The traditional Bildungsroman that originated in Europe toward the end of the 18th Century embodied the concept of progress and the belief in the Enlightenment ideals of universality, knowledge and the search for truth. In the classic model of the genre the values of the society represented, those of modernity, are ultimately legitimized. In this dissertation, I argue that the female Bildungsroman of Ángeles Mastretta and Carmen Boullosa respond to a fundamentally postmodern aesthetics and ideological framework. In their novels, “Arráncame la vida” (1985), “Antes” (1989), “Mal de amores” (1995) and “Treinta años” (1999), the Mexican writers challenge the legitimacy of the modern ideals of progress and individual maturity that characterized the traditional, European, male Bildungsroman. These texts reject the essentialist and utopian representation of progressive personal growth and achievement that would invariably lead to a fixed state of maturity. My study of Mastretta’s and Boullosa’s representations of the Bildung process draws on postmodern theories such as those proposed by Jean-François Lyotard, Linda Hutcheon and Zygmunt Bauman, among others. Their protagonists’ subversive and contestatory attitudes toward many of modernity’s most disseminated master narratives –the traditional concept of maturity, of a coherent sense of self and of childhood and adolescence as steps toward a definitive personal identity, suggest a revision of the traditional principles of the genre. In the context of contemporary Mexican society, these texts ultimately suggest the inadequacy of the conventional form of the coming of age novel to represent the process of individual development. In postmodern Mexico, as this study demonstrates, the referents of modernity have lost their hegemonic value and therefore, the conventional model of the coming of age novel must be reinvented. The implications of the novelists’ reconceptualization of the genre are twofold; on the one hand, it suggests an emancipatory defiance of the modern concepts of individual progress and perfectibility, while on the other, it demands a high degree of tolerance toward the ambiguous and plural nature of postmodern representations of women’s formative journeys.

In an age compounded by diversity, this dissertation seeks a common ground among the multifarious experiences of America. It argues that the land, the physical and the metaphysical, the lived and the perceived space that is referential to all, constitutes a primeval experience--the imagination of America. If Anglo-Americans once envisioned a virgin land on which to build a New World Garden, ethnic groups have their founding myths of America: While the Navajo Indians perceive a "house made of dawn," Chicanos reclaim the mythic "heart of Aztlan" in the Southwest; and while Afro-Americans hail "home to Harlem," Chinese Americans "go-out-on-the-road" to the legendary Gold Mountain in California. Conceptually, the study employs Henry Nash Smith's (1950) critical notion of myth: "a poetic idea, a collective representation." While Smith historicizes the westward expansion of the "virgin land," Annette Kolodny (1984) provides a paradigm of middle-class white women taunting and questioning the male-centered "virgin land." Kolodny is important not only because she polarizes the male and female fantasies, but because, by exposing the woman as one category of "otherness," she relates womanhood to ethnicity. The study hence deconstructs the myth of virgin land by contesting the issues of ethnicity and gender in imagining America. It investigates the images of Aztlan, la Mestiza, Harlem, the "house made of dawn," and the Gold Mountain to surface the common ground of a mythic element in our imaginations of America. It emphasizes the ethnic woman's need to carve out the "land before her" in both racial and gender terms. This is done structurally by pairing a male and a female writer in each ethnic group: (1) N. Scott Momaday and Leslie Silko; (2) Rudolfo Anaya and Gloria Anzaldua; (3) Claude McKay and Zora Neale Hurston; (4) Louis Chu and Maxine Hong Kingston. By comparing male and female writers and by juxtaposing multiethnic writers, this study transgresses sensibly and fluidly among Ethnic Studies, Women Studies, and American Studies. Mostly, it lands on a common ground to illuminate from various angles the lure of the land.

This dissertation presents a study of carnavalesque parody in three works by Virgilio Pinera. The first chapter consists of a study of the genesis of the master narratives of literary modernity in Latin America as formulated in the writings of Jose Marti and elaborated by the arielista writers in the first decades of the century. The chapter also includes a study of the literary group Origenes to which Virgilio Pinera belonged and a brief biographical essay about the author. The second chapter begins with a study of the theory of parody based on the theoretical writings of Linda Hutcheon. This study is followed by an analysis of the short story "El album" as a parody of the cuban neobarroque, an aesthetic shared by some of the members of Origenes. The chapter concludes with a study of the novel La carne de Rene as a padody of the Buildungsroman and of the master narratives of Latin American literaty modernity. The third chapter begins with a study of the popular tradition in Cuban theatre which was influential in the development of Virgilio Pinera's theories about theatre. This study is followed by a comparative study of Tembladera, a play by Juan Antonio Ramos which is based on the arielista modern ideology, and Electra Garrigo, Pinera's first play. The final chapter includes the conclusions of this dissertation.

Esta disertacion estudia dos novelas de Gertrudis Gomez de Avellaneda y dos de Reinaldo Arenas: Guatimozin, ultimo emperador de Mexico (1846) y El cacique de Turmeque (1860), y El mundo alucinante (1969) y La Loma del Angel (1987). En tanto novelas historicas que son tambien re-escritura, este estudio examina junto con ellas sus hipotextos y metatextos: la Historia verdadera de la conquista de la Nueva Espana (Bernal Diaz), las Cartas de relacion (Cortes) y El carnero (Freile); las Memorias de S.Teresa de Mier, Cecilia Valdes (Villaverde), El siglo de las luces (Carpentier) y Biografia de un cimarron (Barnet). La lectura de estos textos se realize siguiendo principalmente los postulados teoricos de Benedict Anderson, Foucault, Genette, Hutcheon y Hayden White. Las novelas de Avellaneda y Arenas son analizadas dentro de sus respectivos contextos de fundacion nacional: la poetica romantica cubana de mediados del siglo XIX y la poetica de la Revolucion (1959). A Avellaneda y Arenas los une el hecho de ser dos escritores cubanos excluidos del grupo fundacional: Avellaneda como mujer que se niega a cumplir la funcion asignada a su sexo, y Arenas como cuidadano cuyas necesidades y deseos--los del homosexual, entre otros--no coinciden con los del ente abstracto de "el Pueblo". Sin embargo tambien ellos escriben novelas historicas: sus textos hacen parte del discurso sobre la nacion, si bien cuestionando sus supuestos de manera radical y haciendo patentes sus contradicciones. En buena medida para estos autores la realidad son textos: textos que son tema de su excritura y escritura que deviene por tanto re-escritura. La historia que escriben no es la nunca antes contada, sino la historia de como ese relato ha sido escrito; y es tambien la historia que quiere volver a contar el acontecimiento porque no comparte el relato que de el se ha hecho. Las novelas historicas de Avellaneda y Arenas son asi relatos escritos en contra de la historiografia patriarcal y evolutiva que homogeniza la realidad a costa de sus particularidades, y trivializa sus proyectos.

Various approaches to the problem of inexplicable body pain exist. According to Elaine Scarry in The Body in Pain, physical pain resists language by returning it to its original state, crying, before language is learned. Pain is projected in crying because suffering has no referent, and thus cannot be given objective reality in words. This viewpoint frames the problem of communicating pain as a struggle between doubt and certitude, and not as an intellectual challenge. Other theorists describe how referents are created to explain the phenomenon. Most theories on physical suffering are rooted in the dualistic conception of mind and body. The body is seen as a complex machine for apprehending reality whereby mind and body are inextricable. The dualist view born of modernity posits reason as the translator of sensation. In this way only an interpretation arrived at through reason—in other words, subjected to the discourses of power—can hold. For our analysis we take these conflicts—the division between human suffering and the rationalizations of it—as our starting point; however, we propose that all interpretations, beyond requiring that pain or disease have a biological, social, religious, philosophical or other justification, entail an ethical approach. This is because all knowledge wishing to do justice to both the physical and spiritual aspects of pain and disease requires an ethos. Only an ethical position that accounts for relationships with the other can interpret and understand suffering. Our study relies on Emmanuel Levinas' theories on alterity and the constitution of the subject. Levinas argues that pain gives alterity its impact. Disease and pain confront us with our own mortality. In that uncertainty, alterity is expressed. In this framework, we consider nineteenth and twentieth century Spanish American and Peninsular texts and how disease and physical pain are represented.

In an interdisciplinary fashion, this dissertation on Brazilian women writers in English focuses on translation and gender issues and employs an historical and statistical approach. Following an investigation of the proportion of men to women writers in the corpora of Brazilian literature and its English translations, I offer an analysis of the English translation of three contemporary Brazilian women writers. Then, drawing on models developed by Javier Franco Aixelá and Carla Melibeu Bentes, I evaluate the "foreignizing" or "domesticating" character of the translations by examining Culture-Specific Terms (CSTs) and provide a new model to analyze translation strategies for Gender-Marked Terms (GMTs). The first part of the dissertation (chapters two and three) consists of a quantitative macro analysis of women writers' representation in Brazilian literature, based on a recent reference work, the Enciclopédia de literatura brasileira (2001), and on my own diachronic survey of translated authors. The surprising results, graphically represented in tables and charts, point to the visibility of Brazilian women writers in translation and raise questions regarding the process of cross-cultural transmission. In the second part (chapters four through six), I undertake a qualitative contrastive micro analysis examining the strategies used to translate CSTs and GMTs - presented in tables and charts–in seven books by three Brazilian women writers. Clarice Lispector (1920-1977), the most widely translated and best known in Brazil and abroad, has published highly introspective works. Carolina Maria de Jesus (1914-1977), briefly famous after the publication of her exposé of favela life, found unexpected success in English translation, which motivated her book's re-publication in Brazil. Ana Maria Machado (1940-), famous for her children's books, is one of the few Brazilian authors of this genre published in English. English translators tended to keep most CSTs (50%) in Portuguese; 68% of GMTs were equivalently translated; however, domesticating (CSTs) and neutralizing (GMTs) strategies had a significant impact on the translations. Such macro and micro analyses introduce an evidence-based dimension that complements contemporary translation studies, at times contradicting the presuppositions of theorists, and offers new avenues of research for understanding the processes by which Brazilian works enter the English-language market.

Esta disertación estudia la construcción de sujetos en tres novelas latinoamericanas de la segunda mitad del siglo XX: Balún-Cavan (1957) de Rosario Castellanos, Dreaming in Cuban (1992) de Cristina García y Chambacú (1967) de Manuel Zapata Olivella. Para llevar a cabo este estudio parto aquí de la noción foucaultiana de discursos como prácticas que estructuran nuestro sentido de realidad al construir nociones como las de sujeto e identidad desde las que nos pensamos y actuamos. Es a partir del examen de estas nociones que analizo cómo han sido construido los sujetos en los textos escogidos, desde qué discursos. La nación, el género, la hibridez y la alteridad son los discursos que se enfatizan en el análisis de sujetos y de la construcción de identidades realizado aquí. La lectura de estos textos se lleva a cabo siguiendo pensadores como James Clifford y su noción de nativo híbrido y culturas como rutas, Gloria Anzaldúa y su noción de fronteras como heridas vivas y abiertas, Mary Louise Pratt y sus zonas de contacto, Benedict Andersen y su nación como comunidad imaginada, Cornejo Polar y su crítica del mestizaje como resolutorio, Benítez Rojo y su postulación de la criollización como movimiento del caos, Stuart Hall y su noción de identidades como reposicionamientos. Todos estos pensadores y nociones cuestionan la bipolaridad Sujeto/Otro. Este cuestionamiento es la columna central de esta disertación que pretende no sólo ver en los textos analizados cómo los llamados tradicionalmente Otros (mujeres, US Latinos, Afrocolombianos, indígenas) son construidos como sujetos, sino cómo es replanteada en ese intento la bipolaridad tradicional. Cómo Sujeto y Otro terminan siendo Alteridad. Siendo. Por eso a partir de ello no es posible hablar de su identidad sino de sus identidades, de sus siendo en esas identidades y discursos.

Dominick LaCapra argues that historians continue to interpret legal documents in a hierarchical fashion that marginalizes intellectual history, as fiction is perceived to be less important. This dissertation analyzes contemporary literary texts in the Americas that exploit such a narrow reading of documents in order to interrogate the way official history is constructed by introducing false forms of documents into their narratives. This type of literary text, or what I label “con-script,” is not only historical fiction, but also historicized fiction that problematizes its own historical construction. Many critics propose that the new historical novel revises historical interpretation, but there exists a gap between theory and textual practice. Adapted from E.L. Doctorow's notion of “false documents,” the con-script acts as an alternative that purposefully confuses fiction and nonfiction, providing tools to critically examine the authority maintained by official narratives. By revealing the fictive nature of these constructions, the con-script alerts readers to the manipulation of documents to maintain political authority and to misrepresent or silence marginalized groups. The recent revision of American Studies to include a hemispheric or Inter-American scope provides a context for applying such political claims within a transcultural framework. I compare texts from English, Spanish, and Portuguese America in order to identify shared strategies. After a survey of the historical novel's development across the Americas and a critical theory overview, I analyze three types of con-script. “The Art of Con-Fessing” juxtaposes texts from the three languages via Jay Cantor's The Death of Che Guevara, Augusto Roa Basto's Yo el Supremo, and Silviano Santiago's Em Liberdade. These false documents present themselves as apocryphal diaries written by revolutionary leaders or activists. The authors demythologize untouchable public figures through the gaps in their “own” personal writing. “Mediations of Media” features Ivan Ângelo's A Festa, Tomás Eloy Martínez's La novela de Perón, and Ishmael Reed's Mumbo Jumbo. These journalists interrogate the role of media and political corruption within the construction of national identity; the false documents appear as newspaper clippings, magazine articles and media images. Finally, the subjective process of archiving is examined in “Con-Centering the Archive” via Aguinaldo Silva's No País das Sombras, Francisco Simón's El informe Mancini, and Susan Daitch's L.C.

This project is a narratological study of the border between fiction and reality, and the traversing thereof. I postulate that the permeability of this border is the consequence of textual acts: Cataloged Fabulations, Second-tier Fictionals, and Rhizomatic Fabrications. These are akin to speech acts in that fictional entities gain nonfictional status by means of an implicit contract at the heart of the textual act. Having laid out the narratological foundation of the textual acts' power, I argue that the narratological bears on the ontological through performative speech acts, as portrayed in J. L. Austin's tripartite model. I use two lenses in my analysis: the work of Jorge Luis Borges and the Hebrew Bible and its commentaries. The Borgesian trifecta is encyclopedia, mirror, and labyrinth, referents that are synonymous with the three textual acts noted above. In terms of the biblical lens, my analysis focuses on a metaphor family in Jewish mysticism. This family includes the World as Book, The Torah as Blueprint, God as Author, and Letters as Building Blocks. The resulting conceptual system is narratological in nature. Consequently it is useful to draw on this system so as to elucidate the field of narratology. The binoculars offer a parallax view, which provides a unique perspective on narratology: the combination of modernist/postmodernist fantasy and the urtext of the Western literary canon. My aim is to further the conception of narratology into the crosshatched territory of literary theory and cultural studies.

My dissertation is the first systematic study to bring together contemporary legal and literary theory to the analysis of the legal texts of Spain in the New World. By focusing on the Capitulaciones de Santa Fe (1492), and other legal documents, I argue that this legal corpus is also a narrative construct which blurs the distinction between fact and fiction. My purpose is to explore the rhetorical dimension of legal writing as a process of emplotment of colonial encounters. The poetics of legal narrative will be examined applying the theory of "law as literature," a recent cross-disciplinary approach. My point is that all the strategies and approaches developed in the field of colonial literary studies have neglected to examine this corpus of laws as cultural production. Nevertheless, it is precisely rhetoric which provides an accessible medium for exploring the connection between law and literature. My point is that colonial legislation can be understood in its complexity only when it is realized that legal discourse is not merely conceptual--that is, not reducible to a set of definitions--but also literary, by which I mean that its metaphorical and associative quality derives precisely of the need to address the question of imposing principles of social control, which are at the center of any legislative controversy. In other words, Spain's legislation in America should be studied not only as a set of rules or institutions, but as a kind of discursive practice of cultural dominance. This methodological approach is based on the assumption that a nexus between law and literature was at the center of the Conquest of America. Finally, I will conclude by summarizing the objectives of my work. This study should help to increase our understanding of the relation between law and literature. Cataloguing legal texts as new objects of study within Colonial Literature, invites us to raise new research questions which, among other things, challenges the category of what we consider as "colonial texts." The methodological consequences of this broadening of the range of objects of study represents an enrichment of perspectives in colonial literary studies.