Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Pennsylvania, 1940. / Bibliography: p. 57-58.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas, 1964. / Vita. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 235-254).

Thesis--University of Texas. / Vita. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 235-254).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--UCLA, 2009. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 469-507).

Time, as the title suggests, is the main character of Tiempo diámetro. This brief and unusual phrase embodies the content of the text in an intuitive way rather than in a conceptual one. The sole word diameter brings a precise image to our mind: the circumference, the line that crosses it and, why not, even if it’s not explicitly mentioned, the dot that marks the radius. This simple yet complex image, and its ambiguous set of symbols, are a good point of reference, as I see it, to portray the various manifestations of time, which I approach as a human concept, experience and condition, and also as a linear, cyclical and static phenomenon.

So, everything finished orbiting around the concern about the gap that exists between language and things designated by it, between word and reality. Language is an imperfect resource of communication, breaking its link with the world but also needing to coexists with it. But there's also the past narrative, that determines so deeply the way we narrate us the present. History is a continuum. Writing is always a political act.

My dissertation explores how the concepts of collective memory, identity and nostalgia are defined in Cuban culture after the end of the Soviet Union, and how these definitions relate to the presence of Soviet culture in Cuban daily life during at least thirty years, from the 1960s to the 1990s. The presence of Soviet aesthetics and symbols in Cuban literature and cinema from the 1990s to onward appears not just as physical traces but also as the representation of a nostalgic space and as the allegory of an identity in transition. I argue that after the collapse of the Soviet Union, a group of Cuban authors experienced a sense of nostalgia that is linked to the loss of a collective memory from the period when their nation thrived as an ideological partner of the Soviet Union. I also argue that despite the fact that the Communist Party continues to hold power, with the de-penalization of American currency, Cuba is a post-socialist country. These circumstances contributed to the emergence of an imagined Soviet-Cuban sentimental community, which despite ideological differences among its members, retains a common focal point: a generation's memories. The consumption of certain cultural products, among them cartoons, allowed the formation of a Cuban identity marked by affection towards Soviet cultural forms. Daily contact with the Soviet experience brought about an aesthetic where the use of Soviet symbols is frequent: words in Russian, music, graphic arts and other Soviet references. There are many young Cubans with Russian names; also, in the houses and on the streets there are still cars and appliances from the Soviet period. This Soviet aesthetic includes literature, cinematography, music, theatrical performances, and even online sites. The Cuban Soviet past continues in the Cuban present as one of the crucial cultural imaginaries. There is not an ideological nostalgia; nostalgia is a means for mourning the end of a world. The end of this world, finally, has allowed the birth of multiple, unstable and personal worlds, some of them related to the Soviet era in Cuba. I center my analysis on authors such as Anna Lidia Vega Serova, Jesús Díaz, Adelaida Fernández de Juan, Gleyvis Coro Montanet, Antonio José Ponte and José Manuel Prieto. In their novels and short stories we encounter traces of Soviet presence. At the same time, there has been a flourishing of documentaries after the 1990s that explore what the Soviets left behind in Cuban society after their country disappeared.

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This dissertation examines the emergence and consolidation of a textual corpus known as the sicaresca novel, a new genre that proliferated in Colombia in the 1990s. These novels emerged from the violence of the drug wars, and are named after the sicarios, young paid assassins recruited by drug traffickers. The main hypothesis claims that the sicaresca novel is a new literary genre that opens with Our Lady of the Assassins by Fernando Vallejo, and is consolidated by Morir con Papá by Óscar Collazos, Rosario Tijeras by Jorge Franco, and Sangre ajena by Arturo Alape. This work builds on discourse analysis and theorizes some of the characteristics of the sicaresca novel that create a distinctive narrative discourse, directly engaged with the political, economic, and social reality of Colombia. The first chapter is devoted to the effect of drug-trafficking on the rise of a new subculture where the sicario’s attitudes and beliefs are embedded, and relates the sicaresca to other narratives about drug-trafficking. The second chapter studies specific narrative forms in Our Lady of the Assassins that will be copied, altered or subverted by the subsequent novels, such as the use of a street vernacular known as parlache, and other devices borrowed from oral tradition. The third chapter studies fictional configurations of the sicario archetype in relation to the Bildungsroman, the sentimental novel and the picaresca novel. This section reveals how each archetype denaturalizes presumed natural concepts about the sicario figure, validated by official discourses. The fourth chapter examines the relation between the sicaresca novel and mass media. It questions the role of the cultural critic in the reception of the sicaresca novel as a whole, and analyzes how the dialogue between literary and cinematic discourse is established for Our Lady of the Assassins and Rosario Tijeras and their adaptations to film The sicaresca novel is built on the transformation of narrative devices used by testimonial writings, historical accounts and sensationalist press related to drugtrafficking and its young assassins. All the works studied represent a critique of the social, economic and cultural changes that conditioned the sicario’s appearance during the last decades.

My dissertation examines three novels by Colombian author Fernando Vallejo: La virgen de los sicarios (1994), El desbarrancadero (2001), and La rambla paralela (2002). Vallejo is considered by many to be the most controversial Latin American novelist of our time. His literary work is filled with harsh criticism towards key pillars of civilization, from religion and democracy to motherhood, making him a symbol of the "politically incorrect" in contemporary Latin American narrative. This dissertation proves that there is much more to Vallejo's work than the controversy it generates, which has been the focus of much of the literary criticism on him. I show that the discourse of Vallejo's narrator focuses on criticism and nostalgia as a way of dealing with the crisis of modernity in contemporary Colombia. This allows me to establish the origin of the author's critical view of the world in his narrative work: a deep sense of nostalgia for the values of modernity in the midst of the chaos of contemporary life in Colombia, as well as a profound feeling of frustration upon the discovery that they might have actually existed only in the realm of discourse. My research also explores the reasons behind the radical turn in the narrator's view of the world that is evidenced in Vallejo's latter works, as his disillusionment eradicates his belief in criticism and replaces it with a state of nihilism that can only lead to death. Ultimately, my dissertation establishes how Vallejo's narrative reaches its limits by destroying the very arguments on which it once relied.