My dissertation examines the experimental poetry of three periods, the historical avant-garde of the 1920s, the neo-avant-gardes of the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, and the digital avant-garde (from the 1990s until the present), drawing on the works of poets from the Luso-Hispanic world including the Iberian Peninsula and Latin America. Scholars such as Renato Poggioli and Peter Bürger define the avant-garde as radically new and unrepeatable, an "advanced" guard that exhausted its aesthetic and political possibilities. I challenge this view by establishing a continuity of avant-gardes that emerge during periods of technological innovation and cultural exchange, introducing new artistic modalities, engaging with emerging media and re-purposing the strategies of past avant-gardes to their own historical conditions. Experimental poetic practices such as visual, kinetic, phonetic, concrete, video poetry, and poetic performance have unfolded over time and across national boundaries in response to global, social, and technological forces. My focus is on poetry broadly understood as works that "experiment" with the interplay between the visual, the sonorous and the verbal, questioning both genre and medium specificity, and contesting traditional discipline-bound tools of analysis. In order to critically approach poems that are often not printed on a page, and depend on more than verbal communication, I draw on disciplines such as literary analysis--including close-readings--media theory, and film analysis, and deploy theories of metaphor, embodiment and affect to interpret works that focus on the materiality of language through typographic experiments, script animation, and performance. The selection includes poems by authors from the 1920s such as Josep M. Junoy, Joan Salvat-Papasseit, José Juan Tablada, Guilherme de Almeida; neo-avant-garde visual and concrete poets from the 1960s such as Joan Brossa, Julio Campal, Edgardo Vigo, and Décio Pignatari; and their contemporary counterparts working with digital media such as Ana María Uribe, Olga Delgado, María Mencía, Arnaldo Antunes, and Eduardo Kac. Examining digital poetry in the light of older poetic practices, I compare and contrast how artists have queried the status of literature as a purely script-based art, considering how notions of experimental literature have changed through time (diachronically), but also isolate each period (synchronically). / Romance Languages and Literatures

This dissertation interrogates the role of fashion at representative junctures in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Latin American literature and culture. It shows how fashion has helped to advance specific visions of cultural identity, historical change, and literary production and consumption. Chapter 1 surveys current understandings of dress, fashion, and related concepts, highlighting this dissertation's questioning of fashion as a historically construed, rhetorically powerful discourse associated with Western modernity. It reflects on the importance of sartorial metaphors in literary theory and proposes that fashion is key to understanding the specificity of Latin American modernity. Chapter 2 surveys current scholarship on fashion in Latin America, reconsidering fashion's role in works by Joaquín Fernández de Lizardi, Andrés Bello, Domingo Sarmiento, José Martí and other seminal nineteenth-century writers. Chapter 3 offers the first study of the women's fashion magazine Elegancias (1911-1914), produced in Paris for Latin American consumption with Rubén Darío as literary editor. It investigates Darío's involvement and analyzes four collaborations presently unpublished in book form, particularly Darío's profile of the Argentine writer Delfina Bunge (whom he called "mademoiselle Verlaine"). It also analyzes Elegancia's inscription of Latin American modernismo within femininity and commodity culture. Chapter 4 shifts to Mexico, following the motif of the empty indigenous dress in works by painter Frida Kahlo and writer Rosario Castellanos spanning the 1930s to the 1970s. Mexico's indigenous textile traditions offer a space against/outside fashion from which to subvert normative femininity, imagine ethnic filiations, and critique post-revolutionary Mexico's forging of a mestizo national identity that incorporates indigenous people as mere icons. Chapter 4 analyzes Alejo Carpentier's major novels and his fashion chronicles in Venezuela's El Nacional from the 1950s. It analyzes the representation of everyday dress as costume within the world as theatre metaphor and Carpentier's Benjaminian sensibility in granting fashion allegorical meanings in relation to historical dialectics and transculturation. Throughout, the analysis observes how fashion exacerbates anxieties about Latin American divergence from metropolitan cultural models while its repertoire of images and discourses is used to fruitfully negotiate gender, race, and class as images of the body politic crystalize into images of the dressed body. / Romance Languages and Literatures

This study investigates the imbrications and porosity between journalism and narrative fiction in Latin America. It examines how three journalist-writers, Afonso de Lima Barreto (Brazil), José Marín Cañas (Costa Rica) and Gabriel García Márquez (Colombia) write in a fluid double-sided process of textual creation during the twentieth century. In their journalistic production, these writers include characters or situations that are false or imagined and, at the same time, while working in newspapers, write novels based on their journalistic reports. This discursive dialogism results in works with different degrees of hybridity that relativize the argument of those who see rigid boundaries between journalism and literature in Latin America. The literary figure of the journalist-writer, who produces narrative fiction while simultaneously working full-time for newspapers, magazines and news services, is a deeply rooted tradition in Latin American letters. In this study, special attention is given to the complex deployment of reference, hyperbole, deception and lying. During the twentieth century, when Latin American newspapers wanted to appear less political and more commercial to their readers, the journalist-writers continually masked their political views under the cloak of a fact-oriented journalistic discourse. This dissertation analyzes genre borders and develops concepts like "favela de las letras" ("Favela" in contradistinction to the Republic of Letters) and "diarismo magico" ("magical journalism"). The dissertation also examines the conundrums of verisimilitude raised by the imbrication of journalism and literature referred to above. The notion "magical journalism," which echoes "magical realism" yet structurally is more akin to the ambivalence that Tzvetan Todorov detects in the fantastic, produces its effect by the doubt that arises from the tangle of two principles of decoding: the realist, naturalist one that is expected of journalism and the preternatural. The latter is not the realm of the supernatural, as in marvelous verisimilitude, but ensues from apparently immeasurable political power, which in the texts of these writers is presented not only in a realist mode but coded through literary devices like allusion, allegory, hyperbole. In this way, the texts both refer to a concrete reality and simultaneously register it in a literary mode that produces astonishment, consternation and a range of effects of verisimilitude. / Romance Languages and Literatures

This dissertation explores the relationship between fiction, knowledge and "knowing" in Latin American discourses of China and Japan. By scrutinizing Brazilian and Hispanic American travel journals, novels, short stories and essays from the nineteenth century to the present, Disorientations engages with the epistemological problems of writing across cultural boundaries and proposes a novel entryway into the study of East Asia and Latin American through the notions of "cultural distance," "fictional Sinology" and "critical exoticism." / Romance Languages and Literatures

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This thesis examines the representation of social conditions and historical events in Isabel Allende's first novel from a moral perspective. Using David Hume's moral theory, we explore Allende's judgement of the causes of the 1973 Chilean coup d'etat based on her representation of both the event itself and the social conditions surrounding it. The thematic focus of this study is on issues of affectivity and violence in the novel. This thesis is written in Spanish.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Notre Dame, 2008. / Thesis directed by María Rosa Olivera-Williams for the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures. "March 2008." Includes bibliographical references (leaves 206-215).

This thesis examines the representation of social conditions and historical events in Isabel Allende's first novel from a moral perspective. Using David Hume's moral theory, we explore Allende's judgement of the causes of the 1973 Chilean coup d'etat based on her representation of both the event itself and the social conditions surrounding it. The thematic focus of this study is on issues of affectivity and violence in the novel. This thesis is written in Spanish.

This dissertation analyzes the performance praxis of the Mexican poet Nahui Olin (1893-1978) and the Salvadoran guerrilla leader and author Nidia Díaz (1952-). Through their self-representation in images and texts, these two women subverted the discourse of power characteristic of their respective cultural and historical contexts. Whereas Olin carried out her “corporeal activism” through defiant eroticism; Díaz did so through her stoic stance in the face of incarceration and torture. The dissertation carries out visual analyses enriched by attention to literature, and literary analyses informed by visual culture. In their respective approaches to performance these two figures engage with their sociopolitical contexts as they relate to women’s condition and the quest for spiritual liberation. The first chapter presents the dissertation’s theoretical framework. Michel Foucault, Judith Butler and Elaine Scarry’s theories are crucial to understanding the concepts of body, discourse of power, performance, and pain; Gillian Rose’s approach is essential to analyzing images; Lucia Guerra-Cunningham and Rita Felski are fundamental for addressing women’s writing. The second chapter focuses on Olin’s activism, evident in her role as a “flapper,” her transgressive nude photographs and her poems written during the Mexican post-revolutionary period and which were influenced by avant-garde movements. My analysis links the key photograph I call “Nahui Olin Andrógina” with her poetry, centering on the trope of androgyny as a mystic state. The third chapter examines the naïf self-portraits and testimonio found in Díaz’s Nunca estuve sola (in 1988), which she narrates her imprisonment during El Salvador’s civil war of the 1980’s. My analysis centers on the trope of stoicism manifested in her drawing I call “Una ‘mesías’ que deviene en la madre del pueblo” as well as in the prose of her testimonio. Olin’s erotic activism and Díaz’s armed rebellion both represent attempts to achieve human liberation, including their own as oppressed women, and suggested emancipatory paths that may serve as models for others.

Made available in DSpace on 2014-06-11T19:32:48Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 0 Previous issue date: 2013-12-20Bitstream added on 2014-06-13T20:24:09Z : No. of bitstreams: 1 000744829.pdf: 1045649 bytes, checksum: 9da7efa4c735670854093406f9230c85 (MD5) / Este trabalho tem por objetivo demonstrar como a literatura articulada com a historiografia e a memória pode contribuir para a reelaboração da escrita da história. A partir da leitura crítica da trilogia do escritor Augusto Roa Bastos (1917-2005) - Hijo de hombre (1960), Yo el Supremo (1974) e El fiscal (1993) – este trabalho discute a questão do exílio e suas implicações na vida dos intelectuais, especialmente no século XX. Os textos são analisados à luz de referencial teórico que trata das relações entre história, memória, intelectual, poder e exílio. Os conceitos são abordados sob a perspectiva da literatura, literatura comparada e estudos históricos e culturais. Os personagens históricos envolvidos nas tramas do paraguaio Roa Bastos permitem revisitar a história de seu país, e contribuem para o estudo de sua identidade nacional. Os fatos históricos e os textos memorialísticos ficcionalizados permitem ao autor abordar questões como a relação entre história, memória e esquecimento, memória coletiva e poder / This work aims to demonstrate how literature, combined with historiography and memory, can contribute to reworking history writing. From the critical reading of the trilogy written by Augusto Roa Bastos (1917-2005) - Hijo de hombre (1960), Yo el supremo (1974) and El fiscal (1993) - this research discusses the question of exile and its implications for the life of intellectuals, especially in the twentieth century. The texts are analyzed in the light of theoretical references that deal with relations between history, memory, intellectual, power and exile. The concepts are discussed from the perspective of literature, comparative literature and historical and cultural studies. The historical characters involved in Roa Bastos' plot allow revisiting the history of his country, and contribute to the study of national identity. The historical facts and the fictionalized memorialistic texts allow the author to discuss issues such as the relation between history, memory and forgetfulness, collective and power