Theses - Spanish and Portuguese

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Material Virtuality: Remaking Rio de Janeiro’s Past and Present through Digital Media
Adams, Victoria
Since the 1970s, Brazil’s authorities have regarded the country’s past as a source of cultural and economic value (Gonçalves 2007; Collins 2015). In the late 2000s, a boom in Brazil’s consumer economy served to make smartphones and social media ubiquitous across the country (Spyer 2017). This thesis focuses on how these two phenomena intersect in the city and state of Rio de Janeiro. Drawing on material gathered during fieldwork in 2019 and 2020, it examines how a selection of cultural-historical projects use digital media to explore Rio’s past. This thesis argues that, through their exploration of Rio’s past, each of these projects shapes how people engage with the city and state and reproduces their space (Lefebvre 1991). This analysis of how digital media intervene in the production of Rio’s space contributes to scholarship that explores Rio’s urban and cultural history (Sevcenko 2003; Needell 1987; Carvalho 2018). In so doing, it adds to literature exploring how the screens of digital media form an integral and constitutive part of the space of contemporary cities (McQuire 2016; Degen and others 2017). The thesis also contends that the projects it examines all reflect and remake contemporary understandings of how Rio should be in ways that are contingent upon and shaped by the material context(s) from which they emerge, namely, Rio’s enduring history of racialised urbanism, its authorities’ shifting attitude to the past, and changes in Brazil’s approach to cultural funding following its return to democracy in the late 1980s (Sevcenko 2003; Gonçalves 2007; Rich and Vieira 2020). Through analysis of the impact of these factors and from the perspective of a city in the Global South, this thesis dialogues with a growing literature in media studies that examines how the historicity of different forms of technology shapes their affordances (Hu 2015; Crawford 2021). The structure of the thesis moves from Rio’s centre towards its suburbs and rural hinterlands to examine the different ways that digital media are used to interrogate the past of these distinct areas. Chapter One focuses on Rio’s centre. It examines how the circulation of early photographs of Rio on an Instagram page called rioantigo transforms them into axes of debate about what kind of city Brazil’s former capital should be. Chapter Two moves from Rio’s centre towards its suburbs. It interrogates how a walking-tour initiative, Rolé Carioca, and a virtual museum, Rio Memórias, use a mixture of digital platforms and in-person events to encourage residents of Rio to reconnect with their city’s public spaces. Chapter Three considers how glitches, uneven provision of infrastructure, and deliberate acts of sabotage inform the shape of Passados Presentes, a project which uses digital media to explore the legacy of slavery across Rio state.
Open Access
Aristotelian and other auctoritates in the works of Enrique de Villena, and their possible sources
Mutton, Richard Anthony John
My objective has been to examine, selectively, auctoritates which Villena, who was working during the early days of the emergence of ‘vernacular humanism’ in Castile, used in his body of work, and to identify their possible sources. My approach assigns all authoritites used by Villena to seven key groups (e.g., classical, biblical) and eight categories of possible source works (e.g., florilegia, encyclopaedias), for which I determine relationships. In what I consider the key component, I review the Latin extracts used by Villena in Consolación, Lepra and Aojamiento in an extensive exercise in which I identify more than 300 possible primary references. I find that approximately one third of these references can be attributed to Vincent de Beauvais’s Specula and his briefer works. This figure can be extended to more than 400 examples when secondary possible sources are taken into account. Other significant possible sources I identify include Auctoritates Aristotelis, popular in the Middle Ages, Compendium moralium notabilium (using the 1505 printed version Epytoma sapientie), Pietro Alighieri’s Commentum, and the Verona florilegium (of 1329). I have also made an assessment of the extent to which Auctoritates Aristotelis might be a possible source throughout Villena’s body of work, not solely for Aristotle, but also for Boethius and Seneca. In a third evaluation, I assess the possible sources of what I identify as a ‘double authority’ in Glosas 35 (Plato/Boethius and Vegetius). As a result, I have formed the opinion that a conjectural notebook, similar in scope to the Count of Haro’s Vademecum, a collection of excerpts distilled from several other collections of excerpts, including, for example, Auctoritates Aristotelis, could have been compiled for Villena’s use, obviating his need to access more than 20 source works or necessitate his dependence on complete texts of the works to which he makes reference in his writings. Overall, I judge that my work is significant in the study of Villena insofar as it establishes a substantially enhanced understanding of Villena’s use of authorities and his possible sources that is not dependent on the work of Cotarelo.
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(Hi)stories in Displacement: The Poetics and Politics of Errancia in Post-1960s Latin American Literature
Vargas Ortiz, Angelica Tatiana
This thesis engages with errancia as a literary phenomenon within post-1960s Latin American literature. The author analyses errancia in its poetic and political dimensions and takes the work of Reinaldo Arenas, Adelaida Fernández Ochoa, Roberto Bolaño and César Aira as cardinal points in a contemporary mapping out of errancia. Figurations of errancia are analysed in the interplay between autobiographical traits, imaginary biographies of errant subjects and alternative historical discourses. Errancia features mechanisms of transgression that challenge territorial boundaries, contest rooted conceptions of Being, and destabilise the aesthetic, racial, gendered and disciplinary regimes that inform the laws of literary representation. In chapter one, Arenas’ El mundo alucinante (1965) is read as a site of intersecting authorial projections between outlaw biographies from the present and the past and foregrounds errancia’s transgression of orthodox political views and conventional discourses of history. In chapter two, Fernández Ochoa’s Afuera crece un mundo (2015) is read in its engagement with alternative narratives of independence anchored in historical forms of marronage and as a cartography of human survival that ties errancia-as-marronage to radical flight from the bounds of the national. In chapter three, Bolaño’s short stories in Putas asesinas (2001), Llamadas telefónicas (1997) and El gaucho insufrible (2003) are explored in their capacity to open up lines of flight through spatial and identitarian mobilities of errant subjects. In this errant and global cartography of intemperie, origins are revoked and normative paths of being are contested. In the final chapter, core elements of Aira’s poetics, such as geographical and symbolic displacements and procedures of simulacra and miniaturization, are examined in Cómo me hice monja (1993), La mendiga (1994) and El congreso de literatura (1997). In their vertiginous simulations of reality, these elements are tied to his view of novels as errant fictional machines.
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Negotiating Gossip in the Spanish Realist Novel
Fell, Rebecca; Fell, Rebecca [0000-0002-0754-281X]
This dissertation focuses on ‘chisme’ or ‘gossip’ as theme, plot device and narrative dynamic in four canonical realist novels of the Spanish Restoration of the 1880s by Emilia Pardo Bazán (Chapter 1), Benito Pérez Galdós (Chapter 2) and Leopoldo Alas (‘Clarín’) (Chapter 3). An Introduction presents a theoretical analysis and framework of chisme, beginning with its definition and etymology, and considers the historical moment (the Spanish Restoration). It also draws on the fields of anthropology and psychology (Dunbar and Foster), philosophy (Foucault and Adkins) and sociology (Bourdieu), and literary theory (Bakhtin) to define gossip in terms of its core purpose (information-sharing, segregation and distancing, connection and bonding, or all simultaneously). This study argues that, when viewed as gossip, these texts are at their most powerful. They dialogue with and bond, confound and distance readers, alerting them to hidden intentions. They point to the epistemological value of gossip as a form of knowledge, and as a metaphor for the Spanish realist text. Their reproduction and troubling of social norms echo the multiple dual-faceted dynamics of gossip: knowledge/power, schism/bonding, differentiation/homogenisation, totalisation/fragmentation, speculation/substantiation, among others. Chapter 1 on Emilia Pardo Bazán’s Los Pazos de Ulloa and La madre Naturaleza examines gossip’s role in apportioning blame and stereotyping, and marginalising others. In a form of gender revenge, Pardo Bazán turns on its head the stereotypical belittling of women and women’s discourse as gossips and gossip, and exposes male anxiety around gossip and status. In Chapter 2, I posit that in Fortunata y Jacinta Galdós uses an economy of gossip to create bonds between his characters, to bond readers to character groups and to question the patriarchal status quo. Using the theories of Pierre Bourdieu on the bourgeois construction of social distinction through displays of material wealth and other visible ‘signs’ of power and influence, I argue that gossip about Fortunata points to the interdependency of the social and symbolic capital (‘status’) of the bourgeoisie and working classes (‘el pueblo’). Chapter 3 analyses gossip as a form of tale-telling in Clarín’s La Regenta. I propose that the narrator is the personification of a nasty gossip, whose exposition, privately to readers, of the characters’ shortcomings and vices, duplicity, deception and hypocrisy, serves as a mimetic echo of their tale-telling and backbiting. The narrator’s gossip strategies are emotive, designed to provoke feelings of distaste, disgust and displeasure, sensations and perceptions far more difficult than pleasure to disavow or ignore. All four texts expose the power relations between narrator and reader. The triangle of desire that exists between narrator, reader, and characters mirrors that of gossiper, interlocutor, and target of gossip.
Open Access
Between Tradition and Transgression: Education, Culture, and (Inter)national Pedagogies in Spain (1857–1931)
Lawson, Andrew Parker
This dissertation examines three prominent educational reform movements in late nineteenth- and early- twentieth century Spain: the Institución Libre de Enseñanza (Free Institute of Teaching), the Escuela Moderna (Modern School), and the Escola Nova Catalana (New Catalan School). Studying these movements syncretically, analyzing both similarities and differences, the thesis contends that efforts at educational reform throughout Spain were vibrant, heterogeneous, and far-reaching. Although bound together by history, politics, culture, and more, the thesis studies how each movement conceived differently the relationship between the individual and the collective, or the particular and the universal: the Institución Libre de Enseñanza pursued a liberal Spanish “cultural nationalism,” while the Escuela Moderna eschewed nationalist formulations in favor of international collectivism, and the Escola Nova Catalana sought to increase Catalonia’s political and economic influence both domestically and internationally by championing study of Catalan history and language. By privileging child-centered pedagogical theories that focused on rationalism, autonomy, hygiene, and wellness, and by taking steps to widen educational access to girls and working-class children, the three movements contributed to the constellation of reform that advanced Spain’s often fractured process of modernization. Spanish and Catalan educationalists were also active in global circuits of intellectual exchange. Accordingly, the thesis deploys a cultural and historical archive to illustrate the international characteristics and contributions of educational reform movements in modern Spain. In their attempts to “modernize” pedagogical methods and curricular offerings and to “emancipate” students from the strictures of State-sponsored Catholic hegemony, Spanish and Catalan educationalists occasionally employed rhetoric and embraced methods that mirrored the practices they critiqued. Thus, the dissertation considers the ties and tensions between tradition and transgression in an array of areas that range from religion, economics, and governance to gender, class, and national identity to the prospects and/or specters of revolution. Ultimately, the dissertation explores the interconnected relationships between pedagogy, politics, and power to offer fresh perspectives that will enrich the cultural and intellectual histories of modern Spain and its relations to the wider world.
Open Access
Refracted Communications: Multilingualism and (Im)Purity in the Works of Maria-Mercè Marçal and Julia Fiedorczuk
Goclawska, Aleksandra
This dissertation explores the multilingual poetics of hospitality in the works of Maria-Mercè Marçal (1952-1958), who wrote in Catalan, and Julia Fiedorczuk (born in 1975), who writes in Polish. Multilingualism, for Marçal and Fiedorczuk, will not only refer to the presence of multiple languages in a literary text, but also to translation; it also means a mixing of dialects and argots with the normative versions of Polish and Catalan and includes the mixing of different symbolic structures that regulate communication, such as the expression of gender, skin color or class belonging. Chapter One provides an outline of the ties between the nation, national language, and family in Polish and Catalan contexts; it also engages with texts by Marçal and Fiedorczuk that inform and potentially destabilize the traditionally gendered roles within the national community, metaphorized as family. I point to the historical perilousness of the patriarchal understanding of the nation as ‘the country of men,’ and of the romanticized Nature as woman (the latter, I argue, acquires an especially dangerous dimension given the on-going, global environmental crisis). In Chapter Three, I explore some alternative versions of nationalism or patriotism in alignment with the ecofeminist and transnational writing practice of both authors. Marçal complicates the links between motherhood and language; she also reworks the myth of the dragon and Sant Jordi, pointing to the ties between patriarchy and anthropocentrism. For Fiedorczuk, the links between poetry and spirituality give rise to an abstract notion of Fatherland, which needs to be replaced with the care for the cleanliness of the air, seas, and rivers, leading to an understanding of community founded upon inter-species solidarity. In Chapter Three, Marçal and Fiedorczuk appear in their role as translators. In the chapter, rather than offering a critique of Marçal’s and Fiedorczuk’s translations, I sketch the visions of the translator’s task that shine through Fiedorczuk’s and Marçal’s translation strategies. Fiedorczuk analyzes translations in the context of representation of the non-human world and sees translation and writing as part and parcel of the same process: ecopoetic interbeing, by which she understands the making of a home through language. Marçal’s focus is on musicality, sound, and dialogue, which remain linked to her understanding of writing and translating as passion. In Chapter Four I look at the importance of translation as metaphor in Marçal’s and Fiedorczuk’s writing. Chapter Five contains close readings of fragments of Fiedorczuk’s and Marçal’s prose, focusing on language mixing, the definition of language border and linguistic and cultural ‘outsiders.’ For Marçal, boundary-crossing is a metaphor for inter-human and inter-textual, passionate relationships, which are often germane to translation. For her part, Fiedorczuk understands writing as an ecopoetic issue, as the creation of a home in which both the human ‘outsiders’ and the non-humans will thrive.
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The Quest for Knowledge: Religious Enquiry and Intellectual Discovery in the Works of Luisa de Carvajal y Mendoza
Huo, Ran
My doctoral research traces the intellectual development of Luisa de Carvajal y Mendoza (1566-1614) by exploring her life and works within the framework of the concept of intellectuality. Rejecting the conventional paths for early modern women of either marriage or convent life, she decided to devote herself to the cause of the faith in an unconventional way and travelled from Catholic Spain to Protestant England where she undertook missionary work and founded her own independent female community. Compared to existing scholarship which has shown a marked tendency towards biographism, my study represents a particular biographist reading by examining Carvajal from an unprecedented perspective based on the concept of intellectuality. This analysis will, on the one hand, explore the concept of intellectuality with the example of Carvajal and, on the other, shed new light on her life and oeuvre with the theory of intellectuality. Based on the idea that knowledge, autonomisation, isolation, and political involvement represent four consecutive steps in the development process of intellectuality, my thesis argues that each of the genres through which Carvajal expressed herself—autobiographical, poetic, and epistolary—not only marks various chapters of her life, but also and more importantly the different stages of her intellectual evolution. In her autobiographical writings, Carvajal demonstrates her erudition and literary skills by representing an identity that is marked by plurality and diversity. She therefore set foot on the path to her autonomisation. Carvajal’s poetry, written in isolation in the attic of her uncle’s house, reflects an epistemological process from individual religiosity towards religious individuality which culminates in her intellectual revelation. This cognitive awakening was subsequently applied to society and manifested itself in her English mission. Far from pursuing a missionary life and the death of a martyr, Carvajal in fact strived to realise her goal of founding and leading a beaterio by provoking Spain’s protection through strategic acts of religious radicalisation, while rebelling against her submission to any authority. Her lifelong goal to found a female community could be understood as the embodiment of her desire for freedom and intellectuality.
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Fragmentary States: A Study of Power in Conflict Narratives from Peru and Colombia
(2020-07-01) Hunt, Rosanna; Hunt, Rosanna [0000-0002-7568-1010]
This thesis illustrates how state imaginaries, ideas of sovereignty, and the agency of violence are presented and engaged as shared preoccupations of narratives of the Peruvian Internal Conflict (1980-1992) and the Colombian Conflict (1964-Present). The thesis’s central questions stem from a deliberate move against the grain to challenge ways in which state and counter-state actors are portrayed, and to see what impact narratives of the soldier as human rights-abuser and the guerrillero as terrorist have on our making sense and telling stories of conflicts’ many tragedies. The thesis engages with the paradigms of biopolitics, (post-)colonial necropolitics and the friend-enemy structuring of the political to shed light on how conflicts in both nations play a crucial role in the fragmentary and conflicted transition to, and specific regional configuration of, neoliberalism. It thus situates the Latin American filmmaker and author in a position in which they must make coherent the deregulated use of violence in the name of law. The first chapter details the recent resurgence of interest in the 1985 siege of Colombia’s Palace of Justice, and reads artistic interpretations of this watershed moment for the light they shed on foundationalist state narratives of violence. The second, building on these works’ anti-foundationalism, explores how literary representations of Sendero Luminoso soldiers in Peru humanise the figure of the necropolitically-defined state ‘enemy’. The subsequent chapter examines Colombian cinema’s return to the rural, specifically as a scene of conflict already profoundly marked by violence’s urbanising effects. It does so to explore the crises surrounding the witnessing and narration of violence. Following the third chapter’s emphasis on the foreclosure of marginal voices, the closing chapters examine narratives which address the re-inscription of friend-enemy distinctions, in post-conflict urban contexts, through the regulation of the bodies of both victims and victimisers.
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A Pacific Coast Ontology of Intensity and Process in the Writings of Alfredo Vanín-Romero, Antonio Preciado-Bedoya, and Gregorio Martínez
Vargas Holguin, Elizabeth
Through an engagement with Deleuze and Guattari’s relational ontology of intensity and process, this thesis performs a reading of selected Pacific Coast texts from Colombia, Jornadas del tahúr (2005) by Alfredo Vanín-Romero; Ecuador, De sol a sol (1992) and other poems by Antonio Preciado-Bedoya; and Peru, Crónica de musicos y diablos (1991) by Gregorio Martínez-Navarro. Concerned with the territorialization of race and the experience of material and subjective enslavement in the Pacific Coast of South America, I explore how each author links these subjective and material conditions with the outcome of the connection (intensity) and disconnection (process) of desire machines that make possible the subject’s experience of the real. By relying on the relational forced of desire, as a key ontological relational force in writings by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, the chapters explore molecular and molar dimensions of becoming able to bridge European and Pacific Coast understandings of the basis of a free subjective development. Thus, the starting point of the understanding of freedom and enslavement in this thesis is that on the Pacific Coast of South America depicted by Vanín-Romero, Preciado-Bedoya, and Martínez-Navarro, “Everywhere it is machines—real ones, not figurative ones: machines driving other machines, machines being driven by other machines, with all the necessary couplings and connections” (AO 8). Taking into account desire’s machine-like interconnectedness, which also involves the connection with intensive flows from “sonorous, optical, or linguistic ‘effects’” (LS 7) in the context of cultural existence, this thesis explores individual and social instances of stratification and destratification (labor and leisure). Out of the bodily intensities that persist in language, as a cultural manifestation, the Pacific Coast authors portray the construction of metaphysical and linguistic surfaces through which they can visualize the emergence of a subject of freedom and an interconnected understanding of the history of slavery.
Open Access
Reading as rewriting: Miguel de Unamuno, Jorge Luis Borges and the Quijote
(2019-04-27) Hyland, Paul
The relationship between Miguel de Unamuno and Jorge Luis Borges remains understudied. In this thesis I compare both authors according to their shared interest in reading and rewriting Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quijote de la Mancha. Across their vast respective bibliographies on Cervantes, from Vida de don Quijote y Sancho and ‘Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote’, both examine the canonical Spanish work from anachronistic perspectives, and re-author it according to personal circumstances and points of view. I interrogate a series of works that both authors produce on Cervantes’s masterpiece, and outline the comparable yet contrasting aesthetic approaches that underlie their arguments. From this I show that the aesthetic models of reading that they produce are strongly derived from aspects of the Quijote, a novel whose narrative complexities compel the reader into a more active, critical role in interpreting the work. Beyond demonstrating the Cervantine echoes in their works, I argue that the non-intentionalist approach that Unamuno and Borges take when reading texts including and especially the Quijote fits comfortably within the realm of literary theories that were formalised much later on. In particular I focus on the reader-response theories of thinkers such as Hans Robert Jauß and Wolfgang Iser, as well as Stanley Fish’s affective stylistics. I adopt key critical terms from the works of these theorists in order to critique the way Unamuno and Borges interpret the Quijote across their careers. Chief among my concerns is how the reader’s cultural and historical circumstances produce unique meanings in the text that the author cannot prohibit. I also explore the question common to these theorists as to the principle by which an interpretation of a work can be considered acceptable or unacceptable. By tracing the commonalities and contrasts between Unamuno’s and Borge’s readings and rewritings of the Quijote I show how their works respectively further such theoretical discussions.
Open Access
Torture, Fiction and the Repetition of Horror: Ghost-writing the Past in Algeria and Argentina
Tomlinson, Emily Jane
The object of this thesis is to study the attempts made by writers and filmmakers in two very different socio-cultural contexts to depict and elucidate the experience of political violence, particularly torture, in the periods 1954-1962 and 1976-1983. I seek to apply the hypotheses of Anglo-American and French theorists with an interest in historical representation, as well as trauma, to both ‘realist’ and experimental accounts of the widespread oppression that occurred during the Algerian war of independence and later during the so-called ‘Dirty War’ in Argentina. The texts analysed in detail include novels and short stories by Kateb Yacine, Assia Djebar, Julio Cortázar and Luisa Valenzuela; the films I examine most closely are the Algerian-Italian ‘docudrama’ La Bataille d’Alger and the Argentine melodrama La historia oficial. However, the thesis also addresses other non-factual portrayals of brutality, such as the Nouvelle Vague’s meditations on decolonization, and autobiographical writings, such as military memoirs and survivors’ testimony, as a means of elaborating more fully on the issues at stake in the works cited above. It explores the difficulty – and the possibility – of giving voice to histories that simultaneously resist and demand articulation, and ultimately, of reconstituting the fragmented or ‘disappeared’ subject through narrative: of using fiction to summon the ‘ghosts’ of the past.
Open Access
Spanish and Greek subjects in contact: Greek as a heritage language in Chile
(2018-10-20) Giannakou, Aretousa
The present study aims to capture linguistic variation in subject distribution of two typologically similar languages, Greek and Chilean Spanish, considering adult monolingual and bilingual speakers of Greek as a heritage/minority language in Chile. The focus is on null and overt third-person subjects in topic-continuity and topic-shift contexts. Such structures involve the interface between syntax and discourse/pragmatics, a vulnerable domain in bilingualism. Previous research has shown overextension of the scope of the overt subject pronoun in contexts where null subjects are discursively expected (e.g. Tsimpli, Sorace, Heycock & Filiaci 2004). The Interface Hypothesis (IH) (Sorace 2011) was formulated to account for such findings, which obtain even in pairs of two null subject languages (Sorace, Serratrice, Filiaci & Baldo 2009). The key question as to the language-contact effects on subject distribution in pairs of two null subject languages requires further exploration while the combination of Greek and Spanish has been so far understudied. The IH is evaluated with new empirical data from a bilingual situation not studied before. Data from oral narratives and aural pronominal anaphora resolution were elicited from monolinguals and three types of bilinguals, namely first-generation immigrants, heritage speakers and L2 speakers of Greek residing in Chile. The monolingual data revealed differences in the use and interpretation of overt subject pronouns between Greek and Chilean Spanish. The crosslinguistic difference lies in the strong deictic properties of the Greek pronoun compared to its Spanish counterpart; hence differences obtain because of the relative strength of the two pronominal forms. No overextension of the scope of overt pronouns was found in bilinguals, against predictions stemming from the Interface Hypothesis. This may relate to the typological similarity between Greek and Spanish as well as to the nature of the Greek pronoun, which makes its use relatively categorical. Such findings lend support to the Representational account (Tsimpli et al. 2004). On the contrary, null subjects gave rise to optionality presumably due to their complexity, which demands higher degrees of computational efficiency. The Vulnerability Hypothesis (Prada Pérez 2018) may also account for the findings.
Open Access
Literary Historicism: Conquest and Revolution in the Works of Carlos Fuentes (1928-2012) and Alejo Carpentier (1904-1980)
(2018-07-20) Velásquez-Alford, Sandra Liliana; Velásquez-Alford, Sandra Liliana [0000-0003-4573-772X]
This doctoral thesis analyses the depiction of the historical topics of Conquest and Revolution across the literary writings of Alejo Carpentier (1904-1980) and Carlos Fuentes (1928-2012). These historical tropes constitute core topics of reflection throughout their literary and critical works, stressing the interplay between literature and history. I propose the concept of literary historicism to analyse their portrayal of historical topics and characterise the role of history in their poetics. This concept denotes the historical awareness that underpins the authors’ literary reinterpretations of historical events; their use of a historicist writing methodology; and the critical relationship established to historiographical sources and narratives. I argue that the authors’ deliberate historicism characterises their narratives, challenges disciplinary boundaries and posits literature as an alternative medium for the production of historical interpretation. This comparative study focuses on a corpus of fifteen fictional works from both authors that depict Conquest and Revolution. The first section analyses the authors’ literary portrayal of the Conquest of Mexico (1521) and stresses the relationship established to the historical sources consulted and their literary reinterpretation of this historical event. An assessment of the reflections and symbolisms embodied by their literary-historical figures elucidates the authors’ understanding of the Conquest. Thus, this section demonstrates the defining character of these authors’ literary historicism in their writing methodology and semantic interpretation when addressing historical tropes. The second section explores Fuentes’s and Carpentier’s depiction of historical Revolutions including the French, Mexican, Haitian and Cuban Revolutions. This section comprises a transversal and diachronic analysis of their Revolution cycles to demonstrate recurrent narrative, thematic and stylistic patterns in Fuentes’s and Carpentier’s literary portrayals of this historical phenomenon. I highlight the further meaning that these patterns acquire in their works, articulating a critical assessment of these historical revolutions. This thesis adds to the scholarship on these authors from an interdisciplinary perspective that re-centres attention on History. Through the concept of Literary Historicism, I demonstrate the existence of a central concern in their oeuvres to critically reassess the Latin American past and its historical interpretations from literary discourse. This study contributes to the understanding of history and literature in Latin America, for it analyses the interactions between these branches of written culture.
Open Access
A study of certain early plays by Lope de Vega.
(1973-10-30) Adams, Carole
Open Access
Queer Genealogies in Transnational Barcelona Maria-Mercè Marçal, Cristina Peri Rossi, and Flavia Company
(Legenda, 2019-12-30) Tanna, Natasha; Epps, Bradley
How do queer texts engage traditional perceptions of family, nation, and the literary canon? How do readers and writers connect with their predecessors? Natasha Tanna explores lesbian and queer desire through three authors based in Barcelona, a key locus of queer cultural production. Her analysis of the Catalan Maria-Mercè Marçal (1952-1998), of Montevideo-born Cristina Peri Rossi (1941-), and of Buenos Aires-born Flavia Company (1963-) disrupts linear conceptions of time and challenges the centrality of textual and authorial origin to national literary historiographies. Whereas conventional understandings of genealogy emphasise a continuous line of inheritance traced from an origin, Tanna highlights the collaborative creation in these authors’ fragmented, transnational genealogies. A queer bringing together of disparate fragments suggests how we might navigate difference in an increasingly entwined, yet ever more fractious, world in which notions of ‘pure’ or ‘simple’ origins are often violently at odds with disordered and disorderly relationships between people, nations, and texts.
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Naturalism Against Nature: Kinship and Degeneracy in Fin-de-siècle Portugal and Brazil
(2017-10-13) Bailey, David James
The present thesis analyses the work of four Lusophone Naturalist writers, two from Portugal (Abel Botelho and Eça de Queirós) and two from Brazil (Aluísio Azevedo and Adolfo Caminha) to argue that the pseudoscientific discourses of Naturalism, positivism and degeneration theory were adapted on the periphery of the Western world to critique the socio-economic order that produced that periphery. A central claim is that the authors in question disrupt the structure of the patriarchal family — characterised by exogamy and normative heterosexuality — to foster alternative notions of kinship that problematise the hegemonic mode of transmitting name, capital, bloodline and authority from father to son. It was this rapidly globalising form of patriarchal capitalism that saw Portugal and Brazil slip into positions of economic disadvantage and dependency, events that were then naturalised in centres of dominance as incidences of national, racial and sexual “degeneracy”. The thesis thus draws links between contemporaneous disquiet about the nation’s race and bloodline; the various “homosexual scandals” that rocked the period; the considerable prevalence of incest and non-normative desire in the literature concerned, and the supposed “inconsistencies” in the style of Lusophone Naturalism that have often been regarded as imperfections in the face of Zola’s model. I propose instead that such adaptations to the Naturalist model can be read as attempts to reassess its potentially marginalising discourse from the margins themselves, exposing something “queer” at the textual, discursive level. This is the process that I call writing “against nature”, relating non-normative kinship to the disruption of the Naturalist aesthetic more generally. Drawing on postcolonial theory, psychoanalysis and queer theory, I argue that the Lusophone Naturalist perspective presents the divided world of the period as anything but a “natural” state of affairs. In this sense, a second line of reasoning is developed: that its authors formed a tentative transatlantic movement that criticised Naturalism as conceived in centres of dominance, calling for a revision of the role that the “scientists” played in shaping and understanding the fin-de-siècle world.
Open Access
Based on True Stories: Representing the Self and the Other in Latin American Documentary Narratives
(2017-08-01) Chávez Díaz, Liliana Guadalupe; Chávez Díaz, Liliana Guadalupe [0000-0002-9865-0890]
This doctoral thesis studies the relationship between journalism and literature in contexts in which freedom of speech is at risk. It takes as primary sources a variety of nonfiction, crónicas, literary journalism and testimonial novels published by Latin American authors in Spanish, from the 1950s to the 2000s. I propose the concept ‘documentary narratives’ to refer to all literary modes of discourse which are related, in diverse degrees, to a journalistic representation of reality. My corpus covers a wide range of topics such as social protests, dictatorships, civil wars, natural disaster, crime and migration. While scholars have focused on the rhetoric and history of this kind of narratives, my reading considers the real, face-to-face encounter between the journalist and others. I argue that the representation of these encounters influences the pact with the reader and challenges the notion of truthfulness. I contend that documentary narratives can serve as a tool for the transmission of knowledge and the production of public debate in societies marked by political and social instability. In a world overwhelmed by data production and immersed in violent acts against those to be considered ‘Others’, I argue that storytelling is still an essential form of communication among individuals, classes and cultures. Contrary to the authors’s intentions of documenting others’ lives, I conclude that these stories offer an (interrupted) account of oneself, that is, the account of a contemporary storyteller pursuing a rarely fulfilled desire of getting to know the Other truly. The thesis has two appendices. Appendix 1 showcases archival material that support some of my arguments. Appendix 2 includes the transcripts of the interviews that I conducted with eight Latin American authors: Elena Poniatowska, Leila Guerriero, Cristian Alarcón, Arturo Fontaine, Santiago Roncagliolo, Francisco Goldman, Martín Caparrós, and Juan Villoro.

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