Developed from the similarity between exile theory and age studies, the term "exile" is expanded to a natural form of exile because of the shocking temporal shift that reconstructs social interaction, familial dynamics, and the aging body. Using Heidegger's theoretical work Being in Time, Simon de Beauvoir's The Coming of Age, and Jean Améry's On Aging as insight, this literary analysis captures how the elderly protagonists Goyo from Cristina García's King of Cuba, Máximo from Ana Menéndez's "In Cuba I was a German Shepherd," and Soledad from Cecilia Rodríguez Milanés's "Abuela Marielita" experience a natural exile among society, their family and within their own body. These areas express how the elderly's sense of displacement equates that of a political/geographical exile.

In Peru since the end of the last century, there has been a surge in new interest in cuisine in the country, due to the so-called Peruvian gastronomic boom. The novel Cocinero en su tinta employs this cultural phenomenon as its setting to articulate the personal conflicts of Rembrandt Bedoya, a recognized Peruvian chef, who searches for a récipe that represents the cultural polyhedral reality of his country to be presented in Madrid. This search is coupled gradually with the necessity of making peace with the memory of his father and establishing a relationship with his evasive and unattainable lover. The objective of this thesis is to investigate and analyze how the personal and national journeys of the protagonist is the recurring theme that links the narrative discourse. The first chapter is dedicated to analyzing the cultural importance of food in relation to the established ties with the protagonist, who identifies as much as a Peruvian as he does as chef. In the second chapter, Rembrandt’s personal and national conflicts are explored deeper, as well as his desire to find originality through his relationships with the other characters, estableshing and analyzing his search for the double meaning of origins. Key Words: Peruvian gastronomic boom, identity, creole from Lima, Gustavo Rodríguez

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Thesis (Ph. D.) -- University of Maryland, 2004. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 386-408)

Jorge Luis Borges is considered by many to be a pioneering author in 20th-century Latin American literature. Although he had a wide variety of themes and leimotifs in his literature, one of his most apparent was religion. However, given that he was agnostic, the way in which Borges often utilized it varied, creating a tangled web of many different religions and traditions in his literature. Further, the religious representations one sees in his literature serve a greater purpose by allowing him to both uncover his own concept of literary creation while at the same time exploring philosophical and metaphysical themes. This analysis explores the ways in which Borges represents religions and how the religious symbolism seen within his short stories are a means of purporting philosophical and metaphysical questions, specifically the ideas of the infiniteness of time and space, the absurdity of the human condition, and man’s incapacity to understand how the world works, among others. The analysis will begin with a discussion of Borges’ strong affinity for Judaism and demonstrate how although his concept of what Judaism is varies, the religion as a whole serves as a branch towards these metaphysical ideas. In particular, I will analyze the stories “El milagro secreto”, “La muerte y la brújula”, and “El Aleph”. Many of these same philosophical and metaphysical ideas can be see in Borges’ representations of Christianity, represented here with “Tres versiones de Judas” and “El evangelio según san Marcos”. Finally, I will also discuss Borges’ representations of other religions, such as Islam and the Maya religion, in order to show that his questioning of metaphysical concepts extends beyond Judaism and Christianity. In this case, I will discuss the stories “Los dos reyes y los dos laberintos”, “La escritura del dios”, “La secta del Fénix”, and “Las ruinas circulares”.

This dissertation explores myth-making in Latin America by focusing specifically upon four Amerindian and mestizo figures: Doña Bárbara, mestiza protagonist of Rómulo Gallegos’ 1929 novel; Anacaona and Hatuey, Taíno caciques who first appeared in Bartolomé de las Casas’ Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias (1552); and Andrés Chiliquinga, indigenous protagonist of Jorge Icaza’s Huasipungo (1934). The present analysis examines the evolution of these myths from their original appearance to literary and film versions throughout the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries in the Caribbean and Andean regions. The project focuses upon the ways in which artists have interpreted these myths, their embedding in society’s collective memory, and their mythical functions in anti- and postcolonial discourse. By breaking down each myth into its most basic structure, this project identifies the core connotations contained within that reveal each myth’s function as a cultural foundation in Latin America. It also examines how the versions of a myth depart from one another, thus underscoring possible critiques of the myth. Finally, it examines the ways in which some of these myths have become commodities, particularly in contemporary popular culture. By examining these figures as cultural myths—bridging past and present—, this research argues that a mythic-interpretive model proves effective as it leads us to a deeper understanding of the universal connotations contained not only within the stories chosen here, but the Latin American narrative as a whole.

This dissertation examines the ways in which torture was imagined and narrated in Guatemalan literature during the Internal Armed Conflict. For nearly four decades, Guatemala suffered one of the longest and most violent wars in Latin America. During that time, it is estimated that more than 100,000 people were tortured at the hands of the Guatemalan military. Torture, as suggested by Ariel Dorman, is most fundamentally “a crime committed against the imagination” (8), disrupting and often dissolving the boundaries between fact and fiction, the real and the unreal. The Introduction and Chapter One of this study explore the destabilization of this boundary by examining the historical and theoretical context for torture in Guatemala. The ubiquity and normality of torture was so terrible that, for many, it became “unspeakable”—an atrocity that defied language. Chapters Two through Four study three different literary modes of countering the state’s rhetoric of torture, probing the possibility of narrating torture despite its seemingly unsayable nature. Examining works by Rigoberta Menchú (chapter two), Marco Antonio Flores and Arturo Arias (chapter three), and Rodrigo Rey Rosa (chapter four), and aided by current theories and studies of torture, this dissertation investigates the ways in which these Guatemalan authors have sought not only to re-present torture, but also to explore and sometimes question the possibility of bearing witness to that torture in literature.

This dissertation examines the co-evolution of consumption and production as competing models of agency in Argentine culture in the era of global consumer capitalism. Tracing the influence of several key political and intellectual developments in Latin America, the US, and Europe on the symbolic language of regional politics, I map out how participation in the global consumer market came to be understood as an expression of power and authority in the context of Argentina's disastrous experiment with neoliberalism in the last three decades of the 20th century. Then, using films and literary texts including works by Lisandro Alonso, Adrián Caetano, and Aníbal Jarkowski together with critical projects by George Yúdice and Josefina Ludmer, I examine how a model of subjectivity that exaggerates the economic, social, and cultural agency of consumers has managed to persist in Argentina's cultural imagination despite growing disillusionment with the neoliberal model and the disenfranchisement of the nation's consumers. Through close readings that reveal work as the site of a restored order that is ultimately incomplete, fantastical, and contradictory, I show how the myth of the consumer dictator perpetuates itself through a system of intellectual values, including abstract, absolutist visions freedom and tolerance, that isolate the subject and divert communication, inscribing an extreme version of consumer agency even upon production itself. Together, these instances of interrupted reform suggest that a model of agency suited to the era of global consumer capitalism must understand production and consumption not as alternative options, but as distinct, integral modes of creativity.

In this dissertation, I argue that the shifts in the terrain of literary criticism in Argentina during the 1950s represent the development of what I call a “critical infrastructure,” whereby criticism came to perform an essential function for the circulation and appropriation of books and literature in a context of major transformations in book publishing and distribution. In doing so, I bring together two phenomena that belong to a single historical shift, which saw the expansion of mass cultural production, and the consequent development of material and discursive practices to distribute them and to allow them to be appropriated. On the one hand, Buenos Aires experienced a rapid expansion in its publishing industry as a consequence of the Civil War’s ravages on Spain, turning Argentina for a brief period into the world’s primary producer and exporter of Spanish language publications. On the other hand, Argentina experienced what is frequently referred to as an “eruption” in literary criticism in the 1950s, propelled by the proliferation of a number of small, independent literary journals headed by young, middle-class writers and critics. These publications represented a critical challenge to the Argentine literary establishment, which was hitherto almost exclusively comprised of intellectuals belonging to the nation’s elite. While there has been considerable academic interest in each of these phenomena, theorizing their relationship to one another offers important insights into the reasons for the increased relevance and visibility of these otherwise marginal publications. Analyzing a variety of heterogeneous periodicals (including major newspapers like La Nación and La Prensa, as well as “little magazines” such as Espiga, Centro, Bibliograma, and Contorno), I discuss the expansion and increasing contentiousness of literary criticism, which became an ever more regular and visible presence in such publications. I trace the transformations in publishing (1899-1953) to show how a process of indifferentiation among printed materials made the intervention of discursive practices —mainly performed by literary reviews— a structural necessity for the distribution and appropriation of books and literature. Drawing from Adolfo Prieto’s seminal Sociología del público argentino (1956) as well as other texts, I discuss the ways in which the presence of a mass public with ostensively heterogenous ways of “consuming” literature posed a challenged to traditional ideas about national literature, the act of reading, the “figure” of the reader, and consequently also about the nature and function of criticism. Finally, I analyze the small avant-garde magazine Letra y Línea (1953-54) to show the empowering effect this transformation had on relatively marginal, middle-class writers, who invested themselves in a radical critical task in order to seize the opportunity offered by this structural discursive need.

“Entertaining Culture: Mass Culture and Consumer Society in Argentina, 1898-1946” is a study of Argentine mass culture in a new consumer society: a new cultural dynamic that emerged around the turn of the century in Buenos Aires. This dynamic entailed a redefinition not only of the relationships between culture, creators, and publics, but also of those categories themselves. Early twentieth-century Argentine mass culture was a heterogeneous realm of cultural production and consumption in which varied and often conflicting ideologies, aesthetic convictions, and class or party allegiances jostled for purchase, creating a constant push and pull of competing desires and values. Within this context, criticism and ambivalence about the effects of cultural modernization was ubiquitous, a byproduct not only of the heterogeneity within mass culture itself, but also of the tension-filled incorporation of culture into the market. By analyzing Argentine mass culture in this light, my dissertation challenges monolithic understandings of mass culture that ignore how it exposed and grappled with the tensions in its own premises. The cultural dynamic of the period collapsed the categories of culture, consumer good, and entertainment and blurred the limits between production and consumption, often provoking dismay from creators, cultural critics, nationalists, and educators, frequently voiced from within mass culture itself. Mass culture adopted variety as a central premise, claiming to offer something for everyone and for every taste, in a business strategy designed to attract as many paying consumers as possible, and to turn them into brand loyalists. Cultural ventures also used a number of other tools, such as novelty, brevity, immediacy, familiarity, levity, and affordability, to expand their market share through entertainment, providing cultural production that fit the bill and encouraging Argentines to demand these qualities of the cultural production they consumed. Mass culture also encouraged Argentines to view the world through the logic of spectacle, according to which anything or anyone, given the mass cultural treatment, could be transformed into entertainment. While the transformation of culture into a for-profit entertainment venture and a consumer good made it possible for more aspiring artists to make a living at writing or performing, it also provoked frequent criticisms of the industrialization of culture, the mercantilism of producers, the quality of cultural works, and the naïveté of audiences and aspiring creators. To better understand the tensions in play in this new cultural dynamic, I advance the concept of “cultured consumption,” a term I use to identify the dominant ideal of consumption in early twentieth-century Buenos Aires. As a loose complex of practices, cultured consumption was characterized by a tension between competing models of social aspiration: one, based on the performance of gentility and refinement, per aristocratic practices; another, founded upon a middle-class ideal of comfortable domesticity and family-centered values. Thus, by participating in cultured consumption, Argentines asserted their ascription to a certain set of potentially competing values and desires, from upward mobility and good taste to economy and family unity. Furthermore, according to the premises of cultured consumption, purchase of certain products and participation in certain activities would mark consumers as authentically and patriotically Argentine. Nevertheless, it was not clear how Argentine culture was to reconcile refinement and moderation, performance and authenticity, and public and private activity. Cultured consumption was, thus, both progressive and conservative, aspirational and protective of the status quo; in it, standards of taste took on moral and even political connotations. Through it, culture was both democratized and limited according to a set of sometimes competing standards and values. In this way, mass culture promised ever broader sectors of the population that by participating fully in it they could satisfy their heterogeneous desires, experience self-actualization, and improve their lot in life. At the same time, mass culture invoked consumption, spectatorship, and artistic aspirations as possible threats to the stability of the family and social structure to limit the expansion of access to culture and cultural production. Mass culture, thus, set itself up as the articulating joint between public and private life in Buenos Aires: a series of practices that increasingly defined participation in, and an interpretative lens that allowed Argentines to make sense of, public and private life—including mass culture and consumption themselves. Against the limited narratives of the period traditionally proposed by literary criticism and cultural history, this dissertation argues that it is precisely this heterogeneous area of mass cultural production that can help us better understand Argentine culture of the period more broadly: it allows us to see how these tensions played out on a massive scale. Considering cross-object study to be essential for understanding the new cultural dynamic, this dissertation recuperates archival materials and understudied genres such as mass-circulation periodicals, advertisements, reviews, advice literature, recitation manuals, celebrity profiles, and popular plays and music, and analyzes both the texts themselves and the interactions, institutions, and practices around them. This methodology allows me to do two things: first, to put disciplines such as consumer history and media studies in dialogue with literary criticism, theater history, and cultural studies; second, to complicate the narratives of the period traditionally espoused by literary critics and cultural historians. While the former, through their focus on aesthetic and political polemics, largely erased an area of cultural production massively consumed in the early twentieth century, the latter, by portraying culture as tangential to a more important political or economic narrative, deny culture its historical agency. My dissertation, in contrast, considers Argentine mass culture of the period to be not only a cultural dynamic that comprised systems of production, practices, and content, but, more broadly, the mouthpiece of a new worldview that redefined all areas of life. This worldview, originating in the cultural realm, would shape the course of Argentine social, economic, and political history to come. In foregrounding mass culture in this way, I propose a new corpus and lens for evaluating modernization in Buenos Aires.