The dissertation examines fashion narratives in Argentine periodicals ranging from 1829 to 1880. It considers how both male and female writers, from conservative as well as liberal political camps, created an entire discourse of fashion for specific political and/or ideological purposes. My hypothesis is that while fashion commentaries appear to offer little insight into the dynamics of social relations and politics, upon closer inspection, they reveal an entire network of negotiations and strategies that often involved issues of race, class and gender (all of which were highly political topics in the period of Argentine nation formation from the early 1830s to the late 1800s). Fashion was also a place where the meaning of modernity in a peripheral context was negotiated vis-à-vis metropolitan conceptions of the term as well as a place where the political and cultural strategies that would modernize Argentina were often debated. The dissertation first considers the years 1829-1852 marked by the Federalist Juan Manuel de Rosas domination of Argentine politics, economics and social life and by the emergence of the prestigious Generation of 1837. The dissertation first examines how this Generation (whose members were principally from the Unitarist ranks) incorporated fashion into its writing and how fashion served to articulate many of its anxieties over nation formation, modernization and the changing gender roles brought about by Independence. The dissertation then considers writings from members of the Federalist ranks and how these latter writers used fashion and traditional dress for their own projects of state. The second part of the dissertation considers periodicals published after 1852 and it focuses on the emergence of women writers and the major female fashion journals that flourished during this period. Whereas female journalism was practically inexistent before 1852, now these writers used fashion narratives to metaphorically discuss topics ranging from nation formation and politics, to changing gender roles after the Rosista dictatorship to modernity and the role of consumption in creating an ideal sense of citizenship and finally to public health, hygiene and womens immoral participation in the public sphere through prostitution.

AESTHETIC OSCILLATIONS IN THE NARRATIVES OF FOUR FEMALE AUTHORS FROM THE SOUTHERN CONE: NORAH LANGE, MARÍA LUISA BOMBAL, ARMONÍA SOMERS Y CLARICE LISPECTOR My dissertation is an examination of the work of several key women writers from the Southern Cone (Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, and Brazil), and an evaluation of the literary criticism that affected womens writing from the 1930s to the 1980s. It therefore questions the critical establishment and addresses a range of problems related to aesthetic values. It deals with several kinds of writing by both female authors and male authors to whom they are compared and contrasted within the context of the tradition to which they belong. What is significant is that each of these women writers (Norah Lange, María Luisa Bombal, Armonía Somers, and Clarice Lispector) has at least two modes of writing, and both of them are examples of womens writing / feminine writing, but not as fixed essences. What I have undertaken to identify in their narratives is a range of problems related to aesthetic values and these problems are more evident when viewed from the perspective of gender. In other words, how do they stand in relation to the aesthetic values of the Avant-garde? On the one hand, their writing embodies the aesthetic values promoted by the Avant-garde. Yet they also write narratives that are not considered to display these aesthetic values (e.g., melodramatic ones). Thus, there are two groups of issues to be considered. On the one hand, writing centered on Vanguard aesthetic values, and on the other hand, writing on the margins of Vanguard aesthetic values, including the melodramatic on three levels (as genre, as theme, and as a form of cultural agency). Therefore, within institutional spaces such womens writing either does or does not become legitimated, creating a kind of oscillation between these two trends. This phenomenon has become even more pronounced as the market in the field of culture has grown. In summary, both the common ground and the zones of tension between gender and aesthetic values have become increasingly visible as these values have been constituted and consolidated within the vanguard and as the market in the field of culture has grown. It is from this perspective that I analyze the narrative works of these four twentieth-century women authors.

In its first two sections, this dissertation offers a discussion of contemporary debates about the Haitian Revolution (1791-1804), its relation to Western Modernity, and its immediate consequences in the Caribbean of the early 19th century. The argument begins with an extended critique of Modernity Disavowed (2004) and its theorizations of cultural hybridity and alternative modernities as a model for understanding the Revolution and the possibilities it opens up. Fischers perspective does not give sufficient attention to the political and cultural practices of the insurgent masses of slaves. To do so requires criticizing the prevalent distinctions between tradition and modernity or between the pre-political and the political in the most influential historical representations of the Revolution (CLR James, Genovese, Buck-Morss, etc). Following Alain Badious reflection on the notion of event, the second part also interrogates the underlying historicism of some of these representations. These two sections function as a general background for a third, final one, which focuses on a historical document that is one of the most important expressions of the social imaginaries created by the Haitian Revolution in the Caribbean. This document is the record of the interrogation of José Antonio Aponte, a free black artisan, who lived and worked in Havana between the final decades of 18th century, and the first years of the 19th who was accused, in 1812, of being the mastermind behind a conspiracy against slavery and colonialism in Cuba. The center of the interrogation by the authorities was a cultural artifact of his own described as a libro de pinturas or book of paintings. This artifact regarded by the authorities as the main evidence against Aponte- was clearly influenced by the Haitian Revolution and contained a vast amount of images that seems to be a kind of visual history of Africans and African descendants, including the leaders of the Haitian Revolution Toussaint, Christophe and Dessalines. Part 3 studies the description of some these images as a form of political theology concerned with articulating a genealogy for a form of statehood, suspended problematically between the teleology of modernity and a different, non-Western form, of historical teleology.

NARRATIVES DURING AND AFTER DICTATORSHIP: EXPERIENCIE, COMMUNITY AND NARRATION. This dissertation explores the relationship among literature, politics, the loss of community, and the representation of society in Chile during the transition from dictatorship to post-dictatorship. The first part explores narratives which deal with the constitution of social representation in a state of exception, marked by extreme experiences of pain, fear, terror, and uncertainty. Section A of Chapter One outlines the social thought of reactionary thinkers like Jaime Guzmán, who strongly influenced the dictatorship, arguing that these thinkers provided the language to produce a discursive division of Chilean society into two antagonistic camps: enemies and friends. Section B describes the consequences of this Manichean division of society through a study of the representation of torture in testimonial narratives. The dictatorship, it argues, had the potential to change the conditions of representation, blocking the possibilities of public knowledge about torture and assassination that an important part of the population was undergoing. Testimonio contested that blockage, but in doing so also revealed its own limits. Chapter Two deals with the practice of the Avanzada, the Chilean neo-avant garde, as a response to conditions of life under the dictatorship, analyzing in particular Diamela Eltits novel Lumpérica. The Avanzada presented itself as an alternative to testimonio, but it also embodied problems of representation that have to do with its avant-garde aesthetic ideology and its problematic relation to notions of community and identity. Chapters Three and Four deal with narratives produced after the dictatorship. Chapter Three works with the urban chronicles of Pedro Lemebel, exploring the conditions of possibility of his proposal to traffic with rumors of mass culture between the worlds of the popular and the academic. The final chapter deals with the neo-noir novels of Ramón Díaz Eterovic, which, through the persona of their main protagonist, Heredia, produce a critique of the neo-liberal order that follows the dictatorship, and a represention the continuing conditions of violence and corruption in Chile today. The dissertation ends by raising some questions about the role of contemporary literature in constructing an alternative vision of the society and the nation in countries emerging from dictatorship such as Chile.

This is a study of the use of the present perfect and the preterite in the Spanish of Lima, Peru. It explores whether specific linguistic factors, such as situation type, temporal adverbials and type of speech, as well as social factors, such as age, gender and social stratum have an effect on the use of these verb forms. It also aims to find out whether the frequency of the preterite is increasing or not through time, and whether there is evidence of a change in progress. The study also discusses the extent to which the distribution of the preterite and the present perfect in the Limeño variety reflects a process of dialect and language contact. This is an experimental study that uses a questionnaire as a data-collecting instrument, created with the purpose of comparing the same linguistic context and tense choice. This study involves sixty-four participants, all of them Limeño Spanish monolinguals. Results show a significant effect of the linguistic factors on the selection of the preterite and the present perfect, as well as of their interactions with social factors. They also give evidence of different patterns of tense choice according to social to strata, which seem to be linked to language contact. Results also provide evidence of the interface between lexical properties and the grammatical categories of external aspect and tense, thus giving information about how the language components interact, and indirectly supporting a modular approach to the study of language.

This dissertation proposes an analysis of representative texts within the category of intellectual nations. The idea of intellectual nations is inscribed in the project of questioning the centrality and canonicity of certain cultural productions that have given legitimacy to the hegemonic idea of nationalism, which helped sustain the PRI regime in Mexico. The dissertation, thus, seeks to follow an intellectual tradition that thought the nation in coordinates different to those institutionalized by the PRI State. I define intellectual nation as a discursive construction that imagines other forms of conceiving the national, articulated within the literary field and enunciated from a non-hegemonic position with respect to the field of power. In these terms, the dissertation is focused in the specific study of representative texts within this tradition, written between 1917 and 2000, through certain terms that have been defining the evolution of Mexican literature: national culture, tradition, modernity, border, Occidentalism. This study is thus centered in texts that allow the study of intellectual nations in diverse historical contexts. These contexts have been chosen in order to speak of important moments of transformation within the intellectual field, as well as of the state ideology and the emergence of social movements where the intellectual nations played an important role.

In this dissertation, I study an aspect unexplored in both the field of history and that of literary studies: the relationship between two groups that offered resistance to the authoritarian governments of the seventies, the activists of the revolutionary left, convinced of the necessity of an armed fight, and the homosexuals, committed to the cause of sexual liberation. The novels under consideration propose a series of answers about the failure of a convergence that could never have been: that of homosexuals and the Latin American left, or in broader terms, a meeting of two projects that many thought were analogous: sexual liberation and political revolution, under the assumption that the former would allow the reorganization of social life under new and more inclusive parameters. The issue that guides this dissertation is the different ways in which homosexual subjectivity is reconfigured in order to be accepted as a revolutionary agent, where gender has a fundamental role since femininity can either have a positive and subversive value or else be perceived as a sign of weakness and decadence. The first chapter is a historical and cultural introduction to the Latin American revolutionary left, giving special attention to its views about sexuality. In the second chapter, I consider Manuel Puigs "El beso de la mujer araña", which has a foundational value within the series because it is the first novel to articulate the historical debate between homosexuality and the revolutionary left. I also analyze "La más maravillosa música (una historia de amor peronista)", by Osvaldo Bazán, where the question about a possible alliance between homosexuality and the political left is revisited. In the third chapter, I study a series of texts where the different representations of homosexuality are governed by rigid sexual and gender politics. I include "Nivaldo e Jerônimo" by Darcy Penteado; "El sol de la tarde", by Luis González de Alba; and "Entre la resignación y el paraíso. Desnudos en la alberca", by Hugo Villalobos. The last chapter examines the novel "Stella Manhattan" by Silviano Santiago, to investigate how different homosexual subjectivities complicate and reevaluate the problem outlined by Puig.

This dissertation is an examination of the problematic of Russian identity as manifest in the prose literature and cinema during the last two decades of the twentieth century. The reassertion of Russian national identity in the post-Soviet Russian Federation masks a crisis, the historical roots of which extend back to the development of Imperial Russia. The analysis employs the tools of Lacanian psychoanalysis to diagnose this crisis and to analyze the almost unsurmountable difficulties involved in the struggle either to recover or to create anew a usable Russian identity for the twenty-first century. The first chapter reviews the theoretical literature on nationalism as well as studies of the problematic conception of Russian nationhood. It also grounds the use of Lacanian theory for cultural analysis and illustrates, through a case study of Ivan Dykhovichnyis 1992 film Moscow Parade, the utility of a carefully deployed psychoanalytic interpretation of a cultural text from the period under consideration. The following four chapters contain analyses of four identifiable trends in late- and post-Soviet Russian literature and cinema. The heirs to the Village Prose movement, in their engagement with the postmodern environment of this period, reveal in their works an attempt to recover a lost identity that is trapped within the self-reflecting structure of an Imaginary Russia. Advocates of the postmodern in Russian culture deconstruct a Symbolic network of cultural texts in which the dissonant discourses of nation and empire generate an identity that seeks substance in the ephemeral. As the sots-art movement spread from graphic arts to literature and film, it illustrated the ultimate logic of a cultural identity based on the endless generation of ideological signifiers. Finally, the young writer Viktor Pelevin and filmmakers such as Karen Shakhnazarov illustrate the lure and the dangers of a culture that seizes upon fantasy as a way out of the cultural conundrum. The same analytical tools are deployed in the concluding chapter to argue that the period under consideration has come to an end and that Russian culture has entered a new period.

This study investigates the recent implementation of the Escuelas de Bienvenida program (Welcome Schools), in the Autonomous Community of Madrid (CAM). Specifically, it focuses on the Aulas de Enlace, one integral part of the program. This research investigates the participants everyday experiences, and the perceptions and meanings attached to those experiences while in the program. Additionally, the study identifies the factors that affect participant perceptions, analyzes the impact of the program on student learning, and documents their intentions to continue to post-compulsory education. The study also attempts to uncover the match between the official policy and the participants lived experiences and perceptions of the program. The participants in this study were 116 recently arrived Chinese, Moroccan and Romanian secondary students, 36 Aulas de Enlace teachers, 3 principals, 2 inspectors and 2 policy and decision makers. Research was conducted in 23 high schools in the CAM, and four were selected for case studies. Methods of data collection included survey questionnaires, semi-structured interviews, participant and non-participant observation, and document analysis. Data were analyzed using descriptive statistics, content analysis, and member checking. This research shows that program design, implementation and practice do not reflect the research literature on second language acquisition and effective immigrant minority education. Consequently, policy and practice are guided by misconceptions that do not influence positively the education of immigrant children. Furthermore, this research shows that the Spanish language learning goals of the program are not achieved equally by all children, and integration into the Spanish education system is not uniformally realized. This finding renders the claim that the program provides equal education for all invalid. The study also shows that program planning and implementation were not carefully undertaken, which resulted in stereotypical views of minority students. Stereotypes are posited to affect the teachers interactions with children and their expectations of performance. The findings of the study raise questions about the political motivations behind program implementation. This study underscores the importance of giving voice to the constituents of educational innovations. In doing so, I hope to promote conversation that will lead to more thoughtful and informed policy making and practice.

This thesis examines the Latin American avant-garde movements of the 1920s and 1930s not through the usual focus, poetry, but through narrative fiction. I am working here with three 1930s novels that portray profound ideological concerns that had not often been considered in earlier Latin American avant-garde narratives. El tungsteno, by Peruvian César Vallejo, is a mining novel that includes indigenous issues. Parque industrial, by Brazilian Patrícia Galvao, is a gender-based novel with urban and proletarian themes. And Cubagua, by the Venezuelan Enrique Bernardo Núñez, is an historical novel, confronting the trauma of neo/colonization with the beginning of the populist modernization project. The beginning of the 1930s provides an important perspective from which to focus on the literary development of the continent. This is because it was not only a powerful world-changing moment but also, as I argue, an opportunity for a rupture within the institutions of literature. After the world political, social, and economic crises of 1928-1929, the Latin American avant-garde had to search for other ideological and aesthetic tactics to participate in the debates about national configurations in the international context, that reflect the emerge of definitive new social forces. My proposal is to explore the literary tensions of these Latin-American narratives, suggesting that it is possible to identify in them concerns such as the influences of mass movements within peripheral societies. I argue that despite their different responses to the literary-historical conjuncture, each of the texts chosen exhibited conflictive components which I call contaminatory: that is to say, an unstable (even contradictory) mixture of political as well as literary elements from very different origins. One of the means of accomplishing this, after a review and critique of some key avant-garde concepts, is through an analysis of the relationship between Vallejos cultural essays (including his USSR travel books) and El tungsteno. Then, in the case of Parque industrial, I evaluate the links with other Brazilian works and female voices of the time. Finally, I assess the relationships between Cubagua and some of his historical works, before summing up the different contaminatory strategies of the era in my conclusion.