Escrever uma tese sobre as variações da literatura é, em muitos sentidos, variar junto com ela, isto é, empreender um exercício de comparação entre a teoria literária e outras teorias. Neste espírito, o texto a seguir dedica-se à especulação em torno do funcionamento de algumas categorias da teoria literária como autoria, referencialidade e iterabilidade por meio da investigação de outros assuntos que em um primeiro momento não pareceriam pertencer à ordem do literário, como a hipnose, os drones, os feminicídios, entre outros. Com isso propõe-se tensionar os limites da literatura e da teoria literária, em especial aquela que se organiza ao redor das indagações sobre o sentido do sentido. / To write a thesis on the variations of literature is, in many ways, to vary with it, that is, to carry out the task of comparing literary theory to other theories. In this spirit, the following pages present speculations on the inner workings of some literary categories such as authorship, referentiality and iterability by means of an investigation of other subject matter that at first glance appear to have nothing to do with literature, such as hypnosis, drones and feminicides, among others. With this I propose to prod the limits of literature and literary theory, particularly that which organizes itself around questions regarding the meaning of meaning.

Escrever uma tese sobre as variações da literatura é, em muitos sentidos, variar junto com ela, isto é, empreender um exercício de comparação entre a teoria literária e outras teorias. Neste espírito, o texto a seguir dedica-se à especulação em torno do funcionamento de algumas categorias da teoria literária como autoria, referencialidade e iterabilidade por meio da investigação de outros assuntos que em um primeiro momento não pareceriam pertencer à ordem do literário, como a hipnose, os drones, os feminicídios, entre outros. Com isso propõe-se tensionar os limites da literatura e da teoria literária, em especial aquela que se organiza ao redor das indagações sobre o sentido do sentido. / To write a thesis on the variations of literature is, in many ways, to vary with it, that is, to carry out the task of comparing literary theory to other theories. In this spirit, the following pages present speculations on the inner workings of some literary categories such as authorship, referentiality and iterability by means of an investigation of other subject matter that at first glance appear to have nothing to do with literature, such as hypnosis, drones and feminicides, among others. With this I propose to prod the limits of literature and literary theory, particularly that which organizes itself around questions regarding the meaning of meaning.

In Mexico there is an increasing lack of engagement of the Mexican government and its citizens towards resolving violence. In the 20th century alone events such as the Revolution of 1910, La Guerra Cristera, La Guerra Sucia, and most recently Los Feminicidios and Calderon’s War on Drugs are representative of an ethos of violence withstood and inflicted by Mexicans towards women, men, youth, and marginalized groups. This dissertation examines Los Feminicidios in Ciudad Juarez and the cultural production surrounding them: chronicles, novels, documentaries and films. In it I draw on Aristotle’s influential Nicomachean Ethics, Victoria Camps’ El gobierno de las emociones (2011), María Pía Lara’s Narrating Evil (2007), Vittorio Gallese’s and other scientists’ research on neuroscience empathy and neurohumanism, and socio-political essays in order to theorize how a pathos-infused understanding of ethos might engage a reading and viewing public in what has become a discourse about violence determined by a sense of fatalism. Specifically, I argue that narrative and its interpretations play a significant role in people’s emotional engagement and subsequent cognitive processes. I stress the importance of creating an approach that considers both pathos and logos as a way of understanding this ethos of violence. I argue that by combining pathos and logos in the analysis of a cultural text, we can break through the theoretical impasse, which thus far has resulted in exceptionalisms and has been limited to categorizing as evil the social and political mechanisms that may cause this violence. / text

In the early 1990s, a series of gruesome murders of young women in Ciudad Juárez, a city located in the U.S.-Mexico border, shook the political landscape of Mexico. A decade later, the strange and violent murders, known as the feminicides or feminicidios of Juárez, reached international infamy across hemispheres and continents. During this time, the city and the cases became the subjects of an extensive body of scholarship and of any imaginable artistic medium (narrative, poetry, theater, performance, music, and so on). Eventually, the complexity and overexposure of the cases and the sociopolitical conditions of Ciudad Juárez placed them at the center of a paradoxical debate: on one hand, the work of activists, feminists, and scholars of social sciences (like anthropologists and sociologists) studied the murders as a localized example of a larger phenomenon of mysoginistic violence; on the other, journalistic and media investigations of Juárez understood the murders as the products of specific agents (serial killers, murderers, drug cartels, amongst others) and the fractures within the Mexican Nation-State. And yet, despite the expansion and overlapping of these discourses, fictional representations of Juárez remained tangential to this intricate debate. Thus, this research explores the different ways in which writers, artists, and filmmakers deployed and negotiated existent perspectives on the feminicides within fictional environments. As a result of the vast amount of published work available on Ciudad Juárez, I narrowed the objects of my research through a transnational scope. The resulting sample of texts transverses borders (Mexico and the U.S.), continents (Latin America and Europe), genres (fiction and nonfiction), and mediums (literature and film). The first chapter explores the connections of Sergio González Rodríguez’s Huesos en el desierto and Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 through the theoretical framework of the possible worlds of fiction. The second chapter moves to issues of representation, gender, and race through the analysis of two novels written by Chicana scholars: Alicia Gaspar de Alba’s Desert Blood: The Juárez Murders and Stella Pope Duarte’s If I Die in Juárez. Finally, the third chapter focuses on film representations of Juárez and the feminicides in the form of Gregory Nava’s Bordertown and Carlos Carrera’s Backyard/El Traspatio. / text