This dissertation focuses on the analysis of Costa Rican literature from 1885 to 1930 in order to explore the problematic configuration of national heroes in the construction of the modern Costa Rican social imaginary. Costa Rica was unique among Central American nations in that its participation in the regional campaign against William Walker (1856-1857) served as a foundational moment for its national project in the 1880s. Two major figures emerged as potential symbols of national heroism: Juan Rafael Mora Porras and Juan Santamaría. Authors Carlos Gagini, Manuel Argüello Mora and Ricardo Fernández Guardia were the only writers who tried to narrate Mora Porras and Juan Santamaría's lives and legacies between 1885 and 1931. In addition, as intellectuals of the liberal elite, their works had to address the consolidation of a national discourse characterized by a desire to highlight distance from, and superiority to, the other Central American nations. According to that vision, Costa Rica could be singled out as racially white and politically peaceful, both attractive traits for enticing foreign investment. Interestingly the paradox of writing on war heroes in this context has not been explored in academia. In fact, publications and academic writing about Costa Rica's military conflicts and heroes are scarce. Within the field of literary criticism, which may have considered these topics taboo, I propose to begin filling this void by analyzing the liberal elite's literary writings on heroism within the context of constructing modern nationhood. My intention is to demonstrate how the literary representations of heroes fracture Costa Rican national discourse, thus explaining the intellectual's resistance to writing on the topic and giving voice to Santamaría and Mora Porras, regardless of the importance of their roles for the foundational "social drama". If we avoid studying how national discourse suppressed violence from its origins and cut short the narrative representations of heroic figures, we deny the possibility of understanding and embracing the need for reinventing traditions and heroes in the 21st century. / text

This is a study of three contemporary Colombian novels using combat trauma theory as an interpretive model. Following the method of psychological literary criticism that psychiatrist Jonathan Shay used in his books Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character (1994) and Odysseus in America: Combat Trauma and the Trials of Homecoming (2002) to analyze the characters Achilles and Odysseus, I propose to analyze characters in Fernando Vallejo’s La virgen de los sicarios ‘Our Lady of the Assassins’ (1994), Darío Jaramillo Agudelo’s Cartas cruzadas ‘Crossed Letters’ (1995), and Juan Gabriel Vásquez El ruido de las cosas al caer ‘The Sound of Things Falling’ (2011) to extend Shay's theories of combat trauma to a broad cultural context. While Colombia has not been engaged in a conventional, state-to-state war, it has been at a constant level of large-scale internal violence for over fifty years, perpetrated by a complex mix of paramilitaries, guerillas, narcotraffickers, and state-sponsored organizations: Colombia has consistently ranked among the top countries in the world for rates of homicide and displaced peoples. Shay’s model allows me to argue this kind of radically epistemologically and phenomenologically destabilizing environment in which non-combatants as well as combatants live under the constant threat of violence as producing severe psychological trauma. These texts have an additional cultural-psychological function. Shay identifies as an effective coping strategy the victims' act of integrating the traumatic memory into a coherent narrative, in order to both regain authority over their consciousness and to give social testimony to the injustice of the traumatic event. I will show how the characters in the texts I analyze make themselves psychologically whole in direct relation to the success with which they can narrate the story of their own trauma: those who fail do so in large part because the discourses available to them are inadequate to articulate the profundity of the trauma; those who succeed do so because they have found a form and structure that allows them to construct a coherent narrative of Self that incorporates the traumatic memory of the nation's failure.

This project explores the phenomenon of National Theater in both Argentina and Mexico, specifically reevaluating the former's exemplarity and the latter's "failure." I propose that Fernando Ortiz's notion of contrapunteo is useful when thinking about the tensions found in National Theater, and I deploy this understanding to argue that, contrary to critical opinion, the "frivolous" Mexican theater scene was a key factor in the Mexican Revolution. / Romance Languages and Literatures

My dissertation proposes a comprehensive study of the politics of representing the Amazonian territory in literature and culture. Using the context of the Amazonian rubber boom (1879-1912) and its aftermaths in Peru and Brazil, my research evaluates how the Amazon Basin became the focus of political and sentimental debates, triggering discussions to rethink national identity, ethnicity, sovereignty, and modernity at the turn of the twentieth century. Traditionally portrayed as an exotic, primeval land, geographically isolated, and with endless natural resources waiting exploitation by a higher civilizing order, its presence continually frustrated colonizers and investigators who failed to reduce it to a set of manageable meanings. Despite the many books written about the region since its encounter in the sixteenth century to nowadays, the Amazon resists demands to be modern and construed by an imported Western rational. Like the Pampa in Argentina and the Backlands in Brazil, Brazil and Peru's Amazon is a tropical body that calls institutional authority into question. / Romance Languages and Literatures

This work seeks to relocate El desierto prodigioso y prodigio del desierto (1650 ca.) within the discursive net of 17th Century Spanish Empire, and to make visible its agendas within the context of the New Kingdom of Granada. Hence, this work states the enunciation of a creole epistemology, defined as an interrogative attitude assumed by the colonial subjects on discourses and forms of writing associated with the Metropoli, which statements of truth and authority are proved inadequate in colonial contexts. These subjects are not necessarily spanish descendants born in America; they are called «criollos» because of their elitist attitude towards their american origin along with their mastering of the discursive reason. / Romance Languages and Literatures

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The interest on this work emerges out of the aspiration to explore the cultural production about the U.S-Mexican border on its broadest interdisciplinary context. The intention is to analyze contemporary aesthetic representations of the Mexican border space in recent Mexican and Mexican American narratives. In this analysis, subsequent to an exploration of stereotyped images of the “West” of the United State and the “North” of Mexico since the beginning of XIX century, our intent is to compare and contrast two main perspectives when representing Mexican border spaces in fictitious narratives. In the 1980’s Mexico sponsored, in a plan to promote cultural production along its border states, a new group of border artists ascend. This effort had its fruitful results and it offered a new perspective and point of view when producing Mexican border representations. Our goal is to emphasize the differences between border representation made by centralist Mexican writers and border writers. To accomplish the goal I the theories used are the proposed by Henri Lefebvre in his The Production of Space, Luz Aurora Pimentel in El espacio en la ficción, ficciones espaciales: la representación del espacio en los textos narratives, and Terry Eagleton in Ideology: An Introduction. Lefebvre and Pimentel discuss the aesthetic production of space as instruments to conceive and perceive the descriptors’ ideology and social values. In the first chapter there is a discussion of the different theories used in this project. The second chapter offers an overview of how border spaces have been represented in fictitious and historical texts produced by American and Mexican writers since the beginning of the XIX century. In the third, fourth and fifth chapters we analyze the representation of Mexican border space in “Malintzin de las maquilas” by Carlos Fuentes, Sueños de frontera by Paco Ignacio Taibo II, Santitos by María Amparo Escandón, El gran Preténder by Luis Humberto Crosthwaite, and Peregrinos de Aztlán by Miguel Méndez.

This dissertation investigates the emergence of detective fiction and film from 1994 to the present. The corpus appears during the government of Carlos Menem and its intent to insert Argentina into a globalized economy. Poverty, insecurity and violence prevail in the Argentine society and ten detective novels, based on real-life murders, appear in 1994. Consequently, I explore each murder case, beginning with the newspaper article, and trace its transformation into short fiction, novel and/or film. The articles about the homicides follow the tendencies of the sensationalist yellow press. The writers and film directors, however, transform those stories, following and also subverting the characteristics of the classic detective fiction or the hard-boiled. In doing so, these recreations of the murder cases aim to denounce or criticize specific aspects of Argentine society: domestic violence, discrimination, stigmatization and corruption, among others.

This dissertation analyzes the representation of violence in Colombian novels and films from the last two decades of the XX century. Aided by current theories of violence and representation on the one hand, and an interdisciplinary methodology that analyses the phenomenon of the violence of drug trafficking from different perspectives on the other, my analysis examines the challenges and limits of literary and cinematic representation as it grapples with the extreme realities of life in Colombia’s major cities. The central body of my thesis focuses on three novels and two films, selected for the marked differences that inform their generic form, their style and their approach to representation as testimony. By focusing on the differences in these works, I further examine how different genres and subgenres help reveal, distort, or obscure the extreme realities these novels and films strive to portray. Chapter two provides the historical and theoretical context for violence and drug traffic in Colombia. Chapter three studies the different narrative strategies used in the literary works that fall under the so-called drug traffic genre. Chapter four analyses the role of the intellectual narrator on La virgen de los sicarios who presents himself as the new authority, called to restore the lost order left by drug trafficker terrorists and their sicarios. Chapter five studies the impact of drug trafficking in the aristocratic world. On Delirio, the apparent madness of the protagonist unmasks the obscure world of high society, a world lead by corruption, complicities, and lies to maintain their economic status. Chapter six analyses Comandante Paraíso and the role of the main character as the new drug lord, who has built an empire based on a network of power, money, and loyalty to maintain order. Chapter seven compares La virgen de los sicarios and Rosario Tijeras and their adaptations to film. The literary works and films analyzed have nourished on the complex reality of extreme violence lived under the drug trafficking era. They explore how this violence has roots in political, economic, and social problems, and the importance of finding a viable solution for this national issue.

Latin American literary criticism has traditionally underestimated the significance of the Gothic aesthetic, in spite of the rich Gothic literary tradition of Latin America. Specifically in the Southern Cone - the focus of my research - there is a particular recurrence and consumption of this genre, not only in literature but also in cinema, which has not been deeply analyzed. I argue that a close examination of the Gothic and Fantastic elements in these novels and films unveils anxieties, repressions and manifestations of social decay that underlie common codes of social decency and the conventions of maintaining an oppressive social tradition. My analysis of particular novels extends from the beginning of the twentieh-century through the Boom; my discussion then extends to film productions from the 1960s to the present. In the first chapter I explore the dissemination of Gothic figures and forms from their eighteenth-century origins to the present. In the second chapter I discuss how the Gothic aesthetic was used at the beginning of the twentieth-century to comment on the effects of modernization and scientific/psychological discoveries in the Southern Cone. I also analyze the Gothic as a powerful feminist discourse. Chapter three focuses on the way the Gothic aesthetic is employed as a mechanism to communicate social and moral decay in a typical Southern Cone family. I also explore how the Gothic is used to question a political-social repression or a dictatorship. In chapter four I focus on cinema in an aesthetically and technically diverse selection of filmes. All of them employ vampirism to comment on different sexual issues, such as repression, incest, homosexuality, fetishism, sadism, and other sexual-social taboos. Finally, the conclusion demonstrates that, while the Gothic aesthetic maintains certain constants throughout the twentieth-century, its underlying meaning shifts to reflect the dominant political-social themes of each era, thus ensuring its continued relevance to popular audiences.