The purpose of this dissertation is to study the literary discourse in the narrative texts of Miguel Mendez, contextualizing them within the specific historical time and space of the U.S.-Mexican border during the contemporary period. It is our specific aim to demonstrate that his literary texts are structured upon base that lends them coherence and gives them continuity. A symbolization of an historical rupture or break has meaning on a personal, internal level because it represents the author's irrevocable loss of the cultural milieu of childhood, a history of affective-spiritual disintegration due to specific events in his life. As a literary structural technique found in the narrative world of Miguel Mendez's fictional works, this symbolization presents the characteristics of an ambivalent poetics of rupture that questions the unity of historical reality. The image in his work of polysymmetrical reality has two faces, two perspectives: on one hand, a tragic, pessimistic view of the contemporary world; and on the other, a hopeful, ironic, and optimistic view of life. This bipolar stance is a consequence of a real break, of a concrete separation, of an historical barrier: the geopolitical and cultural border that is viewed as a powerful obstacle that impedes and makes difficult a collective conviviality between cultures, and ultimately the possibility of a better world. In this sense, Mendez's poetics reflects an external social division. That is, Mendez's view of an imaginary world recreates and is a manifestation, a representation of a border society profoundly and intentionally divided. This division, which occurred ostensibly to establish racial and ethnic order, is reproduced aesthetically and at the effective level in his works as an overall image of disenchantment, disillusionment, and deceit. His is a poetics that symbolizes the dichotomy of separation, barriers, and disintegration. At the same time, it is a poetics that holds out the hope of a new integration of limits and borders. This basic signification that gives coherence to Miguel Mendez's narrative fiction services as a thread that can be traced throughout his works, and it is one that gives them unity. This thread of meaning allows us, on a literary interpretative level, to establish relationships between the various themes found in his most important fictional works. The web of relationships comprise the cultural system whose underlying aspect is the border.

Honors Project--Smith College, Northampton, Mass., 2010. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 108-112).

Thesis (M.A.)--Montana State University--Bozeman, 2007. / Typescript. Chairperson, Graduate Committee: Robert Bennett. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 90-91).

This study traces spatial and temporal disturbances in the modem short story structure. Edgar Allan Poe's "indefinitiveness" and Kenneth Burke's "actualization" serve as historical foundations for this investigation, which leads to contemporary frameworks proposed by such theorists as Gerard Genette, Umberto Eco, Wolfgang Iser, Paul Ricoeur, Peter Brooks, James Phelan, and Susan Sniader Lanser. In particular, I explore how effect operates as a predominant concern of short fiction. Short fiction is a rhetorical interaction encumbered by spatial and temporal constraints, and its narrative teleology is necessarily disrupted by rhetorical techniques. Narrative's boundaries are purposefully violated, its tempo twisted and contorted, exposing a purposeful tension in the rhetorical engagement of author, text and reader. Instabilities crafted within the text disrupt time-space expectations of readers.Importantly, effect is perceived as a rhetorical device within short fiction, and so in this study the text serves as a site of transference privileging equally writer and reader. Conditions of possibility and understanding are invested in the text by the author through techniques of spatial disruption and temporal discontinuity, and then reinvested in the reader by the narrative through the text's generation of uncertainty. Short fiction serves as an invitation by the author for the reader to construct explanations; devices work to disrupt the time-space constraints of the genre, establishing as they do a narrative contract between author and reader that is resolved in and from the text.Burke considers this to be shaping prose fiction to the author's purposes, an act which "involves desires and their appeasements" - and one which purposefully aims for a particular effect. But what are the limits of purposefulness in short fiction? I examine both textual effect and reader affect, relying particularly on Iser and Eco, and turn to Brooks in conclusion to summarize the role of desire in and from the text, and to Phelan to critique the place of rhetoric in establishing and maintaining that desire. My analysis discloses that time-space disruption, employed as a rhetorical strategy by short story writers, serves to heighten rather than threaten the mediated engagement of writer/text/reader in short fiction, producing a measured effect. / Department of English

Univ., Diss.--Göttingen, 2004.

No description available.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--State University of New York at Binghamton, Department of Comparative Literature, 2008. / Includes bibliographical references.