Considerado a culminação do projeto literário do escritor chileno Roberto Bolaño (1953-2003), o romance 2666, publicado postumamente em 2004, é formado por cinco partes de encaixes não harmônicos. Argumento, neste estudo, que 2666 assimila diferentes gêneros literários consagrados, como o romance realista norte-americano, o romance policial em mais de uma variante e, por fim, o romance de formação alemão. Num primeiro momento da tese, um close reading do livro analisa a estrutura e as modulações do narrador e do estilo de Bolaño de cada parte, num afã de compreender como esses gêneros são assimilados. Os principais temas do autor a relação entre ética e estética, arte e violência são alcançados a partir da análise formal, em diálogo constante com a fortuna crítica e, num esforço comparativo, com obras canônicas cujos gêneros Bolaño busca assimilar. Ao abordar 2666 por este viés, levanta-se uma série de questões que orbitam ao redor de duas perguntas fulcrais: que espécie de romance é 2666? E o que ele representa para a poética do início do século XXI? Uma vez que 2666 é ocasionalmente classificado como enciclopédico ou maximalista e posto em diálogo com outros romances longos norte-americanos, questiono essa taxonomia, buscando apresentar suas limitações e refletir sobre como o livro resiste a catalogações e leituras definitivas. Partindo de ligações sugeridas pelo próprio romance, aproximo 2666 de obras que lidam com o conceito de romance total escritas no entreguerras. Em uma leitura diacrônica, postulo, então, que Roberto Bolaño ressuscita o que é possível resgatar de um ideário modernista, que, por sua vez, ganha uma nova significação na sua poética, indissociável dos espectros do fracasso das utopias, da crise do humanismo e do triunfo do capitalismo tardio em toda a sua violência. A relação entre 2666 e o alto modernismo, no entanto, não é estável ou pacífica. A partir das fissuras, dos rastros, do excesso e do desconjuntado, elaboro, por fim, o conceito de um romance monstruoso que assimila com voracidade outros gêneros, expondo contradições inerentes ao fazer poético contemporâneo. / Regarded as the high point of Chilean writer Roberto Bolaños (1953-2003) oeuvre, the novel 2666, published posthumously in 2004, is divided in five disharmoniously connected parts. In this thesis, I argue that 2666 assimilates different literary genres such as the American realist novel, crime fiction in more that one variant, and finally the bildungsroman. The first part of the thesis is dedicated to a close reading of the novel, analyzing its structure, the narrators modulation and Bolaño\'s stylistic changes in each section, in order to understand how such genres are assimilated. The authors main themes the link between ethic and aesthetic, art and violence are reached through formal analysis, in a constant dialog with other works that belong to genres which Bolaño tries to assimilate. By approaching 2666 this way, many questions are raised regarding two main issues: what sort of novel is 2666? And what does it represent to the literary writing in early 21st century? The book is often classified as encyclopedic and maximalist, and placed side by side with other long American novels; I disagree with those labels, and seek to show how limited they are, reflecting upon the way 2666 rejects common categorical interpretations. Based on connections the novel itself suggests, I establish a link between 2666 and modernist novels that deal with the concept of a total novel. I propose then a diachronic reading that claims that Bolaño recovers what is still possible from the modernist ideology, which gains new meaning in his own poetics, inseparable from the specters of failed utopias, the crisis of humanism, and the ubiquity of late capitalism in all its violence. The connection between 2666 and high modernism, however, is not stable or simple. It is through its gaps, leftovers, excess and disharmony that I develop the concept of a monstrous novel that assimilates other genres and exposes contradictions intrinsical to contemporary poetics.

This thesis postulates the narrative of Venezuelan psychiatrist and novelist Francisco Herrera Luque as one that demystifies the official historical discourse of his nation. Our argument is developed through a two-part analysis. First, we present and examine the author's characteristic method, one that he called "fabled history", and the way it deals with elements of Venezuela's historical past. Secondly, we analyze the way Herrera Luque, while crafting an undoubtedly historical narrative, also analyzes many elements of the Venezuelan idiosyncrasy and identity through the illustration of colonial life in the nation, in particular within the oligarchic social class known as mantuanos, a group of people who controlled the beating of the nation's young heart from its birth until its independence. To support our idea, we have used the theories of French philosopher Roland Barthes as our main theoretical basis for the mystification-demystification argument, for it is our view that his theory about myth as a self-justifying discourse is very proximal to what we believe to be Herrera Luque's vision about the role that patriotic or official history has played in Venezuela. We have also relied on the works of Linda Hutcheon and Hayden White to bring up the relationship between literature and history, especially regarding the narrative element in historiography, an essential element in what has been called the "new historical novel", a genre that presents new narrative approaches to history. Our work also presents several elements that show how Herrera Luque's work not only seeks continuity in a usually fragmented discourse, but also takes advantage of its literary condition to present some observations and analysis about Venezuelan collective identity. His attempt to narrate Venezuelan history from its beginnings until the first quarter of the 20th century has produced not only an irreverent look at the historical record, but also an effort to make sense out of a series of events whose disconnected condition has influenced the way that Venezuelans relate to their past. Furthermore, we conclude that perhaps the strongest message of Herrera Luque's narrative is that because of this distortion of the past, Venezuela is unable to have a clear understanding of its present.

In my dissertation I adopt an interdisciplinary approach to explore a crucial moment in the intellectual history of Ecuador and Brazil and the way in which late 19th and early 20th century writers articulate a representational discourse that reveals the contradictions of liberalism and modernity. I argue that after entering the modern world-system, Ecuador and Brazil undergo a comparable modernization process, which entails the emergence of the cities of Guayaquil and Rio de Janeiro as new centers of political and economic power. The study of the coincidences and discrepancies between the two national processes sheds light on antagonistic cultural systems coexisting within the realms of the new metropolis. My dissertation consists of an introduction and five chapters. In the introduction, I present the theoretical framework and explain the key concepts that are common currency in contemporary attempts to articulate cultural analysis with its social and historical reality. Chapters 1 and 2 look at the origins of Ecuadorian and Brazilian identities in the works of writers José de Alencar and Juan León Mera. I intend to trace budding national identities in each of their essays about language, race, and politics, as well as in their foundational fictions, Iracema: Lenda do Ceará (1865) and Cumandá: un drama entre salvajes (1879). Chapters 3 and 4 problematize the ways in which the novels O cortiço (1890), by Brazilian Aluízo Azevedo, and A la costa (1905), by Ecuadorian Luis A. Martínez, are linked to the intricate local debates about slavery, internal migration, and the participation of both national economies in the modern world system. I contend that the narratives of Azevedo and Martínez become “hinge-novels” for glimpsing the “national” within the “liminal,” even though they fail to foresee the disencounters between the dominant and the subaltern classes. In Chapter 5, I explore the locus of enunciation from which Ecuadorian Jorge Icaza attempts to represent marginal social groups. I argue that Icaza’s Huasipungo (1934) reveals the ineffectiveness of the liberal project and helps establish the agency of marginalized groups in the Andean hacienda. The incorporation of these marginal discourses into his narratives constitutes the first endeavor to provide subaltern groups with a voice. / text

Despite the great popularity and increased prestige of classic detective fiction, as well as the American hard-boiled novel, since their introduction in the nineteenth century many readers and authors have perceived them as genres incompatible with Latin American realities. The inherent conventions of the whodunit, the presence of a detective whose legitimacy is never in doubt, and its conservative ideology, which presupposed the punishment of criminality and the reestablishment of the status quo, were incongruous in societies in which people had no faith in justice. The genre, then, was regarded as unrealistic for third world countries. In this way, in order to be plausible, the detective novel in Latin America needed a different approach. In broad terms, these pages propose the emergence of a new genre that can be observed in the works of contemporary authors such as Vicente Leñero's Los albañiles (1963), Ricardo Piglia's Nombre falso (1975), Jorge Ibargüengoitia's Las muertas (1977) and, most notably, in Roberto Bolaño's Los detectives salvajes (1998), which I consider the most prominent and complex example of this type. The present study examines how this innovative Spanish American detective fiction incorporates and restates some of the structures and conventions of the hard-boiled novel and shares some features of contemporary Spanish American fiction, while developing its own characteristics in contrast with both detective fiction schools. Due to the necessity of the native writers to adopt, formally and thematically, alternative approaches when creating credible detective stories, I have named this emergent genre: Spanish American alternative detective fiction. / text

Inspired by the visual allegory ("Conquista, embarcáronse a las Indias" fol. 73 of the Nueva corónica), Legnani contends that the development of the laws of peoples (jus gentium) by 16th century Spanish jurists should be analyzed within the corpus of commercial law (lex mercatoria) employed by sea merchants, bankers and mercenaries throughout the 15th and 16th centuries. This dissertation explores the movement from figure to fiction in discourses of capital and violence. / Romance Languages and Literatures

The brothel has an important role in Latin American literature and film. The fictional brothel is expected to produce gender in both men and women, but these gendered identities are placed at the extremes within the bordello. This gender extremism creates opposition, or gender transgression, in the characters of twentieth-century Latin American narrative and film. Here I map the brothelized iteration of both genders through prohibitions, taboo, abjection, and violence within various texts and films. Much of the discipline of this cultural production of gender rests on the body. The body must bear the mark of its gender or the character risks violent consequences. Fatness plays an important role in this sexual economy, because fatness destroys gender, pushing the subject toward an androgyny that other characters reject or hate. Though the brothel has been studied before, it has not been analyzed from this gendered perspective. / text

This dissertation is a transnational study that argues that a structure of mourning, spoken through and effected by the historical romance, underlies the narrative of national culture as it emerges in the Americas during the early nineteenth century. The writing, consumption and preservation of these texts reveal not only the psychic life of community but also the material basis for that psychic life. Writing and reading, the production and circulation of texts, plays a crucial role in developing this psychic life, and the historical romance was particularly important in the Americas for imagining a national legacy. Current criticism emphasizes the sexual coupling and generative romantic structure of the marriage plot around which many of these novels circulate. This criticism emphasizes the somatic nature of the genre, the corporeal language of romance that is read in the tears of joy and grief spilled by its characters as well as its readers. But while I agree that a libidinal energy is at the heart of both the narrative and its readers’ responses, I argue that the focus on sexual coupling neglects to consider another bodily discourse: that of death and mourning. Mourning enacts a simultaneous identification with and desire for a lost object, a fetishistic relationship that brings together the Freudian “to be” and “to have” and so invests the lost object with both narcissistic and communal attachments. These texts offer their readers the bodies within the narratives, as well as the texts themselves, as the material of a cultural heritage, constructing a nativism that ties the subjects to the land and to the community through a shared lost artifact, their history. Through mourning a common object, the subjects become citizens, native Americans that distance themselves from Europe while supplanting the Amerindian. In combining modern studies of material culture with post Freudian psychoanalytic criticism, the dissertation works to make explicit the relationship between death, citizenship and textuality in order to show the cultural work of fictional historiography in the making of the American nations. / text

No description available.

This M.A. thesis consists of a close-textual reading of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz’s four sets of villancicos dedicated to the Assumption of the Virgin Mary (1676, 1679, 1685 and 1690), with a special focus on Sor Juana’s marianism and a contrast with Juan Correa’s painting, La Asunción de la Virgen (1689). This thesis will cover Sor Juana’s innovation in her representation of Mary as a model of femininity, Mary’s creative abilities, the crowning of Mary, Mary as a dwelling for God, Sor Juana’s feminization of the divine, Mary’s Assumption itself, masculine aspects and professions attributed to Mary, and Sor Juana’s identification with the Virgen.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--State University of New York at Binghamton, Department of English, General Literature and Rhetoric, 2006. / Includes bibliographical references.