<p> This dissertation examines the theme of strangeness in Arabic and Latin American literature between 1880 and 1920. Through analytical readings of novels and other prose fiction of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, I show the salience of strangeness, alienation and estrangement as motifs in these works. In the first chapter of the dissertation, I examine earlier works of prose to provide context. In the second chapter, I focus on strangeness as manifested through sexual transgression. Finally, in the last chapter, I analyze narratives of physical estrangement, such as travel, urban alienation, and disconnect from nature. </p><p> In analyzing strangeness, I show its close relationship with modernity. Indeed, alienation is a hallmark of modernity, rising from a disconnect with one&rsquo;s society and physical environment. Alienation and estrangement are also metaphorical ways of addressing the relationship with the Other, especially if that Other is a colonizer or ex-colonizer. Strangeness is therefore expressive of problematics of national identity, at a time of budding decolonization and post-colonial nation-building. </p><p> Finally, this dissertation shows how the early prose literature of the turn of the twentieth century, in Latin America and in the Arab world, has expressed essential anxieties of modernity, and set the course for the canonical works of the later twentieth century.</p><p>

Orientador: Antonio Roberto Esteves / Resumo: O presente trabalho realiza uma análise comparativa entre os romances Desmundo (1996), da escritora brasileira Ana Miranda, e Finisterre (2005) da escritora argentina María Rosa Lojo. Propomos demonstrar como os romances selecionados apresentam uma afinidade no modo de conceber a reconstrução das heroínas, por meio da revisão de episódios históricos traumáticos dos séculos XVI e XIX, que outorgam às figuras da órfã e da cativa branca, respectivamente, um papel emblemático na construção do ideal do que futuramente seriam as modernas nações latino-americanas. O questionamento dos mitos raciais e culturais é feito a partir das memórias individuais e das compartilhadas com o imaginário coletivo que apresentam uma versão inédita da história, pelo olhar marginal da voz feminina. Ademais, pretendemos verificar as tensões entre o Outro e a mulher, nas quais podemos ver refletidas as relações entre as protagonistas e os discursos que legitimam a autoridade das identidades dominantes. Nesse sentido, podemos ler importantes discussões de cunho ideológico que atravessam os romances e confirmam a desconstrução da univocidade dos discursos fundacionais da Nação, assim como o desejo de refundação de suas bases pela conciliação entre pares, tradicionalmente opostos. Tomamos como base teórica os estudos sobre a metaficção historiográfica, de Linda Hutcheon (1991) e os estudos sobre novo romance histórico latino-americano (PERKOWSKA, 2008), entre outros, a fim de avaliarmos os aspectos cultura... (Resumo completo, clicar acesso eletrônico abaixo) / Abstract: This work makes a comparative analysis of Desmundo novels (1996), by the Brazilian writer Ana Miranda and Finisterre (2005) by the Argentine writer, María Rosa Lojo. We propose to show how the selected novels have an affinity in the way of conceiving the reconstruction of the heroines, through of the traumatic historical episodes review of the Sixteenth and Nineteenth century, which allow to figures of the orphan and white slave woman an emblematic role in the ideal of building which in the future would be the modern Latin American nations. The questioning of the racial and cultural myths is done from the individual memories and shared with the collective imagination that present a unique version of the story, through of the woman's voice marginal eye. Furthermore, we intend to verify the tensions between the Other and the woman, in which we see reflected the relationships between the protagonists and the discourses that legitimize the authority of the dominant identities. In this sense, we can read important ideological discussions that cross the novels and confirm the nation deconstruction of the univocity of the founding discourses and the desire to re-foundation of its bases for reconciliation between pairs traditionally opposed. We take as theoretical basis the studies of Historiographical Metafiction by Linda Hutcheon (1991) and studies about Latin American's New Historical Novel (PERKOWSKA, 2008), among others, to assess the gender cultural aspects, the dialogue with l... (Complete abstract click electronic access below) / Doutor

abstract: This work aims to deepen the construction of identity of the Korean-argentinian through the "koreanity" and "koreanism". Therefore, we will analyze the short story collection La peonia y su sombra (2002) in search of evidence that discover the difficult definition of the "koreanism", or the practice of Korean culture, in which the language is included. The "koreanity" is a feature based on physical traits, while the "koreanism" is defined by the use of the language and the culture. While the "koreanity" is an exogenous factor, and it is well defined, the "koreanism" is defined through cultural impressions that are more difficult to distinguish. To do this we will use the Argentine native vision to find the "koreanism" and, if necessary, will exhibit different forms of subsistence of the "koreanism" in Argentina. / Dissertation/Thesis / M.A. Spanish 2013

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 obviously 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 and styles, 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 revolutionary system of images place him after the “boom” in a narrative style that is postmodern. This study undertakes a thorough revision of external and internal issues, revealing the key linguistic and fictive elements that characterize both writers. Through discourse analysis and close reading, a poetic system is formulated, which incorporate features of the “neobarroco,” “boom” and postmodern narrative styles. This dissertation uses a polar structure to analyze both poetic visions and concludes that they are compatible and 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 only a few studies that explore the works of Borges and Lezama within the context of Baroque aesthetics. For the first time, 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 in content and form. Both writers question the cause and effect relationship and the modern use of metaphor. They also share a redefinition of genre as well as a hedonistic approach to literature and culture. 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.

This research seeks to establish a connection between the Hermetic tradition and the paranormal phenomena found in the works of Alejandro Tapia y Rivera --- “Un alma en pena” (1862), Póstumo el transmigrado (1872) and Póstumo el envirginado (1882) --- and Benito Pérez Galdós´s La sombra (1870) and “Celín” (1871). By establishing a Hegelian influence in their works, we uncover the possible origin of these paranormal events. German Idealism, so widespread during the first half of the 19th century, seems to have given both authors access to new currents of thought, allowing them to explore the union of art with the metaphysical. Thought is given precedence over sensation and Idealism prevails over Empiricism. Nature is now seen to be spiritual, as well as spatial, and among the major exponents of this movement is Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831), whose philosophy states that human knowledge is based on the “Idea,” a concept in which nature and spirit fuse. Hegel holds the traditional hermetic conception of philosophia perennis that supposes a universal truth common to every culture, religious tradition, and belief upheld by humankind. By examining the Hegelian influence in the works of Alejandro Tapia y Rivera and Benito Pérez Galdós, and relating major passages of their works to the precepts contained in the Corpus Hermeticum, the Emerald Tablet, and the Kybalion (1908), we uncover a subtle, sometimes explicit, presence of this esoteric doctrine, which allows the authors to explore the metaphysical side of life.

This dissertation is a critical re-assessment of Latin American philosophical tradition and its quest for an authentic philosophical identity. This re-evaluation is brought about through s distinct reading of the writings of the Peruvian Marxist, Jose Carlos Mariategui (1896-1930). The analysis which is exercised in this inquiry proposes that its philosophical production should not be considered as an obscure or secondary form of European philosophy, or in the most unfortunate case, as a radical denial of the latter's philosophical heritage. In attention to the central question concerning this dissertation it is claimed that a hermeneutic strategy of devising a re-interpretation of a single theorist could yield preferable and more illuminating results than just an extensive survey of the numerous philosophers who belong to the Latin American philosophical tradition. The "case study" which has been performed is that of the Peruvian Marxist Jose Carlos Mariategui (1895-1930). This dissertation argues that regardless of the broad range of studies on the writings of this Peruvian revolutionary thinker, there is still much to say about his idiosyncratic interpretation of the Peruvian society of his times and about his eminently anti-dogmatic conception of Marxism. In his own discursive practice he unveiled a critical response to the inherent and rigid determinism of the Marxist dogmatic orthodoxy widely accepted in Latin America and the rest of the world during his lifetime. His self-education and theoretical practice is described as a virtual "ingestion" of the 1920s Marxism and many other non-Marxist philosophical and theoretical notions which were critically transformed into an innovative and effectual thought replete with revolutionary relevance. The purpose in stressing this point in Mariategui's critical "adaptation" of Marxism is to accentuate the undeniable Eurocentric core of Marxism with which the Peruvian thinker had to contend. The reading of Mariategui which has been suggested, characterizes his theoretical practice as an immanent critique of Eurocentric Marxism. The relevance that Mariategui's writings bear for the problem of Latin American philosophy can be posited as a critique by practice of the traditional discourses of legitimation imposed on non-Eurocentric forms of thought.

This is a comparative study between Elizabeth Bishop and Carlos Drummond de Andrade which examines the trajectory of their poetry towards maturity. Inspired by Mikhail Bakhtin's notions on literary interpretation and intertextuality, this is an analysis that does not include the anxiety of influence, but rather explores the dialogic relations between poet (subject, personality), text, and context. A historicity of texts divided in four acts observes a progressive relation between poet and world. Beginning with the poet, the first act examines a trait of personality common to both poets—their gaucherie —and the projection of this trait in their art. The second and third acts successively discuss the relation between the poet and his/her family, the poet and the world, or more precisely, how the “strange idea of family” travels through poetry while it opens up more and more to a larger world. The final act closes the poet's dialectic with the world with a reading of crepuscular poems, combining a ripening of memories in the “creative time/space distance” with the voice of the mature poet.

This dissertation scrutinizes the writings of two major literary figures of early-twentieth-century Argentina and the United States with the aim of revealing how representations of motherhood function in their journalism as the site for a reformulation of the configuration of female subjectivities astride the private/public divide. Alfonsina Storni's and Charlotte Perkins Gilman's discursive acts of questioning socially and culturally validated mothering practices interrogate the classic divide, thus threatening to unsettle the very foundations of patriarchal ideology, which at least partly explains the neglect displayed towards this production. Alfonsina Storni's fame as Argentina's most famous "poetess of love" drastically overshadowed during her life and afterwards her journalistic contributions, which have as a result been largely overlooked by most scholarship on her work. In a similar vein, Charlotte Perkins Gilman's renown as a leading feminist thinker and reformer have traditionally led critics and scholars to focus almost exclusively on her utopian fiction, to the detriment of her journalistic endeavors. This study sets up a dialogue between the journalism of both women writers through the recuperation and examination of Storni's contributions to the "feminine" column of the journal La Nota and of Gilman's pieces for The Forerunner—the monthly she published entirely by herself. It is via a transgressive use of their journalism that both writers manage to critique the "domestication" of female subjectivity endemic to most existing accounts of motherhood, which cancel and negate the empowering possibilities of mothering practices for new forms of female agency. A close analysis of the discursive and rhetorical strategies employed by Alfonsina Storni and Charlotte Perkins Gilman thus helps unearth a neglected literary corpus and contributes at the same time to enriching new and innovative feminist analyses of mothering.

This dissertation explores the role of food representation and identity in Hispanic cultural production as they participate in establishing resistant agency despite historical contexts of authoritarian oppression. Accordingly, I explore subjectivity through the lens of food studies as it is grounded in notions of difference and therefore allows us to establish understandings of self and other - both personal and political. Next, I use this relationship between food and subjective experience to demonstrate how - regardless of the details in which it is manifested - in each of the historical contexts, the end result of food representation is a politics of resistance which in some fashion challenges the authoritarian status-quo. This is a process that occurs within the text, among characters and often manifested through a challenging of gender roles. However, these works (and specifically their varied historical trajectories) also demonstrate that the language of food extends far beyond the text, participating in larger projects that challenge, undermine, and rewrite the ethical atrocities committed during each of these oppressive political regimes. The novels and films included in this study were chosen to purposely span various geographical and historical time periods encompassing dictatorship, political transition, and those produced in democratic retrospect, which thus revisit an oppressive past in the Hispanic world. In chapter one, I explore food representation as it problematizes Puerto Rican identity in the face of United States imperialism in Luis Rafael Sánchez's Puerto Rican novel La Guaracha del Macho Camacho (1976). In chapter two, I analyze gastropoetics in Margarita Engle's US-Cuban novel Singing to Cuba (1993), as it establishes interconnectedness among the characters, which is juxtaposed with the ruptures created by Castro's communism. In chapter three, I investigate how culinary metaphor is used to rewrite Spain's history of Francoist oppression in Almudena Grandes' Spanish novel Inés y la alegría (2010). Finally, this study concludes with an analysis of food representation in two films that depict the transition from authoritarianism to democracy: Manuel Gutiérrez Aragón's La mitad del cielo (1986), a Spanish transitional piece, and Silvio Caiozzi's transitional film La luna en el espejo (1990), produced under Chilean dictatorship. / A Dissertation submitted to the Department of Modern Languages and Linguistics in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. / Fall Semester, 2014. / October 24, 2014. / Authoritarian Literature, Cultural Studies, Food Studies, Hispanic Literature, Transatlantic Literature, US-Latino Literature / Includes bibliographical references. / Enrique Álvarez, Professor Directing Dissertation; Bruce Boehrer, University Representative; Roberto Fernández, Committee Member; Lisa Wakamiya, Committee Member; Michael Uzendoski, Committee Member.

The aim of this thesis is focused on demonstrating the strong influence that Galician immigrants exerted on the Argentinian society at the beginning of the 20th century. In this transatlantic literary study, the bonds between the old and the new continent will be established by analysing some of the authors who became affected by immigration and exile conditions: Xosé Neira Vilas, Luis Seoane and Alfonso Rodríguez Castelao. The thesis will also examine the Argentinian literature related to immigration, and how some relevant authors accepted or rejected stereotyping. Both views, the one from exiles and the one from local authors, were blended in order to study the mutual influence that both cultures have had upon each other. There has not been much research regarding literary links between Galician and Argentinian authors, therefore the main purpose of this work is to search for connections among different writers from both sides of the Atlantic. In addition, the thesis analyses the importance of mainstream ideas such as nation, transnationalism and transculturation, and how these concepts have changed throughout history due to common experiences of migration and exile.