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The idea of the North, codified since the Old Testament as an empty space, also appears with this distinctive feature in the context of the northern border of New Spain. This notion of an empty space to the North presents a negative/positive signification that is homologous to the pair North/South. The process studied here involves the inversion that occurs on the northern border of New Spain. The study begins with the negative codification of the North expressed in the voyages of the discovery of America by Christopher Columbus, and follows its transmutation into its opposite in the optimistic hyperbole of Eusebio Francisco Kino. The processes of inversion in the systems of the fictionalization of the border territory to the north of New Spain are analyzed between these two extremes. The analysis begins with the naming of the first islands discovered by Columbus, where the analogical transportation of an East-West hierarchal system appears. Later in New Spain Hernan Cortes' foundation of Segura de la Frontera delimits a border zone to the south that carries the negative connotation of his failed journey to Honduras. There follows a process of inversion toward the North that is made concrete in the significant "California", the name given to an island of fabulous riches in Las Sergas de Esplandian. When the cortesian expression is later inverted in Cabeza de Vaca's Naufragios, the expression precipitates into a wholly fictitious character. This course continues later in Fr. Marcos de Niza with his journey to Cibola. Then in Gaspar de Villagra there is a movement from the profane to the sacred. Ultimately in Kino we find a utilitarian concept that annuls the previous mythical codes, thus determining a restructuring of the word. Within the tempo-spacial framework established in this dissertation, the process that appears in the texts is shown systematically, fulfilling the objective of this work, i.e., the study of the formation of the system of expression of the northern border from the sixteenth century to the beginning of the eighteenth.

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This thesis is an investigation of the thematic and stylistic similarities in three novels: Wuthering Heights, Moby-Dick, and Women in Love. The most outstanding similarity is that all the novels focus on the idea of the Unity behind all created things, a Being above, through and in all created beings. In Wuthering Heights this Unity is described in terms of the Eternity of Love; in Moby-Dick, it is Infinity; in Women in Love, it is the Reality which lies beneath the surface manifestations of all things. In each of these novels, also, the protagonist gains knowledge of this Unity through love. Inspired by love, he moves from perception of unity, through purgation of the self, to union with Being. The visionary novels express essentially the same ideas as many philosophic and religious works which deal with the union of man with the Infinite, or with man's attainment of the eternal Ideals. But the visionary novels contrast with such religious or philosophic works in that they present the way to union in purely human, purely material terms. In the visionary novels, also, characteristics of poetry, such as symbolic language and heightened rhythm, are used to focus the reader's attention on the infinite which shines through the finite world of the novel. In the visionary novel, both in theme and technique, the infinite and the finite become one. / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate

My thesis begins with the rapid tracking down of a word that demands the acknowledgment of a territory in its own right: Aztlan. I trace this term from prehispanic times up to the present in order to formulate the mythical, historical, cultural, and literary characteristics of a conglomerate that is currently identifiable and recognizable as the Chicano people of Aztlan. The main hypothesis of this work, which is to establish a coherent starting point for the study of the Aztlanese novel written in Spanish, is set within a historical-literary context. As a consequence, this thesis cannot encompass all the Aztlanese narratives written in Spanish; instead, it focuses specifically on two works--from the 19th and 20th centuries, respectively--that I consider the first and foremost historical-literary links. El hijo de la tempestad (1892), by Eusebio Chacon, and Peregrinos de Aztlan (1974), by Miguel Mendez, are the first texts that exhibit a clear literary awareness. I have what such concepts imply within an artistic framework. I am fully convinced that these two narrative texts are the first and foremost links in the Aztlanese novel as it currently exists, particularly in those novels written in Spanish. In some fashion, these two trail blazing novels constitute concrete examples that can help to establish and systematize, on the basis of specifically literary formulations, the literary tradition of the complex and heterogenous literary phenomenon which is Aztlan. My approach is restricted to a method that recognizes a literary work as a semi-autonomous structure--that is, one which exhibits structural relations with other facts and phenomena outside itself. The second chapter traces the meaning and location of the concept Aztlan, and it notes that the said concept is a myth and a spiritual rallying point among Chicanos. The chapter also comments on the principal aspects of the history of people of Mexican origin in the United States, as well as the so-called "Chicano Movement". The third chapter discusses the principal literary tendencies with regard to esthetic phenomena. It delimits the concept of the novel, the parameters of Aztlanese expression--particularly of works written in Spanish--and, of course, my approach. Each of the two following chapters is devoted to one of the two novels at issue. Each chapter studies the concept and function of literature held by its novel’s author, as well as the structural process exemplified by each of the texts. Significantly, both novels display characteristics that allow them to be classified with modern and contemporary Latinamerican novels, respectively: El hijo de la tempestad clearly fits in with Naturalism, Peregrinos de Aztlan in with Superrealism.

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published_or_final_version / English Studies and Comparative Literature / Master / Master of Philosophy

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This study calls for a re-evaluation of contemporary regionalist literary theory. It argues that traditional models of the discourse have been too heavily influenced by nineteenth century realist aesthetics and political ideologies. Because most scholars continue to interpret regionalist texts according to a resolutely empirical reading of geography, literary regionalism has fallen out of touch with the new kinds of "unrealistic," generic landscapes that now dominate North American culture in the postindustrial era. Drawing heavily on recent work by postmodern geographers such as Edward Soja, David Harvey, Michael Dear and Derek Gregory, this project updates regionalist theory by "re-placing" the artificially stabilized reading of geography that dominated the nineteenth century with a more self-consciously spatialized reading of what Soja calls our contemporary "real-and-imagined" places. By grafting together traditional regionalism and postmodern spatial theory we improve on both contributing discourses. In a "postmodern-regionalist" literary criticism, traditional regionalism sheds its reputation for theoretical naivete, while the elusive abstractions of postmodern theory gain a real-world referent, and a specific geographical index. When we "read postmodernism regionally" - - when we aggressively interrogate where this kind of fiction comes from and the places it represents - - we realize that the canons of postmodern fiction in Canada and the United States have been influenced by two very different spatial epistemologies. Rather than being "determined" by their real geographies, Canadian and American postmodernism have been more directly influenced by two different readings of geography. Works by Thomas Pynchon, Toni Morrison, and Don DeLillo demonstrate that American postmodernism often interprets social space according to what Henri Lefebvre calls the idealistic "the illusion of transparency," while texts by Canadian postmodernists such as Robert Kroetsch, Wayne Johnston and Guy Vanderhaeghe tend to fall under Lefebvre's more materialistic "illusion of opacity." The ambiguous figure of Douglas Coupland - - a Canadian writer most critics treat as an American - - puts the spatial conventions of postmodernism in both countries in sharp relief. In an American postmodernism, dominated by generic suburban settings, regions will almost always be seen as imaginary projections, while in a Canadian postmodernism, dominated by the Prairies, regions will almost always retain some sense of their material reality.