Relectura del discurso novomundista de Alejo Carpentier y Abel Posse en el contexto de la nueva novela historica

The purpose of this dissertation was to analyze the narrative works of Alejo Carpentier and Abel Posse within the context of the new Latin American historical novel that revises the Old World-New World Encounter. Focusing on El arpa y la sombra and Los perros del paraíso , the dissertation studied the particular manner in which Latin American novelists, and particularly Alejo Carpentier and Abel Posse, approach and question traditional historiography. The research also compared different novels to identify various trends within the new historical novel that rewrites the foundational period of Latin American literature. ^ This study considered the theories of the new historical novel as proposed by critics such as Seymour Menton, Fernando de Aínsa, Linda Hutcheon, and Brian MacHale. The new novel was examined within the frameworks of postmodern literary and historiographic theories. The study also contemplated the philosophical views that have influenced postmodern thought, and, especially, the ideas of Nietzsche, Heidegger, Lyotard, Harbermas, and Foucault. ^ Research showed two major trends within the new Latin American historical novel. In the case of the first trend, initiated by Alejo Carpentier in 1949 with El reino de este mundo, the novelist's approach is founded on historicism and factual rigor. The second trend, initiated by Reinaldo Arenas with El mundo alucinante in 1969, is marked by irreverence, parody, irony, and carnavalization. Characterized by intertextuality, dialogism, and anachronism, novels such as Carpentier's El arpa y la sombra and Posse's Los perros del paraíso, undermine the values and beliefs instituted by the traditional historiographic paradigm and the discourse of power. ^

Ficcion de racionalidad: La memoria como operador mitico en las esteticas polares de Jorge Luis Borges y Jose Lezama Lima

The aesthetic placement and period designation of Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) and José Lezama Lima (1910–1976) are complicated issues among critics. Borges is considered a predecessor of the Latin American literary “boom,” but despite that taxonomy his work transcends that definition and provides a foundation for new trends, such as the “neobarroco” cultivated by Severo Sarduy. Lezama is considered part of the second wave of the “boom,” but his work feeds, stylistically, from the Spanish baroque. At the same time, Lezama's daring treatment of homoeroticism and his system of images place him after the “boom” in a narrative style that is postmodern. This study undertakes a revision of external and internal issues, revealing the key fictive elements that characterize both writers. Through discourse analysis, a poetic system is formulated, which incorporates features of the “neobarroco,” and postmodern narrative styles. ^ This dissertation uses a polar structure to analyze both poetic visions and finds that they are symmetrical. From this perspective, Borges and Lezama belong to the “core” of literature that centers its emphasis in the creation of a system versus other modes of writing in which mimetic function prevails. By doing this and by recycling world culture, they create postmodern myth: the new building material for Hispanic American literature. ^ There are a few studies that explore the works of Borges and Lezama within the context of Baroque aesthetics. This dissertation offers a comprehensive analysis that considers their poetic visions at large. Besides the difference in perspective, defined as macro-spatial in Borges and micro-spatial in Lezama, there are many similarities. Both writers question the cause and effect relationship and the use of metaphor. They share a redefinition of genre as well as a hedonistic approach to literature. This kinship in poetic vision is revealed through the polar method used for this study, which proposes a new form of aesthetic placement and period designation. ^

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. ^

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. ^

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.

The civil war of ideas: Ayn Rand, intellectual freedom, and the regulation of thought in the Soviet Union and United States, 1905-1943

The philosopher and novelist Ayn Rand (1905–1982) is an icon of American culture. That culture misunderstands her, however. It perceives her solely as a pure market conservative. In the first forty years of her life, Rand's individualism was intellectual and served as a defense for the free trade of ideas. It originated in the Russian Revolution. In 1926, when Rand left the Soviet Union, she developed her individualism into an American philosophy. Her ideas of the individual in society belonged to a debate where intellectuals intended to abolish the State and free man and woman from its intellectual snares. To present Rand as a freethinker allows me to examine her anticommunism as a reaction against Leninism and to consider the relation of her ideas to Marxism. This approach stresses that Rand, as Marx, opposed the State and argued for the historical importance of a capitalist revolution. For Rand the latter, however, depended on an entrepreneurial class that rejected Protestantism as ideology – which she contended threatened its interests because Christianity had lost its historical significance. This exposes the nature of Rand's intellectual individualism in American society, where the majority on the entire political spectrum still identified with the teachings of Christ. It also reveals the dynamics of her anticommunism. From 1926 to 1943, Rand remodeled American individualism and as she did so, she determined her opposition first to the New Deal liberals and second business conservatives. To these ends, Marxism and Protestantism served Rand's individualism and made her an American icon of the twentieth century.

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.

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.”

Mundos prohibidos: El poder en el discurso epistolar de Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda y Juana Borrero

This dissertation analyses, through a theoretical framework and a critical approach, letters of Cuban writers Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda and Juana Borrero. While love letters have captured the interest of some scholars, such as Claudio Guillén, Cintio Vitier and Alexander Roselló Selimov, the conflict that the analysis of non-literary texts poses has prevented further research in this field. Therefore, I propose a systematic method of analysis encompassing but not limited to evaluating letters based on their purpose, intent, interpretation, and temporal and spatial composition; analyzing the perspective and function of epistolary entities, and examining the textual signs that distinguish the epistolary forms from the literary forms. With this analytical tool, I examine a selection of letters of Gómez de Avellaneda and demonstrate that the writer displaces her identify from the autobiographic self to the epistolary self, in order to manipulate the perspective of her addressee. Caught between the Neoclassical way of thinking and the Romantic aesthetics, her assertive discourse, also reflected in her epistolary work, contributed to the incursion of women writers into the social and professional life of the nineteen century. Following the same method of investigation, an analysis of letters written by Borrero proves that, by building a world of delusion, hallucination and fantasy the writer brings to prose what first generation of female modernistas had done in poetry. In both cases, my focus is on the strategies that turn these letters into instruments of power, process that transformed the love-letter paradigm and forever renovated the women epistolary genre. This dissertation further explores the possibility of initiating a cycle in the study of personal letters to uncover a forgotten genre, mission that might build a bridge to embrace the new forms of written communication that scholars have already begun to explore in contemporary literature.

La modernidad de los "Versos libres" de Jose Marti

The purpose of this dissertation is to analyze the collection of poems Versos libres written by José Martí, as a cycle of literary expression closely connected with the origins and development of the modernist movement, as well as to the emergence of what has been later termed the modernism of Hispanic-American literature. ^ The poetics of Versos libres is based on the liberating function attributed to them by their author, who was determined to reach with this cycle a level of expression where literary modernism and radical Americanism would be fully integrated, in order to enrich the communicative capabilities of poetic language, making it penetrate deep and complex realities: Man's conscience, psyche and creative effort, nature and history. ^ This study of the Versos libres as a cycle, allows us to characterize the contribution of such a work to Hispanic-American poetry as a result of a literary praxis whose tone makes Versos libres a piece of work that, in its best-realized moments, surpasses the limits of the turn-of-the-century Hispanic-American poetry; thus laying a bridge towards modern poetry in the Spanish language. ^ The dissertation is based on the direct and complete transcription of Martí's own handwritings of the Versos libres, included in his Poesía completa. Edición Crítica (1985), edited by Cintio Vitier, Fina García Marruz and the present author. ^

The World in Singing Made: David Markson's "Wittgenstein's Mistress"

In line with Wittgenstein's axiom that "what the solipsist means is quite correct; only it cannot be said, but makes itself manifest," this thesis aims to demonstrate how the gulf between analytic and continental philosophy can best be bridged through the mediation of art. The present thesis brings attention to Markson's work, lauded in the tradition of Faulkner, Joyce, and Lowry, as exemplary of the shift from modernity to postmodernity, wherein the human heart is not only in conflict with itself, but with the language out of which it is necessarily constituted. Markson limns the paradoxical condition of the subject severed from intersubjectivity, and affected not only by the grief of bereavement, which can be defined in Heideggarian terms as anxiety for the ontic negation of a being (i.e., death), but by loss, which I assert is the ontological ground for how Dasein encounters the nothing in anxiety proper.