limit the scope of the institution and would support his vision of having close ties to Latin America. Perry and a founding corps opened FIU to 5,667 students in 1972 with only one large building housing six different schools. Perry left the office of President of FIU in 1976 when the student body had grown to 10,000 students and the university had six buildings, offered 134 different degrees and was fully accredited. Charles Perry died on August 30, 1999 at his home in Rockwall, Texas. He is buried on the FIU campus in front of the Graham Center entrance. Marjory Stoneman Douglas was born on April 7, 1890. In South Florida she is best known for her environmental advocacy passionately fighting for the protection and preservation of the Florida Everglades. As a writer, her most influential book was the book The Everglades: River of Grass (1947), which redefined the popular conception of the Everglades as a treasured river instead of a worthless swamp. Moving to South Florida to pursuit a career in journalism, she began writing for the Miami Herald newspaper and then worked as freelance writer, producing over one hundred short stories that were published in popular magazines. Throughout her long life (lived until age 108), she received numerous awards, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom and was inducted into several halls of fame. She died on May 14, 1998. A statue of her invites visitors at Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden in Miami, Florida to sit with her statue and contemplate the garden. Two South Florida public schools are named in her honor: Broward County Public Schools' Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School and Miami-Dade County Public Schools' Marjory Stoneman Douglas Elementary School.

The Church of Our Blessed Redeemer Who Walked Upon the Waters

The Church of Our Blessed Redeemer Who Walked Upon the Waters is a collection of short stories about Elwyn Parker, a devout pianist who becomes a worldly car salesman. "Thirty Fingers," "My Father's Business," and "Apostate" introduce Elwyn, a saint at church and a trouble-making evangelist at school, who nevertheless finds himself in a love affair with an older woman, Sister Morrisohn. In "Captivity," Elwyn, a college freshman, experiences worldliness, then grows to resent and ultimately reject Sister Morrisohn. In "The Leap," Elwyn is back at the piano, but unemployed and unhappily married. He finds comfort only in his decade-old affair. In "The Lord of Travel," Elwyn, a car salesman, appears bereft of his former morals until he hoodwinks Ida, who reminds him of the now deceased Sister Morrisohn. Elwyn repairs Ida's car, redeeming himself in the process.

La mujer en defensa de la mujer: voces femeninas del romanticismo cubano (Poesía y cuento)

Throughout history, women have played an important role in literature. Nevertheless, since Sappho's poetry until now, feminine voices have had to struggle for recognition of their works. Before the nineteenth century, women were almost ignored in Spanish literature. Society kept them as "ángeles de la familia," taking care of their homes, husbands, and children. Some of them, such as María de Zayas y Sotomayor in Spain and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz in Mexico, complained about their situation in their writings. However, they expressed their fight not as a generation but as individuals. In the nineteenth century, the ideas and ideals of Romanticism, were brought to Latin America from Europe. Cuba was among those countries where the new movement took roots. Initiated by Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda, a group of women began to participate in literary reunions, and to found newspapers and magazines where works authored by women, dedicated to feminist ideas, were published. They indeed through literature started to live out womanhood in order to intellectually leave the ideological prisons where society had been keeping them. This study scans the literary works of all Romantic women writers in Cuba. It specifically analyzes poetry and short stories, and investigates how these authors expressed themselves in their works against the patriarchal society, where they lived and wrote their books. An eclectic critical method has been used. Findings were very revealing. Only three of the fourteen writers studied in my dissertation had been previously mentioned by major critics. Most of them had been ignored. However, the greatest discovery was that they prompted something new: For the first time they projected themselves as a group, as a collective consciousness, and this fact established a difference with former women writers in Cuban literature before Romanticism. In other words, they produced a "Renaissance" in Cuba's literature. In spite of how they lived between 1820 and 1900, their struggles for women's rights have linked them to our current times.

Écfrasis y Lecturas Icono-textuales en las "Leyendas" de Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer

The relationship between literature and the visual arts is ancient and it has been studied from different conceptual frames. Scholars agree that both have a descriptive function and therefore share the common goal of portraying a fictional or nonfictional reality. Based on this correspondence between two different modes of artistic expression, the Roman poet Horace coined the well-known simile ut pictura poesis --as is painting so is in poetry-- which in turn functions as the theoretical underpinning of ekphrasis, a rhetorical device through which one medium of art tries to describe the essence and form of another medium of art, with the purpose of enhancing the original work described. Spanish post-romantic poet and writer Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer (1836-1870) mastered this rhetorical strategy by expertly weaving all of his artistic interests into his prose. The purpose of this dissertation is to analyze how Bécquer makes his readers both see and hear through his prose. My semiotic research encompasses the various forms of ekphrasis used by Bécquer in the “Leyendas”. It shows how both images and symbols produce in readers sensory experiences that enhance their role as active participants in the creation of meaning. Thus, Bécquer´s prose is like a painting which not only tells a story, but also reflects reality through the eyes of the reader’s imagination. By using these ekphrastic strategies in his collection of short stories, Bécquer makes words, paintings, and music converge and collide with iconography, visual culture, and intertextuality. These components must be read, seen, heard, and understood to be more than just complementary to the text, but rather crucial elements, equal in importance to verbal expression. This analysis shows how Bécquer’s “Leyendas” not only tackle notions such as fantasy, figuration, and imagination, but also the importance of the reader´s gaze. Bécquer integrates processes such as imaginative action, iconization and visualization, into a semantic web whereby the reader creates his own particular hermeneutic image.

Estrategias Desestabilizadoras en la Narrativa de Silvina Ocampo

La narrativa de Silvina Ocampo (1903-1993) no goza del lugar que merece en la ficción argentina y latinoamericana como obra de la principal cuentista del siglo XX. Hace relativamente poco que su obra comenzó a despertar el interés de la crítica, atención que se evidencia en la cantidad de artículos y disertaciones recientes. Mediante una disección de la narrativa ocampeana a partir de las grandes coordenadas que la intersectan se pueden caracterizar los aspectos peculiares y distintivos de su estilo. Desarrollada tras la consolidación del psicoanálisis y su influencia en la estética surrealista, la narrativa de Ocampo incorpora algunos de esos elementos. El género fantástico también se articula aunque mediante una selección de rasgos configurados a su modo. Si bien Ocampo rechaza la etiqueta de feminista, ciertos aspectos de su estilo sólo pueden explicarse a partir de la visión particular de una mujer escritora y su representación de la identidad y las relaciones. La lectura pormenorizada de varios cuentos recogidos en “Cuentos completos” I y II (1999), once volúmenes publicados durante su vida, pertenecientes a distintos períodos de su producción permiten realizar un análisis diacrónico que ofrece una caracterización redonda de su estilo y evolución. El análisis sincrónico de estos textos incorpora datos históricos acerca del contexto de producción; a la vez que otras obras literarias del período ofrecen un punto de comparación para identificar influencias y contribuciones. Este análisis, realizado desde el marco teórico de la crítica literaria, da cuenta de la presencia de constituyentes narrativos (narrador, ironía, ambigüedad) que configuran espacios de indeterminación, noción postulada por las teorías de la recepción. Éstos explican las peculiares características de la obra ocampeana: su habilidad para inquietar, intrigar, sorprender y, en suma, desestabilizar al lector y sus expectativas. Es más, sirven para explicar la idiosincrática representación de la realidad que emana de su obra, su interés en lo fantástico y la articulación de lo anti-convencional, como mecanismo subversivo para escapar del orden social dominante, lo cual revela sensibilidades protofeministas. La narrativa de Silvina Ocampo se resiste al reduccionismo y construye una visión peculiar y multifacética de la artista y su obra.

The blue highway

The Blue Highway is a collection of eleven literary short stories and ten miniature that depict men in trouble, searching for a code to live by. The miniatures are repressed memories, appearing suddenly like the tips of ice bergs and act as stepping stones (tension bridges) between the larger works. The stories begin at the end with "Time Out", the story of Frank, a down and out homeless vet at the end of his rope. Then we begin the journey along "The Blue Highway" with Danny and his gang of teenage bandits, taking themselves to Disney World to see if they can recapture their lost dream. On our journey we will meet Mark, the ex-killer, an old Cuban fisherman who will not give up his honor, a young man on a way to a war who discovers a fantastic treasure, a soldier on his way home again, two MP's who nearly kill the wrong man, we will spend a night on an African savannah with wild hyenas and finally, meet a grandfather who discovers the one gift which might save his family. The same gift which might save Frank as well.

Matizes de cultura de massa na obra de Caio Fernando Abreu

The Brazilian writer, Caio Fernando Abreu, was strongly influenced by a period of changes in social values and perspectives. When he enters the Brazilian literary scene using a writing style free from form and content, he applies in his works all the affliction of the contemporary values. His work embodies all the spirit of a generation that, despite its anxiety for freedom, was still suffocated by the military dictatorship period. Abreu’s narrative also reveals an author with an extreme ability to shift between the erudite and the popular. In his short stories, he develops a performative language mingled by references that turns his text into a sort of Pop Art iconography. Just like Pop Art paintings, full of Coke images, cigarettes, tooth paste and food cans, Abreu’s literary discourse is painted by many symbolical references to modern consumerism, as well as to movies, music and to pop stars. This trace in the writer’s works exerts a great deal of attractiveness on the contemporary reader. In this work, we attempt to analyze this resource in Abreu’s literature under the concepts of cultural studies; thus, we aim at analyzing the various forms of the mass culture expression inside Abreu’s literature, recognizing his allusions as a stylish resource in his writings and highlighting its relevance in the study of the author work. In order to do so, we are based essentially on the reflections of theoreticians: Lipovetsky (1996) and Adorno (2011) who debate the culture and social formation in contemporaneity.

Uma leitura de gênero nos contos "Prelúdio", "Na baía" e "A casa de bonecas", de Katherine Mansfield

This work aims to analyze the short stories “Prelude”, “At the Bay” and “The Doll’s House”, by Katherine Mansfield under the prism of the gender studies (mainly on the works of Joan Scott and Elisabeth Badinter). To reach such objective, and based on the feminist criticism works (especially those of Elaine Showalter and Toril Moi), we analyzed the three stories, which are from the writer’s so-called “family phase”. The present work contains a bibliographical contextualization of Mansfield’s modernist work under three main aspects: modernism, the short story and women’s writing/writings on women. From the analysis of the three short stories, we observed that questions of gender, representation and identity were depicted by means of the preponderance of female characters from all ages, marital statuses and classes. At the end it was possible to verify how Mansfield works contributed to a reflection about places and roles occupied by women in turn of the XIX and XX Centuries, whereas how this author was also in search for her own identity as a woman and as a writer, exactly in a context when women writers and women’s writings started to become more visible face to a predominantly masculine literary canon.

Transcultural satire in German fiction of Turkish migration: Self-deprecation, ethnic impersonation, intertexuality

My dissertation presents a study of satire in contemporary German Fiction of Turkish migration. Engaging with a body of works hitherto neglected in scholarship, I examine how satirical texts, films, and plays intervene critically in discourses on post-unification German national identity. Drawing on the seminal work of scholars such as Leslie Adelson, Tom Cheesman, B. Venkat Mani, Petra Fachinger, and Deniz Göktürk, my dissertation expands the scholarship of Turkish German Studies by linking a discussion of satire as a critical rhetoric to the question of how we talk about what it means to be German.

Chapter one offers a novel framework of the satirical vis-à-vis standard conceptions of satire and deconstructionist theories of reading. I understand satire as a form of rhetoric that creates moments of ambiguity by bringing together intersectional categories like gender, ethnicity, race, religion, in order to challenge the audience’s practices of interpreting cultural otherness. Chapter two examines the use of ethnic self-deprecation as one such strategy in Osman Engin’s short stories and his first novel, Kanaken-Ghandi through the lens of Bakhtinian polyphony and Judith Butler’s work on hate speech. Engin, I argue, employs ethnic selfdeprecation as a narrative strategy to straddle the line between deconstructing and re-affirming cultural stereotypes. Investigating the role of ethnic impersonation in Hussi Kutlucan’s film Ich Chef, Du Turnshuh, the third chapter turns to the question of ethnicity as a visual signifier for the negotiation of cultural inclusion and exclusion in post-1990 film. In dialogue with Katrin Sieg’s work on ethnic drag and Amy Robinson’s theory of passing, I show how the film challenges ethnically-coded narratives of Germanness. In the final chapter on Nurkan Erpulat and Jens Hillje’s play Verrücktes Blut, I discuss how intertextuality and adaptation (Hutcheon, Genette) of different story and character worlds are used to create moments of ambiguity and overdeterminacy in the play, in order to challenge the audience’s perception of what an inclusive German society might look like.

"O sumidoiro da memoria, que o mesmo serve para lembrar que para esquecer" : Reflexiones sobre la memoria en los cuentos de Manuel Rivas

Mucho antes de la publicación de sus novelas, Manuel Rivas ya había tratado el tema de la memoria en sus cuentos. Recopilados en O máis estrano en 2011, en ellos se observa una predilección por este tema y muchos de ellos constituyen el germen de las grandes novelas posteriores. En este trabajo se analizará, por un lado, la memoria como creadora de experiencia artística. Por otro, se tendrá en cuenta el tratamiento de la memoria personal o íntima, así como la llamada memoria histórica. En un lugar destacado se situará la memoria cultural, cuyos diversos aspectos permiten a Rivas llevar a cabo una reflexión sobre la visión identitaria de Galicia en la que está presente la realidad y el mito, para la cual el cuento, por su morfología heterogénea y libertaria, se revela como el género más apropiado.

L'impact de la création littéraire, en contexte d'aide, sur la symptomatologie psychophysiologique d'adolescents atteints d'une maladie chronique : étude interdisciplinaire et exploratoire.

Thèse réalisée dans le cadre d'un Ph.D.interdisciplinaire en Psychologie, en création littéraire et en orthopédagogie. L'impact de la création littéraire a été étudié chez des adolescents atteints d'une maladie chronique au CHU Sainte-Justine de Montréal. Cette recherche est exploratoire car la création littéraire n'a jamais été étudiée dans cette perspective. Elle a été réalisée sous la direction de Catherine Mavrikakis, professeure et écrivain à la Faculté des arts et sciences au Département des littératures francophones de l'Université de Montréal et de Jean-François Saucier, psychiatre et anthropologue à la Faculté de médecine au Département de psychiatrie de l'Université de Montréal et chercheur au CHU Sainte-Justine. Interdisciplinary Study.

Influence du vieillissement et de la scolarité sur la compréhension du discours : apport de l’imagerie optique

La compréhension du discours, et son évolution au cours du vieillissement, constitue un sujet d’une grande importance par sa complexité et sa place dans la préservation de la qualité de vie des aînés. Les objectifs de cette thèse étaient d’évaluer l’influence du vieillissement et du niveau de scolarité sur les capacités de compréhension du discours et sur l’activité cérébrale s’y rattachant. Pour ce faire, trois groupes (jeunes adultes ayant un niveau universitaire de scolarité, personnes âgées ayant un niveau universitaire de scolarité et personnes âgées ayant un niveau secondaire de scolarité) ont réalisé une tâche où ils devaient lire de courtes histoires, puis estimer la véracité d’une affirmation concernant cette histoire. Les capacités de compréhension correspondant aux traitements de trois niveaux du modèle de construction-intégration de Kintsch (la microstructure, la macrostructure et le modèle de situation) ont été évaluées. L’imagerie optique (NIRS) a permis d’estimer les variations d’oxyhémoglobine (HbO) et de déoxyhémoglobine (HbR) tout au long de la tâche. Les résultats ont démontré que les personnes âgées étaient aussi aptes que les plus jeunes pour rappeler la macrostructure (essentiel du texte), mais qu’ils avaient plus de difficulté à rappeler la microstructure (détails) et le modèle de situation (inférence et intégration) suite à la lecture de courts textes. Lors de la lecture, les participants plus âgés ont également montré une plus grande activité cérébrale dans le cortex préfrontal dorsolatéral gauche, ce qui pourrait être un mécanisme de compensation tel que décrit dans le modèle CRUNCH. Aucune différence significative n’a été observée lors de la comparaison des participants âgés ayant un niveau universitaire de scolarité et ceux ayant un niveau secondaire, tant au niveau des capacités de compréhension que de l’activité cérébrale s’y rattachant. Les deux groupes ont cependant des habitudes de vie stimulant la cognition, entre autres, de bonnes habitudes de lecture. Ainsi, ces habitudes semblent avoir une plus grande influence que l’éducation sur les performances en compréhension et sur l’activité cérébrale sous-jacente. Il se pourrait donc que l’éducation influence la cognition en promouvant des habitudes favorisant les activités cognitives, et que ce soit ces habitudes qui aient en bout ligne un réel impact sur le vieillissement cognitif.