This dissertation studies the treatment of fantastic or magical objects in the short stories of Silvina Ocampo (1903-1993), member of the Sur literary group in Argentina which included some of the most influential writers of the twentieth century such as her friend and contemporary Jorge Luis Borges. I study how Ocampo's narrative technique uses objects to interrupt the protagonists' sometimes mundane lives as they reveal a hidden desire. These everyday, seemingly trivial, objects are also often the source of the fantastic element present in Ocampo's exemplary short stories. The first chapter places Ocampo in a literary context, highlighting her role in the Sur group. I study texts in which objects are directly related to the creative process of writing and link them to specific works by Borges, one of her salient influences. The second chapter provides textual analysis of the presence of fantastic objects in Ocampo's work: those that make their way into the textual space through dreams as well as others that trigger or undergo a metamorphosis. Articles of clothing play an important symbolic role in Ocampo's narrative as shown in the third chapter where the use of garments as a symbolic-fantastic element is analyzed. Before starting her literary career Ocampo studied painting under Giorgio de Chirico and Fernand Léger in Paris. The fourth chapter examines Ocampo's relationship with visual art, including the representation of paintings, photographs and other images in her work. Since desire may be viewed as a longing for something that has been lost and comes into being only through its absence, my conclusions address how Ocampo's protagonists frequently wrestle with hidden desires and how fantastic objects are associated with unsettling outcomes.

Latin America has historically sustained political, economic, and social upheaval, creating a vacuum of patriarchal power dynamics indicative of gender violence. These dynamics are reflected in personal and political trauma narratives. The connection between trauma, language, and narrative is complex; however, psychological research demonstrates that narrative memory helps heal and process grief and trauma. The non-verbal expression of affect often manifests in physiological expressions, reflecting one's psychological and emotional status. In conjunction with affect theory and trauma theory, narratives provide additional insight to human experiences and processes when placed within their cultural context and history. In this dissertation, analysis of Pedro Páramo and "I'm your horse in the night" focuses on the role of memory and imagination in surviving circumstances of oppressive gender violence. Additionally, issues represented in The Boy Kings of Texas further the discussion of gender violence directed not only towards women and girls, but also men and boys. The themes of Camila, The Official Story and In the Time of the Butterflies offer additional perspective to trauma as they address the consequences of analyzed and expressed trauma and the necessary element of truth-telling to not only individual but collective trauma narratives. The discussion of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents address repercussions of suppressed traumatic memories within the context of buildingsroman taking into consideration both the physiological and psychological effects of gender violence. Finally, Backyard and The Secret in Their Eyes are texts that further explore the detrimental consequences of extreme gender violence, such as femicide, and the necessary element of truth-telling in trauma narratives not only for purposes of justice and grieving but as the starting point of surviving, coping, and healing from trauma both in the individual and collective sense. Analyzing the characters and themes within these texts of various genres through psychological, sociological, and historical lenses allows for a more complete understanding of how trauma narratives function as agents of change concerning trauma and shame and its relationship with gender violence in the context of Latin American cultures. / A Dissertation submitted to the Department of Modern Languages and Linguistics in partial fulfillment of the Doctor of Philosophy. / Spring Semester 2017. / March 7, 2017. / Gender Violence, Latin American, Narrative, Shame, Textual Analysis, Trauma / Includes bibliographical references. / Delia Poey, Professor Directing Dissertation; Robinson Herrera, University Representative; José Gomariz, Committee Member; Juan Carlos Galeano, Committee Member.

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The identification of antimicrobial compounds that inhibit multidrug-resistant (MDR) bacteria continues to be a significant area of research to combat the public health threat posed by MDRs. Pseudomonas aeruginosa is a Gram-negative, MDR bacterium found within both the environment and healthcare settings. Our laboratory has observed another Gram-negative bacterium, Proteus species, exerts an interesting polymicrobial interaction with Pseudomonas aeruginosa by potentially compromising the quorum sensing (QS) factor, pyocyanin, of Pseudomonas aeruginosa. Production of pyocyanin by Pseudomonas is the main method the bacterium uses for communication and coordination of virulence. In this study, we examined the effectiveness of Proteus mirabilis and Proteus vulgaris to compromise pyocyanin production in Pseudomonas aeruginosa. Through the use of pyocyanin isolation and extraction techniques, data was gathered for Pseudomonas aeruginosa’ s molecular interaction with the two Proteus species of bacteria. Further observations were made on microbial interaction between Pseudomonas aeruginosa and Proteus mirabilis through measuring the rate of metabolic activity, twitching motility rate, and observing differences in biofilm formation. Using the data obtained from this research, we hope to identify new methods of controlling Pseudomonas virulence and infection by inhibiting its ability to communicate and coordinate in polymicrobial infections

Flavonols are a major subclass of flavonoids and are considered the most abundant subclass of flavonoids. Flavonols are classified as having a hydroxyl group on the 3rd carbon of the C ring. The most prevalent modification to flavonols is glucosylation. The flavonol specific 3-O glucosyltransferase (Cp3GT) enzyme from grapefruit (Citrus paradisi) is the topic of this research and specifically adds glucose to flavonols at the 3-OH position. The level of activity varies depending on the flavonol structure. This makes Cp3GT an ideal model system for studying the structure/function relationship of Cp3GT using site-directed mutants. S20G+T21S is a mutant form of Cp3GT. As compared to the wild type Cp3GT, S20G+T21S has significantly higher activity with kaempferol, quercetin, and gossypetin. Another interesting difference of S20G+T21S is its ability to add glucose to the 7-OH position of the flavanone naringenin, thus showing a change in flavonoid class specificity as well as regiospecificity for position of glucose attachment. The S20G+T21S mutant was first made by site-directed mutagenesis and verified by DNA sequencing. The linearized pPICZa plasmid containing S20G+T21S was then transformed into Pichia pastoris via electroporation. Transformation was verified by colony PCR and DNA sequencing and a time course analysis of methanol-induced expression conducted to identify optimal expression. Optimal expression was identified at 24 hours and was verified by SDS-page gel and a western blot. S20G+T21S was purified by IMAC column in preparation for crystallization.

This dissertation explores the relation between literature and legal culture in Argentina. It asks why Argentinean literature repeatedly engages with problems of justice and criminality, and what social meanings and social effects this produces. The recurrence of judicial scenes in Argentinean literature expresses a frustration for the way in which the state and society try to solve their conflicts, and reveals what demands and ideas of justice are conceivable in a society that, like Argentina’s, is prone to unlawfulness. My argument is that given Argentineans resistance to the law, literature configures an alternative legality that contests state definitions and juridical principles, and displaces the symbolic place of criminality within society, revealing the jurisgenetic potentials of literature, its ability to create legal meaning. In Chapter 1, I analyze literary contestations of state definitions of criminality and justice during the simultaneous development of juridical and literary discourses at the end of the nineteenth century, specifically in Esteban Echeverría’s El matadero (1871), José Hernández’s Martin Fierro (1872, 1879), and Eduardo Gutiérrez’s Juan Moreira (1879). Chapter 2 examines how Jorge Luis Borges questions the philosophical possibility of political and juridical representation and appeals to a Hispanic affectivity to argue for a personal, individual, and affect-driven justice that ignores the state. Finally, Chapter 3 shows the alternative legality produced by literature at work by surveying cases of litigation in the cultural sphere between 1959 and 2004. The study of the legal opinions written by the judges in the cases against Ricardo Piglia’s Plata quemada (1997) and against the exhibition entitled León Ferrari. Retrospectiva. Obras 1954-2004 demonstrates that the notions and mechanisms regulating artistic practices are capable of refracting juridical principles. / 2018-08-11T00:00:00Z

This dissertation examines how the work of four Puerto Rican poets – Julia de Burgos, Clemente Soto Vélez, Martín Espada, and Naomi Ayala – demonstrates a poetics of resistance. While resistance takes a variety of forms in their poetic discourse, this project asserts that these poets have and continue to play an integral role in the cultural decolonization of Puerto Rico, which has been generally unacknowledged in both the critical scholarship on their work and the narrative of Puerto Rico’s anti-colonial struggle. Chapter One discuses the theoretical concepts used in defining a poetics of resistance, including Barbara Harlow’s definition of resistance literature, Edward Said’s concepts of cultural decolonization, and Jahan Ramazani’s theory of transnational poetics. Chapter Two provides an overview of Puerto Rico’s unique political status and highlights several pivotal events in the nation’s history, such as El Grito de Lares, the Ponce Massacre, and the Vieques Protest to demonstrate the continuity of the Puerto Rican people’s resistance to oppression and attempted subversion of their colonial status. Chapter Three examines Julia de Burgos’ understudied poems of resistance and argues that she employs a rhetoric of resistance through the use of repetition, personification, and war imagery in order to raise the consciousness of her fellow Puerto Ricans and to provoke her audience into action. By analyzing Clemente Soto Vélez’s use of personification, anaphora, and most importantly, juxtaposition, Chapter Four demonstrates that his poetry functions as a dialectical process and contends that the innovative form he develops throughout his poetic career reinforces his radical perspective for an egalitarian society. Chapter Five illustrates how Martín Espada utilizes rich metaphor, sensory details, and musical imagery to foreground issues of social class, racism, and economic exploitation across geographic, national, and cultural borders. Chapter six traces Naomi Ayala’s feminist discourse of resistance that denounces social injustice while simultaneously expressing a female identity that seeks liberation through her understanding of history, her reverence for memory, and her relationship with the earth. Ultimately, this dissertation argues that Burgos, Soto Vélez, Espada, and Ayala not only advocate for but also enact resistance and social justice through their art.

The dissertation explores the trope of bodily abjection in Mexican literature and film that spans from the 1910s to the 1970s as a device for unveiling predominant discourses regarding the foundational myth of the Mexican Revolution. Sickly, mutilated, marginal, or even spectral bodies that appear throughout the cultural production of Mexico’s revolutionary century are closely linked with the literary and filmic representation of the insurgent experience. These bodies are studied as harbingers of the contentious relationship between revolutionary subjects and institutions that claimed to be the legitimate representatives and custodians of revolutionary culture. The dissertation seeks to demonstrate how abject representations of bodies reappear in Mexican literature and film when the possibility of armed insurgency emerges as an alternative to state-centered revolutionary discourse. While my research examines an eclectic corpus of works, crafted by authors and filmmakers belonging to different moments of the 20th century, all showing varied ideological affiliations, I argue that corporeal abjection consistently puts on display how insurgency cannot be incorporated into the imaginary of State power. The literary production of the Ateneo de México, Rafael Muñoz, José Revueltas, and the films of independent directors such as Paul Leduc and Alfredo Joskowicz are among the works this dissertation analyzes. In these heterogeneous texts, the abject bodies of insurgents constitute a valuable interpretive resource that remains largely unexplored in the study of contemporary Mexican cultural production.

Own to a long tradition in Spanish America, the Venezuelan feminine chronicle production takes a greater consideration and interest in the last decades. In this sense we present Elisa Lerner who constitutes an indispensable presence when we need to talk about Venezuelan chronicle. This research is directed to the chronicle corpus of that writer in order to establish a tentative pattern, necessary for its study an analysis. That pattern is conformed by five groups, literary chronicle, mass media chronicle, sexual gender chronicle, cinema chronicle, and autobiographies chronicle. Each one of them can be analysed independently and represent a particular study object. However, we have verified that lernereanas chronicles have an axis which unified them such as the concern for women in the modernization process, which has Hollywood cinema influence. In particular we take cinema chronicles, because in them we have observed that the life in the United States, as it is presented on the screen, is a systematic reference for Lerner when she speaks about women, modernity, and their compulsive conflicts. The cinema then is a metaphor in order to do cultural critic when we refer to more problematical aspects of Venezuelan culture and society. At the same time, she comments, socially and ironically, about the North American society and the strategies related to feminine aspects in that area. We analysed some of this chronicles in a cinema temporal curve in Hollywood from 1920's to 1960's. When Lerner filters her critic through Hollywood, she readapted herself inside the masculine hegemonic speech without using the political speech of their like kind. This cinema mediation allows offering her point of view in the face of modernity, the feminine liberation, the Venezuelan society, and the international politics without being put apart from the circle she belonged at that time. While many of the intellectual people enjoyed a privileged situation own to their hegemonic situation, Lerner's writing continued constantly and secretly emergent in the Venezuelan society.