This dissertation analyzes the political and epistemological significance of the religious historical discourse produced in the viceroyalty of Peru between 1600 and 1682. The goal of this discourse was to respond to the secularizing pressure of the Spanish Crown on the religious Orders. Accused of being a burden to the Royal Treasury and slowing the development of colonial economy, colonial religious scholars belonging to the four main religious Orders (Augustinians, Franciscans, Jesuits and Dominicans) and based in the city of Los Reyes (Lima), created a historiographical discourse aimed at defending the missionary and political achievements of their corporations. Seventeenth-century religious historiography fused the medieval religious chronicle, the Counter-reformation sermon, the ars historica and the early modern period political literature (the memorial or arbitrio) to create the chronicle-memorial, a unique creole version of history and colonial Catholic statecraft. While pushing for the institutional claims of the colonial corporate Church, religious chroniclers, through the revision of colonial history, advanced the politic and economic agenda of Peruvian benemérito elites as well. Thus, this work goes from the text to the social and political context that produced it. It also tracks the efforts of the first class of Peruvian historians and political thinkers from Lima to Madrid and Rome in order to build their careers, connect with an imperial Republic of Letters and push for reforms in the body politic of the Spanish Empire.

This study focuses on the works of three authors whose first poetry books appeared in the 1970s, in the context of the dictatorial and authoritarian regimes that began seizing power in Latin America in the 1960s and '70s. At a juncture in which both traditional leftist discourse and the programs of earlier avant-gardes had begun to seem inadequate, younger poets sought to articulate, in the realm of the symbolic, coherent responses to increasingly oppressive and polarized political environments. The works in question are the following: Brazilian Waly Salomão's "Me segura qu'eu vou dar um troço" (Rio de Janeiro, 1972); Juan Luis Martínez's "La nueva novela" (Santiago, Chile, 1977); and, by Mexican conceptual artist Ulises Carrión, the unpublished "Poesías," from 1973, as well as a selection of his poetry-based artists books. These are hyper-referential, process-oriented, polyphonic works. They are not only politically motivated, but, given their understanding of the entwinement of politics and genre, are also decidedly against the ideology bolstering the lettered tradition, lyrical poetry, and self-expressive tendencies. At the core of their critique is a rejection of an economy of meaning in which the author's function, as Foucault puts it, equals "the principle of thrift in the proliferation of meaning." First and foremost, in their goal to burst open the meaning-making process, Salomão, Martínez, and Carrión disembody the utterance and question notions of literary value that set apart literary language from common speech. Relying heavily on appropriation and framing devices, they each posit an alternate model of authorship in which writing and reading are inextricable and, consequently, the work is co-created by the reader. Key among their strategies is that of acousmatics--here understood as the concealment of the source of the utterances in the text--in order to, primarily, create conditions of reception in which the reader can interact with the material on the page directly, without its being mediated by the poem's subject. Salomão, Martínez, and Carrión each achieve the uttering subject's removal from the text through different procedures that are contrasted in the dissertation. Emulating the cacophony of popular culture, Salomão performatively adopts multiple subjectivities in his works, saturating them to the point that no unitary subject can be said to be manifest in them. Martínez, on the other hand, mirrors the cacophony of printed matter. Besides failing to attribute the copious materials he samples in the wide-ranging word/image works comprising "La nueva novela," in presenting them he adopts the depersonalized institutional tone of textbooks, photographic captions, and paratextual materials such as footnotes, editor's notes, and bibliographical annotations. In Carrión's works the subject seems to have vacated the poem entirely, as author function is reduced to misreading canonical materials and performing interventions and erasures on them. Resulting from Carrión's operations are open structures that serve as models for post-literary ways to engage with texts. The way these authors assembled and put their books in circulation is also examined, since "Me segura qu'eu vou dar um troço," "La nueva novela," and Carrión's artist books are the result of a thorough rethinking of the politics of the book, the lettered tradition's keystone institution.

This doctoral thesis analyses the depiction of the historical topics of Conquest and Revolution across the literary writings of Alejo Carpentier (1904-1980) and Carlos Fuentes (1928-2012). These historical tropes constitute core topics of reflection throughout their literary and critical works, stressing the interplay between literature and history. I propose the concept of literary historicism to analyse their portrayal of historical topics and characterise the role of history in their poetics. This concept denotes the historical awareness that underpins the authors’ literary reinterpretations of historical events; their use of a historicist writing methodology; and the critical relationship established to historiographical sources and narratives. I argue that the authors’ deliberate historicism characterises their narratives, challenges disciplinary boundaries and posits literature as an alternative medium for the production of historical interpretation. This comparative study focuses on a corpus of fifteen fictional works from both authors that depict Conquest and Revolution. The first section analyses the authors’ literary portrayal of the Conquest of Mexico (1521) and stresses the relationship established to the historical sources consulted and their literary reinterpretation of this historical event. An assessment of the reflections and symbolisms embodied by their literary-historical figures elucidates the authors’ understanding of the Conquest. Thus, this section demonstrates the defining character of these authors’ literary historicism in their writing methodology and semantic interpretation when addressing historical tropes. The second section explores Fuentes’s and Carpentier’s depiction of historical Revolutions including the French, Mexican, Haitian and Cuban Revolutions. This section comprises a transversal and diachronic analysis of their Revolution cycles to demonstrate recurrent narrative, thematic and stylistic patterns in Fuentes’s and Carpentier’s literary portrayals of this historical phenomenon. I highlight the further meaning that these patterns acquire in their works, articulating a critical assessment of these historical revolutions. This thesis adds to the scholarship on these authors from an interdisciplinary perspective that re-centres attention on History. Through the concept of Literary Historicism, I demonstrate the existence of a central concern in their oeuvres to critically reassess the Latin American past and its historical interpretations from literary discourse. This study contributes to the understanding of history and literature in Latin America, for it analyses the interactions between these branches of written culture.

This dissertation analyzes a set of innovative literary practices happening in the popular press in Argentina in the 1920s. It takes its departure from two theoretical premises: that what precipitated the historical avant-garde was the spread of mass culture and that art redraws its limits by incorporating the foreign into it. With these premises in mind, the dissertation shows that the aguafuertes of novelist Roberto Arlt and the women’s columns by poet Alfonsina Storni, because they were written especially for the popular press and because their authors positioned themselves as artists of and in the media, the two—Arlt and Storni—were able to process political, social, and economic changes in a forceful and unprecedented way. Technologically accelerated modernization became their vehicle, and it allowed them to contribute to the democratization of the Argentine cultural field in that decade. Further, analysis of this under-read corpus allows me to assert that it was their journalistic texts in which Arlt and Storni experimented with novel poetics, which “modernized” their own more literary practices. Published in discardable formats that were hardly prestigious in the center of the mass media of the day, these texts have passed largely unperceived by critics, although in their moment they formed part of a broad cultural agitation that they themselves in part created. Their marginal placement doesn’t obscure the same procedures used in them as was used by the classic avant-garde. In their newspaper writings, Arlt and Storni erased the borders between genres, re-used found materials and did not shun low materials, provoked the public and at the same time included the public, transgressed reigning norms for the behavior of women. No understanding of the 20s in the Río de la Plata can dispense with these texts, and others like them. They were an integral part of the cultural network; more than this, they worked through the extreme transformations of the epoch—as this dissertation shows—with a radicality beyond that of the local avant-gardes.

[pt] O objetivo deste trabalho é propor uma leitura de Lavoura arcaica de Raduan Nassar pautada pelo reconhecimento de suas tensões formais e ideológicas, bem como pelo contexto social e cultural em que a obra se engendra. Levando em conta o caráter de exceção da prosa nassariana no cenário da literatura da década de 70, preferimos partir de uma leitura pautada pelas coordenadas estéticas do neobarroco - uma forte tendência artística latino-americana , cujo apogeu é contemporâneo do romance em questão. Tomando o partido de autores como Lezama Lima, Severo Sarduy, Alejo Carpentier e Irlemar Chiampi acreditamos em uma possível leitura barroca do romance, utilizando o conceito benjaminiano de alegoria à título de ilustração e aprofundamento interpretativo do mesmo. Nosso primeiro passo é apresentar a problemática neobarroca para em seguida debruçar-se sobre a obra propriamente dita, invertendo (barrocamente) a divisão bipolar do livro - partida e retorno- de modo a salientar o caráter espelhado da análise literária. / [en] The purpose of this thesis is to propose a reading of Raduan Nassar s Lavoura Arcaica which recognizes its formal and ideological tensions, as well as its social and cultural context. Considering the exceptional character of Nassar s prose in the literary scenario of the seventies, we have chosen to place this reading within a neo-baroque aesthetic theory - a very strong Latin American artistic tendency, whose climax is contemporaneous to the author s literary work. Following the line of such authors as Lezama Lima, Severo Sarduy, Alejo Carpentier and Irlemar Chiampi we believe a baroque reading of the fiction is possible. To illustrate the interpretation we have used Benjamin s concept of allegory. Our first step has been to introduce the neo-baroque problem. Next we analyze the work per se (baroquely) inverting the bipolar division in the book - depart and return - in order to highlight the double character of the literary analysis.

The focus of this thesis is to find the most modern methods to craft 3D characters for implementation in game engines. The industry is constantly adapting to new software and my study is to cover the most efficient way to create a character from an idea to fully realized character in 3D. The following is my journey in learning new techniques and adapting to the new software. To demonstrate, I will work through the process of creating a character from a 2D concept to a 3D model rendered in real time.

abstract: The surge of the chola alteña in Bolivia as a woman who, after being historically discriminated, has achieved her empowerment through her practices of resistance and agency is a very particular and new phenomenon hardly studied. The contribution of this research is in principle to describe and discover the complexity of this occurrence, but at the same time to open a field of understanding the works of the chola as a preliminary input for alternative feminisms, in accordance to the particularity of each context. As a result, an eclectic perspective from different non-canonical theories stemming from the Americas has been adopted. For example, intersectionality stemming from various social, cultural, racial, and gender contexts is addressed by Kimberlé Crenshaw, Dora Inés Munévar, Ann Phoenix, Breny Mendoza y Sonia Montecinos. Research from Aníbal Quijano, Walter Mignolo and María Lugones proposes the decolonization of knowledge. From a Bolivian perspective, the proposal of communitarian feminism by Julieta Paredes and the chi’xi approach by Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui. At the same time, the documenting of the chola practices has been obtained from non-conventional digital and oral sources. Thus, this research becomes a referent for future feminist research about the chola, but also for understanding other movements and practices of subaltern and discriminated women in similar or different contexts. The chola is characterized by her peculiar garment which was imposed by the colonizer in the XVIII century, nullifying her indigenous identity. However, this woman has continued to wear it to the present day as much as a tactic of resistance as of empowerment and agency and has transformed it into a current fashion for the valorization of her identity. She is a chi’xi subject who complements or antagonizes opposites without subsuming them. Finally, what guides her practices and strategies are her native cultural values, such as the principle of Living Well, cooperation, reciprocity, and godfatherhood. . / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Spanish 2019

abstract: ABSTRACTO La identidad y el pluralismo se debaten cuando hablamos de dos escritoras chicanas. Ellas reclaman una herencia judía e indígena en sus obras literarias: María Speaks: Journeys into the Mysteries of the Mother in My Life (2004) de Sarah Amira de la Garza y The Desert Remembers My Name:On Family and Writing (2007) de Kathleen Alcalá. En sus obras se examina el proceso de la construcción de identidad dentro de la comunidad cripto-judía en el suroeste de los Estados Unidos. Dicha comunidad ejemplifica y pone en cuestión la construcción de la identidad en el mundo moderno, deconstruyendo la historia tradicional. Se aplican dos conceptos derivados del estructuralismo para analizar el proceso de integrar una identidad más en identidades ya existentes. Bricolaje, concepto teórico de Claude Lévi-Strauss en su obra: El pensamiento salvaje (1962); bricolaje proporciona el modelo a seguir para entender los diferentes patrones culturales que conforman la construcción de una identidad. Jonglerie de Seth Kunin o la manipulación de las identidades, extraído del artículo: “Juggling Identities Among the Crypto-Jews of the American Southwest” (2001). Acudimos al deconstructivismo de Jacques Derrida y al poscolonialismo de Gloria Anzaldúa y Emma Pérez. Este estudio revela que María Speaks deconstruye una educación católica al haber contradicciones eclesiásticas y cotidianas que producen un agudo sufrimiento en el sujeto femenino, ejerciendo como bricoleur, éste acude a la historia chicana de resistencia, a los mitos aztecas y coloniales, y al conocimiento y creencias judías para construir una nueva identidad chicana que incluye la cara sefardita. En The Desert Remembers my Name, el sujeto femenino, partiendo de una conciencia mexicoamericana de los 1950 y los 1960 donde se dan indicios culturales judíos, deconstruye su temprana identidad chicana y, como bricoleur, emprende investigaciones históricas y de familia para recuperar hechos, figuras, prácticas y símbolos para reconstruir una identidad sefardita y opata como parte de una actualizada identidad chicana. El método teórico aplicado, Bricolaje, Jonglerie, deconstructivismo y el poscolonialismo han sido útiles para recuperar la cara sefardita de la identidad chicana heterogénea. Creemos que este estudio representará un punto de partida para futuros estudios de la literatura judea-chicana. / Dissertation/Thesis / Masters Thesis Spanish 2019

The works of Carlos Fuentes are well known for their thematics of History, how the past continues to influence the present despite mechanisms of historical omission, oblivion, or repression. This dissertation offers a spectral reading of a selection of Fuentes’ works—La muerte de Artemio Cruz (1962), Aura (1962), Cambio de piel (1967), Terra nostra (1975), and Una familia lejana (1980)—that represents his vision of Mexican, Latin American, and Transatlantic history. A spectral reading refers to the hidden or indirect ways that the past continues to manifest in the present as specters, ghosts—unconscious and unwitting remembrances of repressed or unknown material that elude conscious recollection but continue nonetheless to linger and impede healthy progress. Concepts from trauma theory and psychoanalysis thus provide a framework for this critical approach. Fuentes’ representations of history often comprise violent events that resonate as ghostly presences haunting contemporary society. Our reading makes use of concepts such as Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok’s “crypt” and “phantom” as well as Marianne Hirsch’s “postmemory” in order to show how historical traumas and violent events are transmitted across generations as a spectral inheritance. Through this theoretical lens, a spectral reading sheds new light upon Carlos Fuentes’ use of cyclical time, doubling, narrative experimentation, and intertextuality that function together to represent the effects of violent history as a spectral legacy on individual, family, national, regional, and global scales. The works studied in this dissertation’s six chapters represent distinct moments of Fuentes’ narrative production. Despite the works’ various forms of representation—realist, Gothic, modern, postmodern—, their common thread is the timeless burden of historical violence and trauma. Fuentes presents a pessimistic vision of the ways in which contemporary society ineffectively bears or disavows this burden. The works thus show a possibility for embracing the Other and engaging in the task of working through trauma, although this potential reconciliation remains constantly thwarted. History, according to Fuentes, remains trapped in a purgatory of violence. Yet the hope can be gleaned, however, that the reader may take up this healing labor. While full reconciliation continues to elude us, engagement with the ghosts of the past is a healthy first step.

Ever since the triumph of the Revolution in 1959, Cuba has witnessed an unprecedented productive boom in the genres of science fiction and the fantastic. A large number of the literary and cinematic works that have surfaced during the last half-century attempt to replace and ultimately reify motifs and scenarios appropriated from the various science fiction and fantastic narratives in world literature and have generated alternative or imagined settings that challenge extant sociopolitical realities and certainties of the island. My dissertation, “Cuba i+Real: singularidades de lo fantástico y la ciencia ficción en la Cuba contemporánea”, examines these literary texts in a Post-Soviet context, analyzing the ways they reimagine the themes, plot devices, and scenarios traditional to the different genres. My argument is that, in most cases, the narratives are carefully and intentionally transformed, adapting them to the strenuous political and economic circumstances of the island and to the tense social conditions of the post-Soviet era. My thesis both decentralizes and expands contemporary debates about fantastic and science fiction theories by recognizing—and including—Cuban science fiction and fantastic production within broader conversations about the relationship between science fiction, the fantastic, and politics. My dissertation builds and expands upon the contemporary currents in literature, exploring how Cuban science fiction and fantastic texts provide a new, imaginative space and frontier to interrupt and contest the Cuban Revolution's hegemonic and monolithic discursive arcs, while allowing for a unique transnational corpus formation which not only crosses many generic and formal boundaries, but also evades and goes beyond existing theoretical and thematic paradigms.