Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Iowa, 2009. / Thesis supervisors: Tom Lutz, Rob Latham. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 239-248).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 1997. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves [238]-250).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, Santa Cruz, 1999. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves [419]-460).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Chicago, Dept. of English Language and Literature, March 2003. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 211-222). Also available on the Internet.

Esta disertación estudia la construcción de sujetos en tres novelas latinoamericanas de la segunda mitad del siglo XX: Balún-Cavan (1957) de Rosario Castellanos, Dreaming in Cuban (1992) de Cristina García y Chambacú (1967) de Manuel Zapata Olivella. Para llevar a cabo este estudio parto aquí de la noción foucaultiana de discursos como prácticas que estructuran nuestro sentido de realidad al construir nociones como las de sujeto e identidad desde las que nos pensamos y actuamos. Es a partir del examen de estas nociones que analizo cómo han sido construido los sujetos en los textos escogidos, desde qué discursos. La nación, el género, la hibridez y la alteridad son los discursos que se enfatizan en el análisis de sujetos y de la construcción de identidades realizado aquí. La lectura de estos textos se lleva a cabo siguiendo pensadores como James Clifford y su noción de nativo híbrido y culturas como rutas, Gloria Anzaldúa y su noción de fronteras como heridas vivas y abiertas, Mary Louise Pratt y sus zonas de contacto, Benedict Andersen y su nación como comunidad imaginada, Cornejo Polar y su crítica del mestizaje como resolutorio, Benítez Rojo y su postulación de la criollización como movimiento del caos, Stuart Hall y su noción de identidades como reposicionamientos. Todos estos pensadores y nociones cuestionan la bipolaridad Sujeto/Otro. Este cuestionamiento es la columna central de esta disertación que pretende no sólo ver en los textos analizados cómo los llamados tradicionalmente Otros (mujeres, US Latinos, Afrocolombianos, indígenas) son construidos como sujetos, sino cómo es replanteada en ese intento la bipolaridad tradicional. Cómo Sujeto y Otro terminan siendo Alteridad. Siendo. Por eso a partir de ello no es posible hablar de su identidad sino de sus identidades, de sus siendo en esas identidades y discursos.

Magic realism emerged as a literary force in Latin America in the 1940s, and it has continued to have an impact on literature throughout the Americas through the start of the twenty-first century. In recent years, a number of postcolonial scholars have noted that magic realist texts are being used as a form of social protest throughout the world. These scholars have labeled magic realism subversive, hybrid, mestizo, or “impure.” The implications of the relationship between magic realist literature and social protest, however, have not been the focus of detailed scholarship. This study explores the relationship between magic realism and social protest in novels written in Latin America and the United States between 1950 and 1990, seeking to determine why the literary mode of magic realism is an effective vehicle for addressing volatile social issues. Organized chronologically, the study begins with an overview of the term “magic realism” and a brief discussion of some of the important predecessors of magic realist literature in the Americas. Later chapters use a range of theoretical tools within a comparative framework in order to perform detailed analysis of specific writers—Juan Rulfo, Elena Garro, Gabriel García Márquez, Isabel Allende, Rudolfo Anaya, Alma Luz Villanueva, Toni Morrison, and Linda Hogan—in order to explore how magic realist techniques have been adapted to different forms of protest according to each author's time and geographical space.

<p> Although Lillian Hellman was obsessed with truth, in her memoirs she often exaggerates, confabulates, and lies. So pervasive was Heliman's penchant for making things up that her reputation as a memoirist has suffered under a deluge of criticism. Hellman personified a era of many societal changes: greater sexual freedom for women, more opportunities for women to work, and television's growing impact on creating celebrities. Foremost, however, central to .Hellman's life was-the advent of McCarthyism, a period she describes in <i> Scoundrel Time Scoundrel Time</i> has drawn more criticism--actually vitriol--than any of her works, possibly because it tells many unwanted truths about that era. Despite her proclivity for fabulation:, Hellman's "stories"--her works of fiction presented as fact--often engage those underlying truths essentially "truer" than her surface fictions.</p>

A sequence of poems, mostly in a phonetically rendered Eastern New England accent, follows the exploits and thoughts of a young man from central Massachusetts, as well as a cast of secondary characters. This is followed by an essay that examines the sequence's salient aspects of language, voice, place, and mythology, and attempts to situate each in a context of forbears and influences.

This thesis considers Ralph Waldo Emerson’s compositional process of ‘double writing’ as a distinctly theorised and intellectually coherent practice that generated discrete bodies of text: his private journals and notebooks; and the public essays, lectures, and poems. Throughout Emerson scholarship, critics tend to quote the two bodies without differentiation, often either neglecting the issue of their coexistence or asserting the priority of one form over the other. I contend instead that principles of self-reading, accretive reinscription, and a perpetuated relation to his own text condition Emerson’s ideas of poetic agency and the role of literature in broader socio-cultural contexts, to the extent that they become the preeminent factor in shaping his philosophical and literary aspirations. Focusing on the period 1836-50, from the beginning of the coexistence of public and private corpuses to the point at which he finalises his theory of textual relation, I trace the way in which Emerson’s ongoing textual investment first echoes—and later disrupts—aspirations to realise a philosophy of the subject steeped in the romantic tradition. The first part of the thesis examines the two textual bodies insofar as they reflect upon each other and on theories of composition, finding that Emerson gradually loses faith in the function of his public works up to 1842. In the second section of the thesis, I illustrate the continual revision his relation to text undergoes in the major works of the 1840s, as his compositional theory adapts to first conceptualise and then fulfil certain ethical obligations of the scholar and poet. I end by examining the poetic apotheosis figured by Poems (1847) and Representative Men (1850), which has little in common with his youthful aspirations, but which explains the ‘sage’-like mantle he accepted in American life and letters from the 1850s until his death in 1882. As well as revising conceptions of Emerson’s literary agency and the structure of his canon, this thesis offers an original reading of the theory of an author’s socio-cultural role in the mid nineteenth-century through the example of one of the era’s major figures.

This thesis focuses on the portrayal of men and masculinities in Carol Shields’s novels. There is a conspicuous gap in the scholarly research on Shields's oeuvre which significantly sidelines her male characters. The focus of academic interest often falls on the author's engagement with feminism, almost solely concentrating on her female protagonists. Along with new developments in masculinity studies I give prominent attention to men in Shields's novels to illustrate how the feminist standpoint is filtered through masculine perspectives. The aim of this thesis is to show how the presentation of male characters in Carol Shields’s novels refracts wider societal changes and evolving theoretical paradigms of masculinity, and to trace how these portrayals evolve as a consequence of social developments. The thesis also stresses how Shields's novels become increasingly experimental, partially embracing postmodern ideas and techniques and combining them with questions about the position and situation of women and men in society. Only by reading male and female characters together, the thesis argues, are we able to build a holistic picture of Shields's literary achievement. Even though, on the surface, Shields's narratives feature most average male characters – white, middle-class, heterosexual North Americans – the protagonists and their constructions vary considerably from one narrative to another. Shields published her first novel in 1976 and her last in 2002. Thirty years of her writing career coincide with a turbulent period in the social life of the Western hemisphere. The emphasis of this thesis is on how Shields’s novels engage with the changing intellectual environment of second- and third-wave feminism, masculinity studies and postmodernism. Construction of gender in the novels changes: it becomes much more complex, less defined and more open to (re)interpretation. In novels such as Swann, The Republic of Love or The Stone Diaries we witness the emergence of postmodern masculinity which is fragmented, self-questioning and unstable. Men’s stories become increasingly complex as filtered through numerous layers of narrators’ and focalisers’ lenses. Also male characters gain more potential as protagonists achieve the capacity to reinvent themselves and their stories. However, as depicted in the novels, a postmodern man still occupies a dominant social position over women and still blames his mother for his failures in adult life, in spite of socio-political changes. As such Shields’s works express great sadness and disillusionment with feminism’s failure to allow women to assume equal status with men; however, the texts never blame men openly for social imbalance. Rather, Shields’s protagonists are united in their inability to control their stories and it is the social system that oppresses and limits women and men. Finally, the thesis shows the author's great skill and deep engagement in revealing the workings of the twentieth-century North American culture which reshapes definitions of what a man and what a woman is at a given time in history. Shields’s novels uncover and expose the mechanisms behind such artificial and arbitrary constructions which are often blindly accepted as the only true norm.