No description available.

The aim of this thesis is to investigate the highly moral ethic of social duty and responsibility which animates the work of Alejo Carpentier. In order to examine this theme, I have studied, in particular, the following six novels: ‘El reino de este mundo', Los pasos perdidos', ‘El acoso', El siglo de las luces', ‘El recurso del método', and ‘La consagración de la primavera'. In the Introduction, I have investigated the various philosophical questions raised by the concept of responsibility : the debate about freewill and determinism has been examined, and the Existentialist philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre has been chosen as the most helpful in an investigation of Carpentier's theory of responsibility, due to a great coincidence of thought between the two writers. The protagonists of the novels in question have been grouped according to various distinguishing tendencies or characteristics, and have been analysed in the light of the Sartrian concepts of good and bad faith. These groupings are as follows: “the deluded intellectual”, “two tyrants”, “the lesson of experience”, and “the committed individual”. The success, or failure, of these characters, in matching up to the goals of self-transcendence and responsible commitment posed by Carpentier has been charted throughout Chapters One to Four, and deductions have been made about the various forms of bad faith in which the characters indulge. The conclusions that I have drawn from this detailed investigation of characters in good and bad faith are, firstly, that Carpentier sees man's goal in life as the attainment of self-knowledge and the honest acceptance of responsibility for the self : once this state of good faith has been achieved, man is able to commit himself to the never-ending struggle for the improvement of the social situation. Acceptance of responsibility for the self is vital, in Carpentier's canon, for without such acceptance, positive commitment is impossible. Secondly, I have concluded that, according to Carpentier, commitment is an inevitable part of life, and that Carpentier's goal, then, is that we should actively commit ourselves to a positive cause through recognition of our responsibility for ourselves and our society, rather than tacitly accept the status quo through a passive or deterministic attitude.

This dissertation examines U.S.-Cuban cultural exchange around the Cuban revolutions of 1933 and 1959. It argues that the historical period from 1930-1970 represents a critical juncture in global politics, when fascination and dismay for Cuban revolutionary struggles spawned new ideas about art, aesthetics, governance, and jurisprudence as part of new state functions and cosmopolitan publics. Drawing from U.S. and Cuban sources, this project documents the ways in which cultural producers from across the political spectrum used the language of revolution to craft claims about race, class, gender, empire, and nationhood. It explains the fractured relationship following the 1959 revolution by beginning in the 1930s, when narratives of U.S.-led Pan-Americanism splintered and frayed within the broader project of neocolonialism. Cultural expressions--from folksongs and poems to presidential speeches and tourist literature--demonstrate multiple ideological positions and aesthetic forms that reveal a tension between Pan-American camaraderie on the one hand and neocolonial violence on the other. I use poetry, journalism, plays, federal policy, music, and radical literature to illustrate ideas about Cuba that spanned the ideological gamut--from socialist utopia to the tragedy of dictatorship--and their location in the generational transition from the Good Neighbor policy to Cold War containment. In the United States, these two political moments were anchored between the New Deal coalition and rise of the Old Left on the one hand, and the dawning of Kennedy/Johnson liberal internationalism and the New Left on the other. At the same time in Cuba the revolutionary culture industries restructured nationalist narratives and political ambitions based on anti-Yankee opposition, which ultimately ushered in a new Cuban state that self-fashioned itself as a leader of the Third World. I present a case study that reveals how political and cultural vectors operate in multiple directions, creating the overarching conditions that enable "minor" states to exert gravitational pull on superpowers in the production of new local tastes and sensibilities from Harlem to Havana. / text

No description available.