A Web Of Eyes: Irony and romanticism in the works of Jorge Luis Borges and Julio Cortázar (Mgr. Vít Kazmar) Abstract The present doctoral thesis offers an interpretation of the works of Borges and Cortázar through the lens of romantic irony. It outlines the origin of the notion of irony from greek drama through philosophical dialogue to rhetorics. The main focus of the work is Schlegel's concept of romantic irony. Various aspects serve as a basis for the interpretation of the work of both Argentine writers in particular chapters: the struggle between enthusiasmus and scepsis in Borges (litotes) and Cortázar (novelistic dialogue), motive of the double, reflexivity in literature written in the spanish language from Cervantes to Borges, focusing on Borges' sources of inspiration (Carlyle, Fernández, Unamuno); Cortázars reflexive short stories, heteronyms of both authors (Morelli, Ménard); and finally the tendency to see the world from above, to constant transcendence of perspective in Borges' short stories and poems and in Cortázar's novel 62: A model kit, as well as in his poetics based on the works of John Keats.

Scholars have long since identified a quixotic mode in fiction, acknowledging the widespread influence of Miguel de Cervantes' Don Quixote (1605-15) on subsequent texts. In most cases, “quixotic” signifies a preponderance of allusions to Don Quixote in a given text, such that most studies of “quixotic fictions” or “quixotic influence” are primarily taxonomic in purpose and in outcome: they name and catalogue a text or group of texts as “quixotic,” then argue that, by virtue of the vast and protean influence of Don Quixote, the quixotic mode in fiction is always divided, lacking any semblance of ideological consistency. I argue, however, that the very characteristics of Don Quixote that make him such an attractive literary model for such a broad range of narratives—his bookish idealism, his fixation on the upper-classed grandiosity of the lives of noble knights—also form the consistent, ideological groundwork of quixotism: the exceptionalist substitution of fictive idealism for material reality. By tracing the ways in which quixotes become mouthpieces for various exceptionalist arguments in eighteenth-century British and American texts, like Henry Fielding's Joseph Andrews (1742), Tobias Smollett's Launcelot Greaves (1760), Charlotte Lennox's The Female Quixote (1752), Hugh Henry Brackenridge's Modern Chivalry (1792-1815), and Royall Tyler's The Algerine Captive (1797), among others, I demonstrate the link between quixotism and exceptionalism, or between fictive idealism and the belief that one (or one's worldview) is an exception to the scrutiny of the surrounding world.

This dissertation explores how recent feminist authors uses their literature to create, sustain, and expand the feminist movement through their creation of communities and readerships. This project consists of four case studies, each of which examines how a feminist author represents feminist identity, where she locates herself in relation to the mainstream marketplace, which strategies she uses to circulate her representation, and what forms of small and large feminist communities she is able to create. To develop this analysis of feminist literary public culture, I focus on playwright Eve Ensler and her work with the V-Day movement, novelist Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez and her expansion of the chick lit genre, poet Lorna Dee Cervantes and her online small press, and the members of spoken word group Sister Spit and their traveling road show. These individual case studies, taken as a whole, speak to the ways that feminist authors are engaging mainstream and feminist readers in ways that create and energize feminist communities. / text

Humans seem to have a cognitive predisposition for perceiving different concepts in terms of opposite extremes, which in turn fosters an either / or mentality where only two contrary views are possible - tertium non datur. This tendency is also reflected in Don Quixote, where the arrangement of multiple and diverse elements through dualistic patterns is so prevalent, and represent such an essential structural characteristic, that it becomes Cervantes’s own ars poetica. However, once readers look beyond the apparent dichotomies, a higher degree of complexity emerges. We can debate whether Don Quixote is either crazy or sane using the Aristotelian aut / aut logic, but a different possibility would also be enlightening - tertium datur. This dissertation offers an alternative critical framework which combines cognitive theories of categorization and perception with the ideas of Heraclitus, Abelard’s Sic et Non, and Bart Kosko’s Fuzzy Thinking based on Lofti Zadeh’s Fuzzy Logic. Through the new fuzzy and (ambi)valent logic Don Quixote can be perceived simultaneously as crazy and sane - sic et non - since both possibilities are valid at the same time. This new approach reveals that Cervantes employs dualities - equal and opposing elements - not to simplify but rather to make us reflect and deepen our knowledge of the human condition. Thus, Don Quixote functions as a mirror (speculum) in numerous levels, since the text’s self-reflexive structure can in turn provoke reflections and interpretations ad infinitum. Chapter 1 of the dissertation explores the long tradition surrounding the use of dualities from classical antiquity to the Early Modern period from a binary perspective. Chapter 2 establishes a theoretical framework based on a fuzzy and (ambi)valent cognitive categorization and perception. That framework is then applied in chapter 3 to the dichotomies explored in chapter 1, and then, in chapter 4, to the dualistic categories and schemata in Don Quixote. Chapter 5 analyzes the interconnectedness of cognitive entities which are typically studied separately: the author (Cervantes), the text (Don Quixote), and the readers (the critics), along with their respective contexts. Thus, this is both a critical / analytical study as much as a meta-analytical / meta-critical endeavor.

The goal of this graduation's thesis was to focus on picaresque elements in The Exemplary Novels (Novelas ejemplares). The object of research were, therefore, ones of the most important works of the Spanish Golden Age - picaresque novels The Life of Lazarillo de Tormes (La vida de Lazarillo de Tormes) and Guzmán de Alfarache and their influence on Cervantes' literary works. We analyzed the picaresque elements, different variations of theirs' in the selected Exemplary Novels. More specifically, we dealt with the character of picaro, form of the works and a concept of realism in Alemán and Cervantes.

Informe de Seminario para optar al grado de Licenciado en Lengua y Literatura Hispánica mención Literatura. / Seminario de grado: Desde la escritura: imágenes y representaciones del Islam y los musulmanes / En La ‘mancha’ de don Quijote: el trasfondo islámico, se intentará poner de manifiesto una posibilidad de lectura, en donde el texto cervantino se nos presenta como un corpus empapado de tópicos, motivos y problemáticas árabes e islámicas luego de la expulsión de los moros de la Península, además de postular una nueva interpretación basada en la identificación de esos elementos orientales en el juego ficcional interno de la obra. Este ensayo intenta de-velar lo que la crítica tradicional occidental ha omitido, ignorado o negado de El Quijote, respecto a la influencia musulmana y/o árabe que, durante la convivencia con cristianos en España, debió de introducir a la literatura medieval y posterior. Así, en este trabajo veremos cómo, incluso entrado ya el siglo XVII, los residuos de la cultura islámica se dejan ver en la literatura española con una voz más potente y determinante de lo que muchos podrían esperar o querer.

This thesis examines the dichotomy of locura/cordura in Miguel de Cervantes' Don Quijote de la Mancha (1605/1615), specifically the nature of the madness of the titular character. Two different aspects of the Quijote are discussed: (1) the dual nature of the personality of Don Quijote/Alonso Quijano as being "sanely insane," that is, that although Don Quijote exhibits symptoms unmistakably indicative of madness, he maintains his sanity underneath this mad façade; the dedicatory sonnets that precede Part 1, the epitaphs that follow the end of Part 1, and the two poems that serve as an epilogue to Part 2 are examined in length in order to show that Don Quijote, and not "Alonso Quijano el Bueno," is the true protagonist of the Quijote; and (2) the roles that the various encantadores play in the Quijote and how they interact with Don Quijote are discussed in order to further explore this dichotomy of locura/cordura.

In "Contestatory Subjects: Performance and the Politics of Recognition in Don Quijote," I analyze the performative strategies used by several well-known characters in Cervantes' 1605 Don Quijote to counter their initial displacement and to constitute an alternative yet acceptable subject position for themselves within the socio-historic structure of the text. Throughout the study, I posit that successful subjectivity requires more than the character who performs any given subject position; it requires a response, an on-going dialogue between self and other - and most importantly - it requires an ethical commitment to the process on the part of the witness, be that witness intra- or extra-textual. My analysis of Dorotea, Ruy Pérez, and Zoraida shows that their individual performances are really communal or dialogic processes played out in conjunction with other characters. My project therefore counters the tendency to study each character's story as an isolated performance or as a self-contained intercalated tale in Don Quijote. Rather, I offer a more holistic or integrated examination of a trajectory of contestatory performances throughout Part I of the Quijote. With each performance, the 1605 novel increasingly expands the normative limits of social inclusivity in Early Modern Spain, ultimately arguing in the last chapters for the accommodation of a mora cristiana within the limits of the recognizable. In viewing these characters not as isolated, self-fashioning individuals but rather as a community of performers and ethical witnesses, my analysis points toward a didactic project on Cervantes's part in the 1605 novel, in which he uses these characters to model and tutor the reader in empathetic reading strategies that forestall the inquisitorial hermeneutic imposed by the State and the Church in Habsburg Spain. My analysis of Cervantes's contestatory performances and their receptions draws primarily on critical theories of gender and performance studies in combination with the cultural materialist studies of early modern Spain (e.g., Cruz, Fuchs, Hernández-Pecoraro, Johnson, Maravall, Mariscal, Presberg, Sieber). Of particular importance are Judith Butler's work on gender performativity and Kelly Oliver's work on witnessing, which nuances Butler's notion of performativity by addressing the ethical responsibilities on the part of the witness/spectator. Each chapter links the performance in question back to the material conditions and available discourses vying to produce acceptable subjects in early modern Spain. In terms of normative discourses, the most obvious institutions involved in the formation and reformation of the seventeenth-century Spanish subject are the Church and the Absolutist state, quite effectively combined in the Holy Office of the Inquisition. Therefore, this study features a number of theological, economic, and social treatises that were written in an effort to constitute the ideal Spanish subject in terms of gender, religion, race/ethnicity and class/estado. Around these normative subject positions we observe the subsequent formation of resistant or contestatory discourses, which also feature prominently in each chapter of the study. By combining the work of Butler and Oliver, and insisting on an analysis of both the performer and the spectator in various scenes of Don Quijote, Part I, this project fills gaps in the scholarship on Cervantes and performance studies, which have tended to privilege the performance of the self-fashioning individual while overlooking the dialogic nature of performativity. I show that there is more at stake than opening space for projects of private perfection, which is no doubt a necessary goal. Also at stake are ethical relationships with others and shared projects of social reform and restoration. In all of the performances I analyze here, Cervantes creates characters who self-fashion by reiterating and manipulating contrary, traditionally binary discourses around gender, class, race/ethnicity, religion, and nationality. In turn, his fictional witness-listeners model the ethical posture necessary to maintain a productive openness to the characters' difference. Together, their performances induce us to accept the contestatory virtues of faith, good works, and caritas over the normative determinants of blood (purity) and lineage (old-order occupations; ejercicios), which the novel shows to be tired categories that are encouraging costly foreign wars, emigration to the New World, declining fertility rates, and unproductive economic investments.

<p>In my dissertation I propose that the detailed representation of food and eating in seventeenth-century Spanish art and literature has a double purpose: to reaffirm a state of well-being in Spain, and to show a critical position, because artistic creations emphasize those subjects who, because of social status or cultural background, do not share such benefits. This double purpose explains why literature and painting stress the distance between foodstuffs and consumers, turning food into a commodity that cannot be consumed directly, but through its representation and value. Cervantes's writing is invoked because, especially in Don Quixote, readers can see how the protagonist rejects food for the sake of achieving higher chivalric values, while his companion, Sancho Panza, faces the opposite problem: having food at hand and not being able to enjoy it, especially when he achieves his dream of ruling an island. The principle is similar in genre painting: food is consumed out of the picture in still lifes, or out of the hands of the represented characters in kitchen scenes, for they are depicted cooking for others. Because of the distance between product and consumer, foodstuffs indicate how precedence and authority are established and reproduced in society. In artistic representations, these apparently unchangeable principles are mimicked by the lower classes and used to establish parallel systems of authority such as the guild of thieves who are presented around a table in a scene of Cervantes's exemplary novel "Rinconete and Cortadillo." Another problem to which the representation of foodstuffs responds is the inclusion of New Christians from different origins. In a counterpoint with the scenes in which precedence is discussed, and frequently through similar aesthetic structures, Cervantes and his contemporaries create scenes where the Christian principle of sharing food and drinking wine together is the model of inclusion that dissolves distinctions between Old and New Christians. I argue that this alternative project of community can be related to the expulsion of the Moriscos from Spain, decreed in 1609, because this event made many subjects interrogate themselves about their own status and inclusion. An artistic model of response to these interrogations about belonging is the figure of the roadside meal, which appears as the main motif of a meal shared by Sancho and a self-proclaimed Christian Morisco in the second part of Don Quixote, and reappears in a painting by Diego de Velázquez, which presents in the foreground a dark-skinned servant working in a kitchen, and in the background another roadside meal: the Supper at Emmaus. Both in literature and painting the way of preparing meals, eating and drinking creates ties, establishes a different principle of belonging, and promotes unity. In this alternative model characters are recognized as subjects of the kingdom as long as they eat and drink the way Christians do. Even though this model still leads to a single Christian kingdom, paintings and writings suggest a different form of cohesion, in which subjects are considered equal and recognize each other because of their participation.</p> / Dissertation

Zugl.: Buenos Aires, Univ., Diss.