This dissertation revitalizes the sociological approach to literature in the light of the 'cultural turn' in sociology represented by Pierre Bourdieu, Ulrich Beck, Gerhard Schulze and others - and demonstrates its potential for contemporary German-language literature. Advocating the decisive role of the social functions of cultural products, my investigation starts from the thesis that, with the electronic mass media acquiring a dominant role in the cultural sphere, a functional differentiation has taken place, forcing authors of artistic aspiration to focus on the media-specific strengths and benefits of literature as text while at the same urging them to adjust to the consumption patterns of mass entertainment - not least because literature as institution is increasingly permeated by the laws of a globalized market. The result is, as I argue, a neo-realism which appeals on the surface to readers looking for intense, authentic experiences of "reality" and shifts its more challenging artistic dimensions to a deeper level of symbolism, allusions and structural constellation.</br> My inquiry into the social functions of this new realistic paradigm is carried out by expos-ing the literary representation of the transforming East-German society after reunification, as rep-resented in Ingo Schulze's novel "Simple Storys", to a comparison with the sociological diagnosis of it. This comparison does not subjugate the novel to external, non-literary criteria; instead, it demonstrates the specific features of the literary "grip on reality" as opposed to the scientific one and relates them to the competition with the mass media. On the individual level, two main social functions of contemporary literature-as-art finally emerge: to work through the cultural knowledge of its readers and their modes of experience, to test their limits and to transcend them partially - and to do the same with the elements of identity bound up with this cultural knowledge, thus facilitating a partial self-transcendence which gives room for suppressed needs. On a more general level, these functions keep reader's cultural knowledge and personal identities flexible enough to adjust to an ever-changing social environment. At the same time, they provide the subjective basis for critical distance and creative innovation.

This dissertation focuses on how contemporary Southern Cone fiction responds to the post-dictatorial symbolic crisis by articulating a new political praxis based upon the intertwining of historical and aesthetic discourses. It thus addresses the link between narrative, historiography and politics in recent Argentinian, Chilean and Uruguayan texts that have not received major critical attention, probably because they do not fit into contemporary critical categories. The analysis seeks to go beyond the hegemonic debates on post-dictatorship mostly represented by scholars such us Idelber Avelar, Francine Masiello, Nelly Richard and Alberto Moreiras, among others which seem trapped in a number of recurrent topics and concepts mourning, memory, post-memory, horror, allegory that erase their critical potential and obliterate other possibilities. Breaking with this pattern, my work explores a dimension that has often been overlooked: the contemporary representation of the nineteenth century. I test the hypothesis that, in contemporary Southern Cone literature, the fictional re-writing of the nineteenth century (the foundational moment of nation, narration and intellectuals in Latin America) attempts to outline new ethical models for the intellectual, to solve the representational crisis through a reformulation of realism and to frame a specific political role for literary practice. My perspective owes considerably to a number of thinkers within the Marxist tradition especially Walter Benjamin, Gyorgy Lukács and Fredric Jameson and intends to contribute to some of their major discussion topics, above all the relation between history and aesthetics and the dichotomy allegory/realism.

I framed my Dissertation in the new discussions developed in Colombia, Argentina, Spain, Brazil and Mexico about the socio-cultural place of young people in the transformations of modernity. I am studying Colombian narratives about violence related to youth cultural identities, practices and communication in two specific socio-cultural marginal environments in marginal neighborhoods of Bogotá and Medellín. I comprehend narratives about violence to be a group of works (novels, chronics, testimonies, documentaries, and fiction films) related to the violent urban reality of the 80s and 90s in Colombia. These narratives determine positions and experiences that reveal imaginaries, sensibilities and identities of contemporary young people, understanding young people as social actors that have been sub-estimated. I also ask about how young practices and experiences refer also to global transformations regarding experiences of gender, sexuality, survival, religiosity, consumption of goods and violence.

Intercultural bilingual education was adopted by the Mexican school system to offer a type of education that was linguistically and culturally suitable for the indigenous groups of Mexico. Although the model was originally aimed at ethnic minorities, recently intercultural education is being extended to society in general as a strategy to change multicultural relations and to establish a more democratic society. However, the model has been criticized because of its lack of theoretical definition, legal grounding and practical problems in its implementation. Since the goals of intercultural education go beyond pedagogic issues, it is important to study how the Discourse of intercultural education is being interpreted, accepted, rejected and transformed by different social actors related to the educational field. This study explores the continuities and ruptures in the Discourse of intercultural education through the analysis of written policy documents and the discourse (i.e., language in use) of indigenous teachers, policy brokers, academics and indigenous leaders. Such continuities and ruptures reflect the underlying ideologies of these social actors regarding the goals of intercultural education, and the roles of indigenous teachers, society and organizations in this change process. Under the framework of critical discourse analysis (van Dijk, 1985; 2003), official policy documents were compared to linguistic data yielded by ethnographic observations in indigenous schools and interviews with key actors in the indigenous educational field. An analysis of the discursive strategies and linguistic devices used by the interviewees and written documents shows that there are continuities, contradictions and overlaps in the positioning of the subjects regarding the tenets of intercultural bilingual education. The study exposes the role of these linguistic practices in the reproduction of dominant Discourses that perpetuate the status quo of indigenous education that the intercultural model was supposed to challenge in the first place; however, such reproduction is far from linear since indigenous teachers exert oppositional agency against institutional practices (linguistic and others) and take advantage of the discursive and legal space opened up by the intercultural model to develop their own educational projects, which constitute a cultural appropriation of the intercultural model.

This dissertation revisits the U.S.-Mexico borderlands to examine its neoliberal transformation intensified by globalization in order to address new aesthetic subjectivities that challenge this violent process from the peripheral experience and imagination. Despite increasing interest in the academic field, Border Studies have been trapped by hybridity theory -whose celebrative interpretations of the border phenomena frequently ignore social inequality and neutralize cultural conflicts- developed by Homi Bhabha and Garc&#xED;a Canclini, among others. Breaking with this postmodern frame, I explore the heterogeneous realities and marginal subjects particularly in relation to the crisis and the reformulation of two major and conflictive concepts: "cosmopolitanism" and "nation." I argue that for Border Studies to be effective, they have to respond to new scenarios of "peripheral" voices and experiences as they have been emerging along the U.S.-Mexico border and beyond. My dissertation thus focuses on narrative analysis of the topics that configure marginal languages and cultures: undocumented migratory labor and border crossing, the cholo community, popular border saints, narco-world and "bare life," feminicide in Ciudad Ju&#xE1;rez and maquiladora workers. From Guillermo G&#xF3;mez-Pe&#xF1;a and Gloria Anzald&#xFA;a, the texts of embodied border identities I analyze attempt to dismantle binary models -the "borderless" and the "bordered"- of the idea of 'great community,' to demonstrate the representational crisis of a national or bi-national perspective that intensifies monolithic claims, and to offer different and even alternative ideas of community in a globalized context.

This dissertation explores the generative mechanisms of representation by which the Dominican and Cuban lettered cities situated themselves the 20th century vis a vis an imagined, yet dynamic US alterity. The argument is that the trope of the United States works as a productive prejudicea powerful master signifier that both grounds and modifies the established national narratives. The dissertation is divided into two parts, on the Dominican Republic and Cuba, respectively. The first explores the influence of Rodós Arielism (arielismo) on official Dominican nationalist discourse. During the early part of the 20th century, the US is seen in as a Caliban figure by Dominican intellectuals. But in the period of Trujillos dictatorship, this negative view of the US is displaced to some extent by a focus on Haiti as the main constitutive outside of Dominican national identity. The section explores how writers such as Ramón Marrero Aristy, Juan Bosch, Pedro Mir, Marcio Veloz Maggiolo, Aída Cartagena Portalatín, and most recently Junot Díaz reacted to or challenged these totalizing discourses. In Cuba, the discourse of the lettered city on the United States also evolves in the course of the 20th century. In the immediate aftermath of independence, intellectuals like José Antonio Ramos oscillated between two ideas of the US: as a model for a desired modernity and as a symbol of imperialism. Later, during the years prior to the 1933 revolution, Jorge Mañach, Antonio Mella, Fernando Ortíz, and Ramiro Guerra, offer varied, and at times opposing views of the US. A similar disparity occurs in the post-revolutionary lettered city. Writers such as Luis Rogelio Nogueras and Roberto Fernández Retamar echo the earlier image of the US as an imperial power, whereas recent novels from the so-called Special period by Leonardo Padura and Edmundo Desnoes offer a more nuanced , self-reflective vision of Cubas relation with the United States. The dissertation shows that the different narratives of acceptance and/or resistance to the idea of the US are also ways of negotiating tensions and ambiguities internal to the national projects of both Cuba and the Dominican Republic during the 20th century.

Ten days before the 1968 Olympic Games, the Mexican Government violently repressed a massive Student Movement as a result of its unwillingness to negotiate with social sectors that had been adversely affected by the modernization process of the Mexican Miracle. After the repression, the government projected an image of stability and progress under the so called apertura democrática. Nonetheless during the decade of the seventies, Mexican citizens experienced state violence, and a counterinsurgency war known as the Dirty War, in which subversive groups who were considered dangerous for the National Security university students and professors, campesinos, and guerilla fighters were systematically targeted. Narrativas marginales y guerra sucia en México is framed between two grassroots social movements that represent watershed events in Mexicos political life: the Student Movement of 1968, and the Zapatista guerrilla uprising in 1994. This dissertation addresses the issues of political marginality, state violence, representation of torture and political imprisonment, construction of official history, and individual and collective memory. To shed light on the issue of political imprisonment, I analyze the novel ¿Por qué no dijiste todo?, and the prison dairy Los diques del tiempo by Salvador Castañeda, as well as the political prisoners anthology Sobreviviremos al hielo by Manuel Anzaldo and David Zaragoza. In discussing the construction of official history, and the role of memory I analyze the novels Pretexta by Federico Campbell, and Muertes de Aurora by Gerardo de la Torre. These texts were published in the decade of the eighties as fiction. Nonetheless, they can be consider marginal for several reasons: 1) some of these writers were guerrilla fighters and not intellectuals, therefore they had to assault the lettered city (dominant discourses and state cultural institutions) in finding an in-between space (Silvano Santiago); 2) the novels of Campbell and de la Torre are not considered canonical, and have been ignored, even though both these writers belong to the lettered city; 3) all texts expose the mechanisms of authoritarian power, and the contradictions of representation, give voice to marginal subjectivities, and reveal alternatives to official history.

This dissertation arises from the hypothesis that the perspective of indigenism is indispensable as a guiding thread in the reading of a variety of Bolivian literary expressions, now impacted by formulas of literature written in Spanish as well as by modern and postmodern urban culture. There are two main strands that are woven into this reading: one that works to weave in detail each of the works chosen; the other that searches to intertwine the connections that unite those different works, holding in perspective, in both strands, a place of contact between basically the two cultures: Andean indigenous and Westernized. It affirms that both the canonical indigenous positions as well as the proposals of mestizaje that operate by omission of the indigenous make themselves apparent in two of the most important novels of the Bolivian literary historiography: Juan de la Rosa (1885) y Raza de bronce (1919). The first operates through omission of the indigenous by erasing the Indian from the novelistic epic; the second, by superimposing on the Indian vision a series of mediations that end up blurring that vision in front of the reader, allowing only the narrators view. Therefore, both function around an authoritarian narrator and operate in a similar fashion both discursively and ideologically regarding the Indian. Instead, Yanakuna (1952), which is considered in general as part of orthodox indigenism and a mere repetition of its principles and denunciations, denotes important breaks in relation to the two aforementioned works and to other novels of orthodox indigenism. In it, the interweaving of literature and politics marks an enrichment of the discourse. Counter-representational or de-representational postures and strategies of reversion are achieved through actively discordant textualities in relation to earlier classical indigenist propositions in the four other narratives under study: Manchay Puytu, el amor que quiso ocultar dios (1977); Manuel y Fortunato: una picaresca andina (1997); Chojcho con audio de rock psshado (1993) and Cuando Sara Chura despierte (2003). These works offer an other way of looking that makes possible the translation of diversity.

"CONFLICT, HEGEMONY AND DEPENDENT NATIONALISM IN COLOMBIA 2002-2008: BETWEEN GOVERNMENTAL COMMUNICATION AND FICTIONALIZED TELEVISION NEWS" Fabio López de la Roche, PhD University of Pittsburgh, 2009 This dissertation explores two key components in the contemporary production of hegemony in Colombia: presidential discourse and television news narratives. Analyzing the Álvaro Uribe Vélez administrations policy of democratic security and its communications, the author highlights its articulation with an authoritarian and regressive patriotic presidential discourse, which attempts to re-narrate the Colombian history of the last fifty years by turning guerrilla movements, especially FARC, into a scapegoat for all national and local problems. Appealing to the populations feelings of fear and hatred of the FARC (a result of its practice of kidnapping), President Uribe Vélez succeeded in reorienting the affective attention of Colombian public opinion against that guerrilla movement. The FARC, conceived of as the major public enemy, has thus contributed to uniting the government and population around a right-wing political project. The author also points out the ambiguous nature of Uribe Vélezs nationalism, characterized by the presence of traditionalist Colombian symbols and values and by its unconditional subordination to the George W. Bush administrations hemispheric policy. The dissertation includes a case study of the representation in the television news program Noticias Caracol of the January 11, 2008 liberation of Clara Rojas and Consuelo González, two Colombian hostages kidnapped by the FARC guerrilla group. The analysis allows the author to address questions of both pluralism and homogeneity in television news, the relationships between hegemony, preferred readings, the realistic presence of fiction and dramatic strategies in the news, and the use of audiences feelings about the phenomenon of kidnapping in manufacturing television stories. The dissertation represents an interdisciplinary research project inscribed among the fields of communication studies, journalism studies, critical analysis of discourse, narratologic inquiry, and political studies. The author uses a wide variety of sources: television news broadcasts; personal field notes of analysis of television news programs; journalistic reports on the Colombian conflict; newspapers; magazines; academic journals; and electronic magazine and newspaper articles. The dissertation is addressed to specialists as well to a wider public interested in the relationships between mass media discourse, hegemony, and political culture.

In my dissertation, I trace the representation of drug use, globalization, social marginality, and violence in the two well-known films by the Colombian director Víctor Gaviria. My approach is framed by Walter Benjamins critical-theoretical work on the notions of experience and intoxication, Gilles Deleuzes idea of double becoming, and Giorgio Agambens concept of bare life. I am also concerned with what might be called the ethical dimension that is inherent in Gavirias strategy (the use of natural actors, the question of pornomiseria, etc.). These films involve what I call the paradox of drug euphoria, this paradox, I argue, means that for those whose existence have become bare life, in Agambens sense of the term, using drugs is an opportunity to reassert their lives. Drugs help the central characters in Gavirias films create a collective experience and give value to themselves and their social environments. On the other hand, global accumulation, deterritorialization (the specter of Medellín as a kind of chaotic postmodern megalopolis), and frenetic stimulation are also effects of drugs, once productive of bare life." These destructive effects are interrupted by the utopian desire of the characters in the films, who are also real people, not only actors representing the urban poor. However, these fleeting moments of utopian plenitudenot unlike what Benjamin meant by illuminations are interrupted in turn by the force of capitalist deterritorialization and dehumanization. Gavirias films exist in and portray the dialectic relation between these two forces. In short, I develop the paradox of euphoria into a critique of contemporary society and a new understanding of collective experience.