<p> While reconsidering Julio Ram&oacute;n Ribeyro's short fiction, this dissertation re-examines the discourses about realism that predominated in the 1960s and 1970s, during the eruption of the Latin American literary and cultural phenomenon known as the boom. Situated at the intersection of philosophical reflection and literary criticism, it interrogates the boom's totalizing conception of realism and its equally exhaustive corollaries while arguing that Ribeyro's fractured form of realism forges new models to critique the relations between fiction and the real. </p><p> The first chapter of the dissertation studies the concept of realism that the boom denigrated while promoting their project of totalizing novels predicated on antirealist aesthetic forms. Assorted texts are examined to complicate the boom's conceptualization that realism, trammeled and outdated, simply mimics reality whereas antirealism conjures a richer view of it by contradicting it. Chapter two argues that Ribeyro's short story, whose form at once absorbs the structure of the fable and disavows the latter's allegorical compass, comes into being upon his failure to write the totalizing novel. His finite short story form occupies the absence enacted by the novel that never was. The last two chapters explore the everyday and the gesture in Ribeyro's short narratives as spatiotemporal reconfigurations&mdash;rather than figural constructions&mdash;that set the critical structure to re-imagine the short story form and by extension realism as assemblages of autonomous fragments of a never completed whole. Chapter three interrogates the time of realism when it becomes unhinged from teleological and etiological temporalities of fixed linearity. By mobilizing the gesture as a critical tool that amplifies interrupted actions rather than their dramatization, chapter four argues that Ribeyro's realism pieces together finite and contingent fragments that flatten the erstwhile hierarchical relations between things and people. </p><p> From the antipodes of figural or tropological regimes of interpretation, <i> Gestured Realism</i> advances new frameworks for the analysis of realism in short and long form fiction outside the paradigms of allegory and symbolism. By cracking echoes of doubt in the disciplinarian order of sequential and coherent signification, it proposes a realism that remains on the verge of disarticulation and incompletion.</p>

El objetivo de esta tesis es el estudio de dos novelas de Jose Donoso: El jardin de al lado y La desesperanza en el contexto del proceso politico y personal del exilio y regreso. Este trabajo consta de tres capitulos. En la introduccion se hable del exilio y regreso de Donoso a su patria y, especificamente, del ciclo de separacion, iniciacion y regreso. El primer capitulo trata de los protagonistas de las dos novelas y sus experiencias con el exilio en varias formas. En el segundo se estudia la muerte simbolica de los protagonistas y en el tercero se analiza su renacimiento, esto es, el regreso simbolico. En la conclusion, se relacionan los sucesos de la vida de Donoso con los de sus protagonistas dentro del contexto de la busqueda humana.

With the publication of her first novel, The House of the Spirits. Isabel Allende has become a Latinamerican voice that needs to be heard. This saga, of four generations of a family, combines mythical and historical elements with a passionate voice. The mythic level is seen through various elements, the most important being magic, as seen through the figure of Clara, and the myth of the dominant male as seen through the figure of Esteban Trueba. The historical level concentrates on the history of Chile starting with the beginning of the 20th century and ends in 1975 when General Pinochet is firmly in control. These two levels combine in a circular form which shows that history repeats itself and the same mythic elements combine over and over again. Through this novel we also see that various parts of the history have a base in mythical elements.

Jose Donoso is a well known Chilean writer whose narrative has received international recognition. A recurring theme in his work from the beginning of his literary career to his most recent works has been the crisis of identity of his protagonists. To achieve the credibility of these characters, Donoso uses a wide variety of narrative techniques. This thesis is divided into three chapters. The first one discusses the factors that influence and form the identity of Donoso's characters and the masks that they are given by the society in which they live. The second chapter deals with the crisis of each individual protagonist, the inception, how the character reacts to the crisis and the outcome. In chapter three we will discuss some of the aspects that these protagonists have in common and ways in which they differ. The manner in which Donoso presents his characters will also be discussed.

Los aspectos que se destacan en la obra de Teillier son la identificacion de vida y poesia y el intento de recuperacion de un paraiso perdido que el situa en la infancia y en el paisaje inmemorial de la aldea. La imposibilidad de volver a este mundo, hace que el lenguaje de maravilla revelado por la infancia se vaya transformando en una cronica, en una biografia personal que no busca ya la comunicacion.

Building upon the historical foundations of Mexican identity assembled by his contemporaries, himself and his predecessors, Carlos Fuentes does his best to render the new face of Mexican identity in his recent novel, La frontera de cristal. Several of its characters stand out as literary embodiments of border theory. These characters not only serve as a description of the author's views of this new reality but also as cautionary tales of what might result from globalization and the neo-liberal market. This thesis will display how these characters are representations of Fuentes's conjecture about the outcome of our present NAFTA-era politics and provide interpretations of some of his characters' fates.

El proposito de este trabajo de tesis es demostrar la influencia de las vanguardias europeas en Altazor, la obra cumbre de Huidobro en la opinion de innumerables criticos. Tomamos cuatro de los mas importantes movimientos: futurismo, expresionismo, cubismo y dadaismo, y analizamos en detalle su influencia en Altazor. En un ultimo analisis intentamos demostrar que a pesar de esta presencia de influencias tan dispares el resultado no es una obra desarticulada, panfletaria y artificial, sino un poema perfectamente integrado y organico. Huidobro creia que el hombre americano estaba llamado a ser aquel "en el cual todos los desequilibrios de las viejas razas vengan a integrarse en un equilibrio nuevo, un hombre de una cultura que sea capaz de resolver las antinomias de las culturas mas contrapuestas" (Huidobro, "Brasil entre nosotros", La Nacion, Santiago, 15-XI-1941). En Altazor, Huidobro uso esa capacidad integradora para alcanzar un "equilibrio nuevo" resolviendo las antinomias de las esteticas mas contrapuestas.

Men have traditionally dominated the world of literature to the point that even in works written by women, female characters have been molded according to men's standards and myths about gender. As women began to break the cultural and social barriers that had for so long contained them, their fictional counterparts also began to embody these changes. Esther Kleinbold Labovitz suggests in her study The Myth of the Heroine: The Female Bildungsroman that it is only in the twentieth century that the female bildungsroman has presented a new female protagonist. This study examines how Angeles Mastretta's Arrancame la vida goes beyond the Madonna/whore syndrome in Mexican literature and looks to discover new paradigms in women's relationship to themselves and the world around them.

This thesis studies the relationship between the narrative techniques employed by three novels of the contemporary South American Southern Cone (Estrella distante by Roberto Bolano, Ciudad ausente by Ricardo Piglia, and Los planetas by Sergio Chejfec) and the practice of journalism in Argentina and Chile in the post-dictatorial period of the 1990s and 2000s. The analysis specifically targets these writers' views of the status of the journalistic project as a vehicle to tell truth about the Southern Cone's recent tragic histories and to preserve memory by making historical experience relevant to lived contemporary reality. The analysis attempts to show that although these writers sense a fundamental flaw in the public attempts to investigate, chronicle, and attribute the crimes of the past, they believe that a deep desire to excavate the past through investigation can be made mnemonically potent through its employment as the modus operandi of a novel's narrator.

<p> This dissertation generates a broader qualitative and quantitative profile of Peru's middle class. It examines an unstudied group of Peruvian immigrants living in the greater New York City area, who are largely of middle-class origins, as are their families who remain behind in Peru. It analyzes immigrants and non-immigrants' lifestyles, changes in family dynamics that occur as a consequence of emigration of one family member, and the effect of remittances on middle-class lifestyles, identity, and experience at home. A close analysis of participants' life-styles and interactions provides conclusions about what defines Peruvian middle class status, and the factors that shape an immigrant's decision to migrate and pursue remittances. By closely examining immigrants from Lima now living in the greater New York area, and their economic, social, and cultural ties to their households back in Peru, I examine remittances as the nexus linking immigrants to their families that are now redefined by a more distant relationship. As social ties are commodified, the relationships between immigrants and non-immigrants prioritize decisions about money, including its production, transmission, reception, and distribution. Consequently, family structure often shifts to reflect a new priority on investment projects for the future over family reunification. By researching immigration and remittances, I analyze this shift in middle-class Peruvian family structure and its impact on social class, identity, and even plans for future emigration. This dissertation also refocuses the analytical lens on the uniquely middle-class origins of Peru's immigrants, challenging scholarly and popular assumptions about immigration that portray poverty eradication and reduction as the primary reason for migration.</p><p> <i>Keywords:</i> Transnational Peruvian Immigration, Peruvian Middle Class, Peruvian Remittances.</p>