Orientador: Antonio Roberto Esteves / Banca: Marilene Weinhardt / Banca: Lívia Maria de Freitas Reis Teixeira / Banca: Ana Cecília Arias Olmos / Banca: Ana Maria Carlos / Resumo: Jorge Luis Borges é considerado por muitos críticos e escritores um dos autores mais importantes do século XX. Afinal, sua poética revolucionou a prática literária, bem como os estudos de literatura, tornando-se paradigmática. Atualmente, observamos que o escritor argentino não é apenas alvo de inúmeros ensaios, teses e biografias, mas também foi convertido em personagem de vários romances, contos, crônicas, peças teatrais, filmes e até histórias em quadrinhos. Nesse sentido, Pablo Brescia (2008) assinala que há uma tendência a "literaturizar" Borges, isto é, transformá-lo em objeto literário. O estudioso acrescenta que nos estudos borgeanos ainda há um espaço ignorado sobre o modo como os escritores (re) leram o autor argentino, particularmente, no âmbito ficcional. Considerando a existência da referida lacuna, entendemos ser justificável a realização de um estudo que examine esta questão. Assim, o objetivo de nosso trabalho é contribuir para a compreensão do processo de conversão de Borges em personagem de outros autores, especificamente, no âmbito das literaturas argentina e brasileira, ou melhor, latino-americana. Destarte, selecionamos como corpus desta pesquisa os seguintes romances: El simulador (1990), de Jorge Manzur; Las libres del Sur. Una novela sobre Victoria Ocampo (2004), de María Rosa Lojo, Matar a Borges (2012), de Francisco Cappellotti, Borges e os orangotangos eternos (2000), de Luis Fernando Veríssimo; O romance de Borges (2000), de Hamilton Alves e Memorial de Buenos Aires (2006), de Antonio Fernando Borges. Observamos que essas narrativas giram em torno de biografemas de Borges e de sua literatura, dialogam com a poética borgeana e a história da literatura, além de utilizarem a intertextualidade e a metaficção como principais recursos estilísticos / Abstract: Jorge Luis Borges is regarded as one of the most important XX century writers from many critics' and writers' standpoint. Therefore, his poetry, which became a paradigmatic one, has revolutionized the literary practice as well as the literary studies. Currently, we observe that the Argentinian writer is not only analyzed in several essays, theses and biographies, but also the writer himself has been converted into a recurring character in various novels, short stories, chronicles, plays, films and comics. In this sense, Pablo Brescia (2008) points out that there is a tendency in fictionalizing Borges, that is, to make him into a literary object. Brescia adds that instudies on Borges there is still an ignored aspect concerning the way some writers have (re)read the Argentinian author, especially within the fictional sphere. Considering the existence of that gap we may justify the accomplishment of a study about this topic. Thus, this research work aims at contributing to the understanding of the process of Borges' conversion into a character in the production by other writers, specifically within the scope of Latin American literature, such as, the Argentinian and Brazilian ones. Thereby, the corpus of this research consists of the following novels: Jorge Manzur's El simulador (1990); María Rosa Lojo's Las libres del Sur. Una novela sobre Victoria Ocampo (2004); Francisco Cappellotti's Matar a Borges (2012); Luis FernadoVeríssimo's Borges e os orangotangos eternos (2000); Hamilton Alves's O romance de Borges (2000); and Antonio Fernando Borges's Memorial de Buenos Aires (2006). We observe that those narratives are structured around Borges' "biografemas" and his literature which dialogs with both Borges' poetry and the history of literature, besides utilizing intertextuality and metafiction as main stylistic features / Doutor

Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado do Rio de Janeiro / Na diversidade das postulações do (neo?) barroco latino-americano ensaiadas no século XX existe uma constante: o discurso político que é sobre-impresso à recepção das teorias européias do Barroco. A tese examina as relações entre essa politização, veiculada principalmente nos debates sobre a historiografia literária, e as representações da comida que aparecem em múltiplos textos ficcionais desde meados do século XIX até a década de 1970, sob a hipótese de que tal vinculação teria construído um complexo dispositivo retórico: uma retórica da comida que operaria politicamente no âmago da ficção. O objetivo não é demonstrar a hipótese, mas procurar estabelecer a possibilidade teórica dessa demonstração. A recepção na América Latina do barroco (como termo e como teoria) é examinada sob uma ótica heterodoxa, que tenta avaliar o papel do barroco na historiografia e nas leituras críticas do século XX. A proposta de análise das obras avança em torno de quatro tipos de representações da comida: a alimentação, a antropofagia, a fome e os banquetes. Trata-se, enfim, de uma leitura que, sem rejeitar totalmente as contribuições da historiografia nem as interpretações tradicionais, propõe conexões alternativas e singulares entre variadas obras de autores latino-americanos, por fora das limitações impostas nos modelos da literatura nacional ou da literatura continental / Within the diversity of new baroque Latin American postulations existing during the 20th century there is a constant: their political speech is submitted to the reception of European baroque theories. This paper analyzes the relationship between this politization diffused mainly throughout debates about literary historiography and the representation of food that appeared in different fictional texts since the middle of 19th century up to the seventieth of the 20th. That hypothesis sustained that such a linkage would erect a complex rhetorical mechanism --rhetoric of food-- which would politically act inside the essence of fiction. This paper aims to establish the theoretical possibility of this statement developing the topic in two parts. The first part refers to baroque reception in Latin America as a term and theory from a point of view of a heterodox perspective that tries to evaluate the roll of baroque in the historiography as well as in the critical readings all over the 20th. In the second part, the analysis of works proceeds around four types of food representation: alimentation, anthropophagi, starvation and banquets. Consequently, this paper is about a reading, which without refusing contributions made by historiography and traditional interpretations, proposes alternative and singular connections among a variety of works written by Latin American writers beyond the boundaries imposed in the patterns of national or continental literature

abstract: Coming out from under the shadow of sight, blindness has a story to tell. From Tiresias to The Miracle Worker, literary and visual representations of blindness are cornerstones of compelling tales of loss and overcoming. In support of the inherent value of sight, these conventional narratives overshadow the stories and lived experiences of blind people themselves. In light of this misrepresentation, I explore what it means to read, write, and see blindness, as well as consider the implications of being blind in present-day Latin America. I achieve this through a transnational and interdisciplinary analysis of novels, short stories, film, and photography by blind and sighted artists and writers whose work has been published or exhibited after the year 2000. In this context, I will demonstrate how blindness can serve as a lens through which the production and reception of narrative and visual culture can be critically evaluated from a blind person’s perspective. Most importantly, this dissertation showcases the critical and creative work of blind people in order to demystify stereotypes and contextualize anxieties surrounding blindness, perception, and identity. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Spanish 2018

abstract: The 1920s have played a key role in the formation of the Latin American consciousness of its own cultural identity. In approaching the selected three heterogeneous regions of Latin America, the Southern Cone, the Andean Zone and the Afroantillan Caribbean, this research focuses on Latin American identity issues as a literary avant-garde construct found in the poetics and in the programmatic texts of the leading avant-garde journals of each corresponding region: Martín Fierro (1924-1927) in Argentina; revista de avance (1927-1930) in Cuba, and Amauta (1926-1930) in Perú. To carry out this kind of analysis and to fully understand the historic implications characteristics of each region, one of the initial tasks of the study has been to contextualize the period in each country in which the journals were published. After that, an analysis of each region's avant-garde production has been performed in order to categorize and situate the underlying questions of identity expressed in corresponding journals. Each region has been studied separately, yet all in view of contributing to a comprehensive and comparative study of the regions selected. The final result has been an organization of diverse principal semantic and ideological fields overlapping in and cross-crossing different regions as represented by the selected literary journals. Starting from the very same literature, which was inspired by the spirit of its time, this research has aimed at reconstructing the notions of identity that were common within the intellectual circles of the avant-garde times as expressed in the journals Martín Fierro, revista de avance, and Amauta, and, in the end, played a signal role in the development of national and continental cultural identity consciousness throughout Latin America from the beginning of the 20th century until today. / Dissertation/Thesis / Ph.D. Spanish 2012

abstract: From Impossible Angles Towards Strategic Ones: Narratives of Death, Life, and Disability in La Muerte me Da and El Huesped The glamour of single-handedly overcoming adversity, sidestepping obstacles, or defying the odds makes for great mystery or adventure fiction, but fails to do justice (poetic or otherwise) to lives that are both physically and conceptually "marked" by more complex challenges. From a theoretical view, a similar desire to escape or maintain the perceived "dividing line" between fact and fiction, nature and nurture, mind and body, is confronted by a diverse set of human experiences, all of which have come to be defined, and continue to define themselves, along both sides of such a divide. Disability, typically viewed as an "emerging" branch of literary and cultural critique, is perhaps the most pervasive. Hidden under the covert language of the "grotesque", "monstrous", "doppelgänger", "freak", "eccentric" or "queer", disability has historically represented something other than itself. Two texts that attest to both the real and imagined possibilities of resignification and new modes of articulation surrounding disability are La muerte me da (2007) by Cristina Rivera Garza and El huésped (2006) by Guadalupe Nettel. From different points of departure, both texts offer a narrative approximation towards the disabled mind, body, and perceptual experience. In ways that are both similar and different, these narratives question one's perceived access to that which is otherwise understood to be the physically and conceptually "inaccessible" or "illegible" space of disability. Such approximations towards, and articulations of, the disability experience are processes that move, largely unnoticed, both within and beyond texts. As this construct continues to transform itself from both within and outside itself, disability acquires intellectual and practical value while requiring the "experts" in fields beyond the narrow scope of medicine, education, and rehabilitation to (re)consider their own approaches to, and apprehensions of, disability in order to redefine what or who is accessible or viable for literary and cultural debate. / Dissertation/Thesis / M.A. Spanish 2014

Humor can be underestimated, but to laugh or not to laugh is as transcendental as the decision to be or not to be. That is the question of this dissertation: the productive encounter of challenging instances of humor in Latin-American literary texts that not only display humor in charged violent backgrounds, but create humorous traps and spaces for meta-humorist reflections, inviting the reader to judge whether to laugh or not to laugh in an aesthetic and ethical sense. Those instances of perplexity would ask the reader to reflect on the nature of the humor displayed, its targets, context, refinement, creativity, meaning and outcomes, among other questions that laugher implies. This would foster a more solicitous public who recognizes a liberating good laugh from a violent one, avoiding the reproduction of stereotypes, hate speeches or the consent of an oppressive status quo. / Romance Languages and Literatures

This dissertation explores the nature of Jose Marti's ethical ideas in relation to the rise of late Nineteenth Century Modernity and in tandem with the deconstruction and subversion of the principal constituencies of colonial and aesthetic discourses. Marti proposes a new paradigm that question the insatiable pursuit of novelty, the hostility towards tradition, the historical perspectivism and a critical stance with regard to social aesthetic Modernity. He also questions the cult of reason, the linear historicism, and the teleological progress framed in philosophical utilitarian pragmatism of bourgeois Modernity. His radical criticism of the structures and institutions of the hegemonic power of the modern state override the ontological and epistemological foundations of Modernity. Marti's deconstruction of the fundamental discourses of euro-centristic Occidental culture leads him, through his ethical writings, to an arqueology of Native American civilizations, thus reinserting, within the false premises of European universalism, his counter-discourse of tradition and the voice of the Other.

This thesis analyzes the political essays of critically-acclaimed and best-selling Colombian author William Ospina (b. March 2, 1954) within the context of the contemporary political Spanish American essays published post 1989. Taking into account his original Romantic answer to the Spanish American left ideological crisis at the end of the 20th century, and the debate which arose among his commentators on the merits of his rhetorical and argumentative techniques used to justify his theses, I examine Ospina´s main political essays using Belgian philosopher Chaïm Perelman's argumentation theory. I claim that, despite his prominence as one of Colombia´s public opinion leaders and most politically engaged intellectuals, his originality within recent Spanish American essay and thought, and the relevance of his warnings against modern society's biggest problems and contradictions, the author’s controversial rhetoric and argumentation fell short of supporting his critique of Western civilization and promoting his Romantic alternatives to current problems. I also claim that Ospina's preference for certain argumentative devices results in literary texts which struggle between the essay and the pamphlet, and oversimplifies the Romantic ideas he tries to defend. Finally, my work has allowed me to point out the lack of academic studies and concrete textual analysis on Ospina´s essays and literary works, the recent Spanish American essay after 1989, and the study of the Spanish American essay’s argumentative purpose, structure and techniques, making this study a first step in the further development of these fields.

This dissertation analyzes three novels by contemporary female Caribbean and Latin American Afro-descendent writers of the diaspora: Peruvian Lucía Charún-Illescas' Malambo (2001), Brazilian Ana Maria Gonçalves' Um defeito de cor (2006), and Puerto Rican Mayra Santos-Febres' Fe en disfraz (2009). In these texts, the old and the new intermingle in the space of the narrative. The colonial past is reexamined and reconstructed out of the need to understand its reminiscences into the present and the necessity to transform the future. These decolonial narratives of the contemporary African diaspora foster an expression of the interconnection between the two colonial spaces: where the African-descendents, especially the black female, were the objects of submission, and the present time, where the remnants of the past persist. I propose a reading of how the writers decolonize via history, memory, myth, and sex by challenging the construction of the colonial patriarchal rule and rewriting a new history to include the marginalized voices. Decolonization here implies a deconstruction of the image of colored people, especially black women in colonial time where they were deprived of their culture, personhood, and subjectivity. The writers propose a social transformation in which colonialism, racism, sexism, and classism are confronted and a new society is created, without the colonial power structure. The writers return to the roots of power and domination and examine the dynamics of the interconnection of gender, race, class, and sexuality and propose a new gender paradigm.

My dissertation is about the feminine Caribbean perspective in three novels: Calypso (1996) by Tatiana Lobo; L'exil selon Julia (1996) by Gisèle Pineau; and Breath, Eyes, Memory (1994) by Edwidge Danticat. The values and traditions involved in the patriarchal system are reevaluated to allow the Caribbean female voice to express itself. The novels are analyzed through the historical and linguistic specificities of the regions studied: the modernization of a small town on the Atlantic Coast of Costa Rica, exile from the Caribbean to France, and the Haitian Diaspora in the United States. The Caribbean is seen as a heterogeneous area sharing particular and general historical facts. Female figures express themselves in English, French and Spanish concerning the domestic sphere and how it is affected by ethnic, migratory, and cultural traditions. Female bonds and religion work together, giving agency to the female characters and allowing them to reconcile their unique experiences. The novels are understood together from a pan-Caribbean feminist perspective informed by the works of Édouard Glissant and Chandra Talpade Mohanty.