Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, San Diego, 2000. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 284-295).

The Central American literary community and historiographical critics maintain a constant dialogue in regards to banana literature. Authors such as Asturias, Fallas, and Amador capture the pervasive nature of the banana enclave in their works. My research reveals the ways in which capitalist power controls and redefines spaces in the banner enclave. By taking a closer look these novels reveal the monopolistic power of the United Fruit Company exploits and destroys the natural space, this manuscript becomes a geographical map of the fictionalized banana enclaves, exposing the capitalist oppressing forces, which dominate nature and control the company workers. Chapter one explores different historical interpretations of the banana enclave, focusing on the geographical spaces in Guatemala, Honduras, and Costa Rica. The second chapter discusses the novel Prisión verde (1950), by Ramon A. Amador, and pointed to enclave plantations and neighboring towns as weaponized spaces that control the inhabitants. Chapter three focuses on Mamita yunai (1941), by Carlos L. Fallas, to show how the banana enclave exploits natural spaces and leave a country ruined by corruption. The fourth chapter concentrates on the banana trilogy by Miguel A. Asturias composed of Viento fuerte (1950), El papa verde (1954) y Los ojos de los enterrados (1960), and examines how geographical spaces in the banana enclave intertwine with total economic, political, and social control in Guatemala. In sum, this thesis brings to light the narrative techniques these authors use to construct and manipulate space within the banana enclave, as a reflection of the capitalist world of Central America.

The aim of the present study is to analyze and compare the representation of the guerrilla soldier in six contemporary Central American novels. According to Claudio Guillén, the comparison is a dialogue between unity and diversity. It can be defined with the help of two coordinates: a spatial and a temporal. In this study the spatial coordinate includes Nicaragua, Guatemala and El Salvador, and the temporal extends from the mid-seventies to the eighties. The novels written in the seventies are Los compañeros (1976) by Marco Antonio Flores, ¿Te dio miedo la sangre? (1977) by Sergio Ramírez and Caperucita en la zona roja (1977) by Manlio Argueta. The ones written in the eighties are La mujer habitada (1988) by Gioconda Belli, La diáspora (1989) by Horacio Castellanos Moya and El hombre de Montserrat (1994) by Dante Liano. The novels are analyzed from a postcolonial perspective following the ideas of Alfonso de Toro and Santiago Castro-Gómez particularly. The method used is the phenomenological hermeneutics, as proposed by Mario J. Valdés. This implies an analysis performed on four levels: historical, formal, phenomenological and hermeneutic. Two of the key aspects in the analysis are the reader's aesthetic identification with the hero and the postcolonial concept subaltern. The main conclusion is that the representation of the guerrilla soldier in the corpus is very heterogeneous and that almost no protagonist can be considered a subaltern. The reader's identification with the guerrilla soldier ranges from admirative to ironic, though the main type is sympathetic. Hence, the representation may be considered a hybrid, using a term borrowed from anthropologist Néstor García Canclini that opposes binary schemes and essentialist thinking. The guerrilla soldier is regarded as an individual and not as an abstract idea, which indicates that the civil wars in Central America were not just a conflict between two ideologies, but above all a human experience.

La fin du XXe siècle et le début du XXIe siècle ont vu renaître le débat sur les rapports entre l’histoire et la littérature, entendue comme fiction, dans le sens d'un effacement des frontières entre les deux. Partant de ce postulat, notre étude, à la croisée de ces deux notions, a pour objectif de montrer les liens qui existent entre l’histoire centraméricaine contemporaine et la fiction dans les romans de l’auteur honduro-salvadorien Horacio Castellanos Moya. En effet, l’histoire de plusieurs pays d’Amérique centrale, marquée par des années de dictature, de guerres civiles et de violences politiques ou économiques, a eu un impact considérable sur de nombreux auteurs de la région. L’œuvre fictionnelle de Horacio Castellanos Moya en porte des traces évidentes. Pour les déceler, comprendre leurs enjeux et la manière dont elles figurent dans les romans, l’étude a été divisée en trois grandes parties. La première traite les données biographiques de Horacio Castellanos Moya en tant qu’homme et écrivain ; la deuxième, des principaux faits historiques thématisés et la dernière de leur mise en scène dans l’œuvre. / The late twentieth century and early twenty-first century have seen revived the debate about the relationship between history and literature, understood as fiction, in the sense of a blurring of boundaries between the two. Based on this premise, our study at the crossroads of these two concepts aims to show the links between contemporary Central American history and fiction in novels of Honduras-Salvadoran author Horacio Castellanos Moya. Indeed, the history of several Central American countries, marked by years of dictatorship, civil wars and political or economic violence has had a significant impact on many local authors. The fictional work of Horacio Castellanos Moya bears evident traces. To identify, understand their issues and how they appear in the novels, the study was divided into three main parts. The first deals with the biographical data Horacio Castellanos Moya as man and writer; the second, the main historical facts themed and the last of their stage in the work.

Contemporary Central American fiction has become a vital project of revision of the tragic events and the social conditions in the recent history of the countries from which they emerge. The literary projects of Sergio Ramirez (Nicaragua), Dante Liano (Guatemala), Horacio Castellanos Moya (El Salvador), and Ramon Fonseca Mora (Panama), are representative of the latest trends in Central American narrative. These trends conform to a new literary paradigm that consists of an amalgam of styles and discourses, which combine the testimonial, the historical, and the political with the mystery and suspense of noir thrillers. Contemporary Central American noir narrative depicts the persistent war against social injustice, violence, criminal activities, as well as the new technological advances and economic challenges of the post-war neo-liberal order that still prevails throughout the region. Drawing on postmodernism theory proposed by Ihab Hassan, Linda Hutcheon and Brian MacHale, I argued that the new Central American literary paradigm exemplified by Sergio Ramirez’s El cielo llora por mí, Dante Liano’s El hombre de Montserrat, Horacio Castellanos Moya’s El arma en el hombre and La diabla en el espejo, and Ramon Fonseca Mora’s El desenterrador, are highly structured novels that display the characteristic marks of postmodern cultural expression through their ambivalence, which results from the coexistence of multiple styles and conflicting ideologies and narrative trends. The novels analyzed in this dissertation make use of a noir sensitivity in which corruption, decay and disillusionment are at their core to portray the events that shaped the modern history of the countries from which they emerge. The revolutionary armed struggle, the state of terror imposed by military regimes and the fight against drug trafficking and organized crime, are among the major themes of these contemporary works of fiction, which I have categorized as perfect examples of the post-revolutionary post-modernism Central American detective fiction at the turn of the 21st century.