Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2006. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 67-11, Section: A, page: 4190. Adviser: Dara Goldman. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 132-138) Available on microfilm from Pro Quest Information and Learning.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, San Diego, 1998. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 246-258).

This dissertation studies modernist translation spaces in Mexico City, a city that became an important hemispheric destination during the early twentieth-century. Although some earlier examples are provided for historical context, my analysis focuses primarily on architectural and editorial spaces that emerged in the city between 1917 and the late 1930s, the decades between the final years of the Mexican Revolution—during Venustiano Carranza’s administration, following the Queretaro Constitution—and the instauration of the Partido de la Revolución Mexicana—founded by Lázaro Cárdenas in 1938. Modernism in Mexico City involved an international circuit of people—such as the poet Langston Hughes, the art historian Anita Brenner, the editor and anthropologist Frances Toor, the Indian activist, and founder of the communist party in Mexico M.N. Roy, and the photographers Tina Modotti and Edward Weston—all of whom traveled to or lived in Mexico City during the 1920s and 1930s. It also involved a series of Mexican writers, artists and intellectuals—among them, the poets Gilberto Owen, Salvador Novo and Xavier Villaurrutia, the writer and intellectual Alfonso Reyes, the muralist Diego Rivera, the architects Juan O’Gorman and Juan Segura, and the painters Dr. Atl and Nahui Olin—whose translation practices were instrumental for the making of Mexican modernism. I argue that these modernist actors played a key role as cultural translators and that it was ultimately through their work that Mexico City, among other so-called peripheral modernities, found a place in the cultural and geographical map of international modernism—a place, nonetheless, which modernist studies still tend to ignore or misrepresent. Drawing from translation theory, architectural history, transatlantic modernism, and the spatial semiology and hermeneutics, Translation Spaces maps the places, both cultural and physical, that these international modernists occupied or, in some cases, created. The five chapters study different architectural spaces—i.e. theaters, rooftops, houses, cinemas, and apartment buildings—and combine spatial analysis and architectural history of such spaces with analysis of specific translation practices that took place in them, such as literary translation, film dubbing and subtitling in modern sound cinemas, urban photography, adaptations of architectural languages to local needs, as well as literary representations and discussions of modern spaces. Taken together as different examples of modernist translation practices, the objects of study in this dissertation map modernist Mexico City as a space in a synchronic relationship to the larger map of international modernism.

No description available.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2000. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 184-199). Available also in a digital version from Dissertation Abstracts.

My dissertation Sea-ing Words: An Exploration of the Maritime in Contemporary Caribbean and Latino/a Literature analyzes how writers from the Spanish-speaking islands and their diaspora have moved past the ever elusive Pan-Antillean quest for unity, rooted in the acceptance of a foundational Trauma (with a capital T). The writers I examine venture to humanize the basin, highlighting the routes, exchanges, and negotiations that currently distinguish the region. In doing so, the idea of one edifying Trauma is displaced by the existence of multiple and individualized iterations. As marginalized discourses infiltrate the center, the flow of the conversation is altered, opening up spaces for new interactions. Through their uses of the maritime, these writers transform the sea into a stage from which new perspectives on Caribbean and Latino/a literature emanate. / Romance Languages and Literatures

<p> This dissertation explores the question of indigenous development and its literary representation through an investigation of depictions of growth in novels from the United States and Peru where boys mature, perhaps, into men. I find that texts with adolescent characters intimately connected to indigenous communities challenge western concepts of maturity and development as presented in the traditional <i>Bildungsroman</i>. Specifically, I read Jos&eacute; Mar&iacute;a Arguedas&rsquo;s <i>Los r&iacute;os profundo </i>s (1958) and Sherman Alexie&rsquo;s <i>Flight</i> (2007) as parodies of the genre that call into question the allegory of a western civilizing mission with its lineal trajectory of growth in which the indigenous is relegated to an uncivilized time before modernity. I describe the protagonists of these novels as inconceivable saviors; inconceivable in that the West cannot imagine them, as indigenous, to be the saviors of the nation (i.e., its protectors and reproducers). They are border-thinkers who live in-between epistemological spaces and the stories of their lives serve as kinds of border-<i> Bildungsromane</i>, narratives of growth that arise in the blurred time/space of a border culture, or Bil(<i>dung</i>)sroman, stories of the abject or expelled. Arguedas&rsquo;s and Alexie&rsquo;s narratives confront the issue of race, a problem that allegories of the consolidation and development of the nation (e.g., <i>Bildungsroman</i> and foundational fictions) evade through magical means by turning the form into a fetish and presenting fetishized fetal origins that offer reassurances of legitimacy for the western narrative of modernity and the nation-state. That is, the traditional form acts like a talisman that magically disappears the fragmentation of coloniality by providing a history to hold on to, creating an origin that does not really exist. Instead of conforming to the model of the genre or rejecting it, Arguedas&rsquo;s and Alexie&rsquo;s texts yield to the power of the original form, appearing to tell the familiar story while carrying a subversive message. Their power derives from the uncertainty inherent in this mimesis. In this way, these novels encourage readers to question the maturation process as conceived and represented in the west and in western literature and to consider alternative paths and formations of self.</p>

Creative Portion abstract (75%): Literary Fiction Manuscript Souvenirs of the Revolution Against the backdrop of the Mexican Revolution of 1910, betrayal, sexual deviance, rigid morality and a fatal subservience to moral correctness drives the Montelejos clan: complex and self-serving, innocent and deluded, larger than life, an illustrious family line in its final decline. Mariabella Montelejos, who tries to sell her only daughter for the price of a new carriage during the bloodiest part of the Revolution. Her daughter, Portensia Montelejos, who leaves her mother’s body to moulder in the front room after soldiers come at the point of a gun. Gloria Vasquez, celebrated beauty, practising witch, and tormentor of her step-sister, Teresa: ill, gullible, naive, awoken to her destiny by the surreal birth of her daughter. Paulina, a child who once communed with the holy, made an empty vessel by the abuse of her father – and revered as a living saint as she lies dying in a Pueblano convent. The men of the family, weak and susceptible to the mandates of their dying class, are no match for the machinations of such women. Evil abuser Ebner Collins, paralyzed by a jealous man’s bullet in the middle of the Sinai desert. Hernando Vasquez, cowed into marriage by the longing for his dead wife, Evelyn Cuthbert. Guiermo Fuentes de Solis, cuckolded husband. Jaime Vasquez, who hears voices and lives at the bottom of a bottle, unable to save his cousin Paulina. The Revolution is the beginning of the end for Montelejos, and the miraculous will be its undoing. Analytical Portion abstract (25%): An Outsized Reality: How “Magical Realism” Hijacked Modern Latin American Literature With the publication of Gabriel García Márquez’s Cien Anos de Soledad in 1967, Latin American writing captured the world’s attention. Critics, readers, and imitators rushed to discuss and emulate this astounding novel. A whole genre of literature, “magical realism”, was popularized, and with it, critical discussion of its influences, history, genre limitations, and the sheer “imagination” it brought to the forefront of literary debate. In this thesis I will discuss the problems associated with “Western” critical analysis of Latin American writing, specifically as it seeks to define, without a proper context, the literature which draws life from the history and culture of Latin America and categorizes its literature without the cultural understanding required.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2008. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 69-05, Section: A, page: 1690. Adviser: Stanley O. Ikenberry. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 361-371) Available on microfilm from Pro Quest Information and Learning.

Thesis--Université Paris III. / Includes bibliographical references and index.