abstract: ABSTRACT Emile Zola is considered one of the fathers of 19th century French Naturalist literature. He is famous for his eloquence, sarcasm and is well known for being a provocateur. He wants to follow the principles of science: observation of his characters in their living environment (or milieu). He holds that individuals inherit physical and personality traits from their ancestors, such as atavism, which can be passed from grandfather to father and father to son. This assumption leads to Social Darwinism and impacted Zola like many other European intellectuals who believed in the new social sciences. Religion was going extinct on the old continent and the trend was to apply these theories to literature and humanities. The author also captures the political and social unrest of a struggling working class in his novel Germinal, where starving miners rebel against the bourgeois class that exploits them. Baldomero Lillo is a Chilean naturalist follower of Emile Zola who found inspiration in Germinal to write Sub Terra-short stories depicting the grim life of the coal miners. The author knows them well since he shared his existence with the miners in Lota, in the southern region of Santiago. Unlike Zola, Lillo, who was less educated and less inclined to trust science, opts for a compassionate Naturalism which relates more to his culture and personal inclinations. Le milieu or el medio ambiente in the Sub Terra stories is dreadful and the author seeks to expose the master/slave relationship in a society that still resembles the European Middle Ages. Le milieu, that is to say the external forces that surround the miners (their geographical, social and political environment), eventually engulfs and condemns them to a life of servitude and misery. Determinism on both continents decides the fate of each member of the society.   / Dissertation/Thesis / M.A. French 2012

This doctoral dissertation examines the intersection between body and nation in the context of Spanish American naturalist short stories from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The many forms of naturalism are useful for exploring national and societal concerns, yet most existing scholarship focuses exclusively on the naturalist novel. By combining the theories of Michel Foucault, Benedict Anderson, and Cesare Lombroso, among others, this dissertation considers the treatment of characters' bodies in their historical contexts and the larger national concerns they portray. Collections by three authors from the Southern Cone are studied: Sub terra, Baldomero Lillo (Chile, 1904); Cuentos de la Pampa, Manuel Ugarte (Argentina, 1903); and Campo, Javier de Viana (Uruguay, 1896). The prologue introduces the theoretical framework that supports the analyses in subsequent chapters and describes the cultural context of the literary movement. It argues that the short story is a particularly useful tool for exploring this topic because, due to its brevity, characters' bodies must often relay vital information. Chapter one analyzes Sub terra and the Chilean miners it presents, studying its connection to the Chilean national body's exploitation at the hands of foreign capitalists who are solely interested in extracting its wealth of natural resources. Chapter two moves to Argentina and examines Cuentos de la Pampa, exploring those characters who reside in limbo between past and present, civilization and barbarism. Chapter three is dedicated to the study of Campo and the ways in which Javier de Viana uses the degraded gaucho body to represent the societal decay plaguing the Uruguayan countryside. For all of these authors, naturalist short stories prove an effective means of exploring national concerns. Within the genre of short fiction, every word is of vital importance and, thus, the body frequently serves as a vessel to communicate ideas such as moral and physical decay, weakness, abuse, and excess. Characters' bodies are a microcosm of the national body as a whole, whose maladies these three authors explore in a variety of ways. / Spanish

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