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

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Chicago, Dept. of Latin American Languages and Literatures, June 2001. / Includes bibliographical references. Also available on the Internet.

abstract: En esta disertación se exploró el desarrollo del sistema de la literatura infantil decimonónica en México. La investigación se inscribió dentro de una perspectiva interdisciplinaria, exploratoria y descriptiva (e interpretativa, aunque en menor medida) de los aspectos histórico-culturales y literarios a los que pertenece el sistema, autor y obra. En la búsqueda de una todavía limitada pretensión interpretativa, en este estudio se trazó una periodización para caracterizar el desarrollo que la literatura infantil adquiere en los dos períodos delimitados para el siglo XIX: sujeto educando de la divina revelación y sujeto educando de la ciudadanía. Se concluyó que en la fábula compleja de la literatura infantil se introduce y construye un discurso integrador de la nación mexicana. En esta formación identitaria, las publicaciones periódicas y los libros para niños fueron un discurso formativo de fundamental soporte a las políticas sociales que guiaban al país, la joven nación republicana. De igual forma, se recopiló una valiosa información sobre el estado del arte de la literatura infantil latinoamericana y mexicana; se exploraron los textos precursores del haz de escritores fundacionales de la literatura infantil latinoamericana; se delimitó el surgimiento, desarrollo y consolidación de la LI en México y, por último, se compiló una lista de publicaciones sobre historia, consulta y crítica de la literatura infantil y juvenil en Latinoamérica con el propósito de establecer líneas futuras de investigación. / Dissertation/Thesis / Ph.D. Spanish 2012

The traditional Bildungsroman that originated in Europe toward the end of the 18th Century embodied the concept of progress and the belief in the Enlightenment ideals of universality, knowledge and the search for truth. In the classic model of the genre the values of the society represented, those of modernity, are ultimately legitimized. In this dissertation, I argue that the female Bildungsroman of Ángeles Mastretta and Carmen Boullosa respond to a fundamentally postmodern aesthetics and ideological framework. In their novels, “Arráncame la vida” (1985), “Antes” (1989), “Mal de amores” (1995) and “Treinta años” (1999), the Mexican writers challenge the legitimacy of the modern ideals of progress and individual maturity that characterized the traditional, European, male Bildungsroman. These texts reject the essentialist and utopian representation of progressive personal growth and achievement that would invariably lead to a fixed state of maturity. My study of Mastretta’s and Boullosa’s representations of the Bildung process draws on postmodern theories such as those proposed by Jean-François Lyotard, Linda Hutcheon and Zygmunt Bauman, among others. Their protagonists’ subversive and contestatory attitudes toward many of modernity’s most disseminated master narratives –the traditional concept of maturity, of a coherent sense of self and of childhood and adolescence as steps toward a definitive personal identity, suggest a revision of the traditional principles of the genre. In the context of contemporary Mexican society, these texts ultimately suggest the inadequacy of the conventional form of the coming of age novel to represent the process of individual development. In postmodern Mexico, as this study demonstrates, the referents of modernity have lost their hegemonic value and therefore, the conventional model of the coming of age novel must be reinvented. The implications of the novelists’ reconceptualization of the genre are twofold; on the one hand, it suggests an emancipatory defiance of the modern concepts of individual progress and perfectibility, while on the other, it demands a high degree of tolerance toward the ambiguous and plural nature of postmodern representations of women’s formative journeys.

In an age compounded by diversity, this dissertation seeks a common ground among the multifarious experiences of America. It argues that the land, the physical and the metaphysical, the lived and the perceived space that is referential to all, constitutes a primeval experience--the imagination of America. If Anglo-Americans once envisioned a virgin land on which to build a New World Garden, ethnic groups have their founding myths of America: While the Navajo Indians perceive a "house made of dawn," Chicanos reclaim the mythic "heart of Aztlan" in the Southwest; and while Afro-Americans hail "home to Harlem," Chinese Americans "go-out-on-the-road" to the legendary Gold Mountain in California. Conceptually, the study employs Henry Nash Smith's (1950) critical notion of myth: "a poetic idea, a collective representation." While Smith historicizes the westward expansion of the "virgin land," Annette Kolodny (1984) provides a paradigm of middle-class white women taunting and questioning the male-centered "virgin land." Kolodny is important not only because she polarizes the male and female fantasies, but because, by exposing the woman as one category of "otherness," she relates womanhood to ethnicity. The study hence deconstructs the myth of virgin land by contesting the issues of ethnicity and gender in imagining America. It investigates the images of Aztlan, la Mestiza, Harlem, the "house made of dawn," and the Gold Mountain to surface the common ground of a mythic element in our imaginations of America. It emphasizes the ethnic woman's need to carve out the "land before her" in both racial and gender terms. This is done structurally by pairing a male and a female writer in each ethnic group: (1) N. Scott Momaday and Leslie Silko; (2) Rudolfo Anaya and Gloria Anzaldua; (3) Claude McKay and Zora Neale Hurston; (4) Louis Chu and Maxine Hong Kingston. By comparing male and female writers and by juxtaposing multiethnic writers, this study transgresses sensibly and fluidly among Ethnic Studies, Women Studies, and American Studies. Mostly, it lands on a common ground to illuminate from various angles the lure of the land.

In an interdisciplinary fashion, this dissertation on Brazilian women writers in English focuses on translation and gender issues and employs an historical and statistical approach. Following an investigation of the proportion of men to women writers in the corpora of Brazilian literature and its English translations, I offer an analysis of the English translation of three contemporary Brazilian women writers. Then, drawing on models developed by Javier Franco Aixelá and Carla Melibeu Bentes, I evaluate the "foreignizing" or "domesticating" character of the translations by examining Culture-Specific Terms (CSTs) and provide a new model to analyze translation strategies for Gender-Marked Terms (GMTs). The first part of the dissertation (chapters two and three) consists of a quantitative macro analysis of women writers' representation in Brazilian literature, based on a recent reference work, the Enciclopédia de literatura brasileira (2001), and on my own diachronic survey of translated authors. The surprising results, graphically represented in tables and charts, point to the visibility of Brazilian women writers in translation and raise questions regarding the process of cross-cultural transmission. In the second part (chapters four through six), I undertake a qualitative contrastive micro analysis examining the strategies used to translate CSTs and GMTs - presented in tables and charts–in seven books by three Brazilian women writers. Clarice Lispector (1920-1977), the most widely translated and best known in Brazil and abroad, has published highly introspective works. Carolina Maria de Jesus (1914-1977), briefly famous after the publication of her exposé of favela life, found unexpected success in English translation, which motivated her book's re-publication in Brazil. Ana Maria Machado (1940-), famous for her children's books, is one of the few Brazilian authors of this genre published in English. English translators tended to keep most CSTs (50%) in Portuguese; 68% of GMTs were equivalently translated; however, domesticating (CSTs) and neutralizing (GMTs) strategies had a significant impact on the translations. Such macro and micro analyses introduce an evidence-based dimension that complements contemporary translation studies, at times contradicting the presuppositions of theorists, and offers new avenues of research for understanding the processes by which Brazilian works enter the English-language market.

Esta disertación estudia la construcción de sujetos en tres novelas latinoamericanas de la segunda mitad del siglo XX: Balún-Cavan (1957) de Rosario Castellanos, Dreaming in Cuban (1992) de Cristina García y Chambacú (1967) de Manuel Zapata Olivella. Para llevar a cabo este estudio parto aquí de la noción foucaultiana de discursos como prácticas que estructuran nuestro sentido de realidad al construir nociones como las de sujeto e identidad desde las que nos pensamos y actuamos. Es a partir del examen de estas nociones que analizo cómo han sido construido los sujetos en los textos escogidos, desde qué discursos. La nación, el género, la hibridez y la alteridad son los discursos que se enfatizan en el análisis de sujetos y de la construcción de identidades realizado aquí. La lectura de estos textos se lleva a cabo siguiendo pensadores como James Clifford y su noción de nativo híbrido y culturas como rutas, Gloria Anzaldúa y su noción de fronteras como heridas vivas y abiertas, Mary Louise Pratt y sus zonas de contacto, Benedict Andersen y su nación como comunidad imaginada, Cornejo Polar y su crítica del mestizaje como resolutorio, Benítez Rojo y su postulación de la criollización como movimiento del caos, Stuart Hall y su noción de identidades como reposicionamientos. Todos estos pensadores y nociones cuestionan la bipolaridad Sujeto/Otro. Este cuestionamiento es la columna central de esta disertación que pretende no sólo ver en los textos analizados cómo los llamados tradicionalmente Otros (mujeres, US Latinos, Afrocolombianos, indígenas) son construidos como sujetos, sino cómo es replanteada en ese intento la bipolaridad tradicional. Cómo Sujeto y Otro terminan siendo Alteridad. Siendo. Por eso a partir de ello no es posible hablar de su identidad sino de sus identidades, de sus siendo en esas identidades y discursos.

Dominick LaCapra argues that historians continue to interpret legal documents in a hierarchical fashion that marginalizes intellectual history, as fiction is perceived to be less important. This dissertation analyzes contemporary literary texts in the Americas that exploit such a narrow reading of documents in order to interrogate the way official history is constructed by introducing false forms of documents into their narratives. This type of literary text, or what I label “con-script,” is not only historical fiction, but also historicized fiction that problematizes its own historical construction. Many critics propose that the new historical novel revises historical interpretation, but there exists a gap between theory and textual practice. Adapted from E.L. Doctorow's notion of “false documents,” the con-script acts as an alternative that purposefully confuses fiction and nonfiction, providing tools to critically examine the authority maintained by official narratives. By revealing the fictive nature of these constructions, the con-script alerts readers to the manipulation of documents to maintain political authority and to misrepresent or silence marginalized groups. The recent revision of American Studies to include a hemispheric or Inter-American scope provides a context for applying such political claims within a transcultural framework. I compare texts from English, Spanish, and Portuguese America in order to identify shared strategies. After a survey of the historical novel's development across the Americas and a critical theory overview, I analyze three types of con-script. “The Art of Con-Fessing” juxtaposes texts from the three languages via Jay Cantor's The Death of Che Guevara, Augusto Roa Basto's Yo el Supremo, and Silviano Santiago's Em Liberdade. These false documents present themselves as apocryphal diaries written by revolutionary leaders or activists. The authors demythologize untouchable public figures through the gaps in their “own” personal writing. “Mediations of Media” features Ivan Ângelo's A Festa, Tomás Eloy Martínez's La novela de Perón, and Ishmael Reed's Mumbo Jumbo. These journalists interrogate the role of media and political corruption within the construction of national identity; the false documents appear as newspaper clippings, magazine articles and media images. Finally, the subjective process of archiving is examined in “Con-Centering the Archive” via Aguinaldo Silva's No País das Sombras, Francisco Simón's El informe Mancini, and Susan Daitch's L.C.

This project is a narratological study of the border between fiction and reality, and the traversing thereof. I postulate that the permeability of this border is the consequence of textual acts: Cataloged Fabulations, Second-tier Fictionals, and Rhizomatic Fabrications. These are akin to speech acts in that fictional entities gain nonfictional status by means of an implicit contract at the heart of the textual act. Having laid out the narratological foundation of the textual acts' power, I argue that the narratological bears on the ontological through performative speech acts, as portrayed in J. L. Austin's tripartite model. I use two lenses in my analysis: the work of Jorge Luis Borges and the Hebrew Bible and its commentaries. The Borgesian trifecta is encyclopedia, mirror, and labyrinth, referents that are synonymous with the three textual acts noted above. In terms of the biblical lens, my analysis focuses on a metaphor family in Jewish mysticism. This family includes the World as Book, The Torah as Blueprint, God as Author, and Letters as Building Blocks. The resulting conceptual system is narratological in nature. Consequently it is useful to draw on this system so as to elucidate the field of narratology. The binoculars offer a parallax view, which provides a unique perspective on narratology: the combination of modernist/postmodernist fantasy and the urtext of the Western literary canon. My aim is to further the conception of narratology into the crosshatched territory of literary theory and cultural studies.

Magic realism emerged as a literary force in Latin America in the 1940s, and it has continued to have an impact on literature throughout the Americas through the start of the twenty-first century. In recent years, a number of postcolonial scholars have noted that magic realist texts are being used as a form of social protest throughout the world. These scholars have labeled magic realism subversive, hybrid, mestizo, or “impure.” The implications of the relationship between magic realist literature and social protest, however, have not been the focus of detailed scholarship. This study explores the relationship between magic realism and social protest in novels written in Latin America and the United States between 1950 and 1990, seeking to determine why the literary mode of magic realism is an effective vehicle for addressing volatile social issues. Organized chronologically, the study begins with an overview of the term “magic realism” and a brief discussion of some of the important predecessors of magic realist literature in the Americas. Later chapters use a range of theoretical tools within a comparative framework in order to perform detailed analysis of specific writers—Juan Rulfo, Elena Garro, Gabriel García Márquez, Isabel Allende, Rudolfo Anaya, Alma Luz Villanueva, Toni Morrison, and Linda Hogan—in order to explore how magic realist techniques have been adapted to different forms of protest according to each author's time and geographical space.