Born in Juticalpa, provincial capital of the Department of Olancho, Honduras in 1902. Clementina Suarez left her hometown at age twenty-one. Once on her own, she began to publish her poetry and to develop a life-style unique for a Central American woman in the early decades of the twentieth century. She lived and worked throughout Central America, in Mexico, New York and Cuba, gaining notoriety for her rebellious, woman-centered poetry, her bohemian life-style and her activities as a dedicated promoter of Central American art and literature. She gradually became a living legend in Honduras, in part because of the numerous verbal and visual portraits of her created by writers and artists from all the countries where she has lived. This is the first full-length biography of this matriarch of Honduran letters. It differs from other portraits of Ms. Suarez in its length, its point of view and its narrative strategy. Told from the perspective of an outsider observing and interacting with another culture, it begins with a brief history of the Suarez-Zelaya family, followed by a retelling of Ms. Suarez' life that is broadly chronological but that weaves together her past, present and future with a reading of her work that foregrounds her use of poetry as a workshop in the construction of herself. The theoretical concerns that inform this biography question the representational possibilities of language, particularly that discourse intended to describe one's self to another, while the biographical praxis responds to the feminist imperative to attend to the female subject and reinscribe her in her many contexts--social, historical, geographical, literary, feminine. Consequently, the narrative constructs an inconclusive portrait of the subject, drawing on such sources as personal interviews, gossip, autobiographical texts and poetry-as-autobiography, as well as the more conventional material found in archival and bibliographic sources. The result is a life-story that attempts to leave the legend intact while bringing the woman to life.

This dissertation deals with part of Juan de Velasco's (Riobamaba 1727-Faenza 1792) historiographical work. While exiled in Italy he wrote the History of the Kingdom of Quito in Meridional America (1789). With this work he engages in the famous polemics known as the “Dispute of the New World” as other ex-jesuits such as Clavijero or Molina had done before him. Using an interdisciplinary approach, I look at the way Velasco articulated his historiographical discourse in the first part of his History, the Natural History, in order to see how it already reflects a strong regionalist consciousness. In this sense, Velasco's work is particularly relevant since it is the first written history of what we today know as Ecuador. Conscious of this fact, the author develops a historiographical project that seeks to define a “Quitean” historical and cultural identity, different from Spain as well as from other Spanish American regions. It also seeks to make the Quitean creole community conscious of this identity. The first chapter describes the development of the Jesuit Company within the Spanish American historical and political context, with special attention to the second half of the 18th century. It also describes the situation of the creole community during that same period as well as the “Dispute of the New World.” The second chapter situates the History of the Kingdom of Quito within the whole of Velasco's work examining the criticism it originated, mainly in Ecuador. The chapters that follow analyze in detail the different parts of the Natural History to show how Velasco's patriotic feelings reveal themselves throughout in this part of his work: in the regional specificity of his History, in the body of autoctonous tradition and folklore recorded in this part, in its defense of the “Quitean” native man and “patria,” in the intolerance towards the attempts to discursively appropriate “Quitean” territory (Father Gilij), and in its effort to show the actual existence of a historical written record for the “Kingdom of Quito” through the elaboration of a “Catalogue of Writers who Wrote about Peru and Quito.”

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<p>This thesis explores the confluence and clashes between local and global cultural flows in Latin America through the multiple literary movements and tendencies for which the Colombian author, Fernando Vallejo, acts as a unifying agent. My analysis pulls from Decolonial, Aesthetic and World Literary theories, in order to analyze how cosmopolitanism and globalization resonate in contemporary Latin American letters through a survey of three geocultural categories: the Colombian local, the Latin American regional, and the literary global. My analysis of the local tracks the formal evolution of the Colombian Novela de la Violencia into the contemporary Novela Urbana and the parallel political challenge to the conventional Lettered City in Colombia after the Violencia. In terms of the regional, I critique the idea of a positive and universally stabilizing cosmopolitanism through a collective analysis of a generation of Latin American writers that were forced to travel to the cosmopolitan center through exile rather than as an act of freewill, a generation that I refer to in this project as the Generation of '72. And my evaluation of the global considers how a singular World Literary aesthetics and political economy of prestige weights negatively on contemporary Latin American authors. Through a survey of the roughly fifty novels and short stories that fall under the purview of both the Colombian Urban Novel and the Generation of `72, I conclude that aesthetic borders - the places where multiple forms of perception converge- open up spaces and forums of critique of rigid cultural models and century old aesthetic formulae, a tendency that I refer to as a poetics of globalism.</p> / Dissertation

Thesis (Ph. D.) -- University of Maryland, 2004. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 386-408)

This study examines the political theory of modernity as it appears in the work of contemporary Latin American writers and thinkers (pensadores). It is designed to help bridge the gap that separates the North American and European dialogue on modernity from the parallel dialogue on modernity currently flourishing in Latin America. The dialogues are brought together in two ways. First, the theory of modernity, which is still often thought to apply only or primarily to the developed world, is subjected to the challenge of the Latin American political and cultural context. Many features of the theory are found to apply equally well to both cultures, and these features provide the basis for the second "bridging" of the two dialogues, in which some of the most interesting Latin American responses to the problems of modernity are brought to the attention of North American and European political scholars. After reviewing the problem of modernity in some depth, the work of Jose Ortega y Gasset is presented both as a link to German philosophical thought and as a pattern for subsequent discussion of modernity in the Spanish-speaking world. Ortega's uniquely Latin way of understanding modernity is then compared to other philosophical approaches, and placed within the context of political literature in Latin America. Literature is shown to be a uniquely suitable forum for conveying Ortega's approach to modernity because it expresses in itself the central role of arts and culture in his political thought. The balance of the study focuses on the works of three contemporary Latin American authors: Octavio Paz of Mexico, Gabriel Garcia Marquez of Colombia, and Mario Vargas Llosa of Peru. Each author's major works are placed within the context of the model Latin American response to modernity inspired by Ortega and analyzed for significant contributions to the discussion of modernity. Their most important insights center around the need to assimilate the value of tradition in a new approach to modernity by means of some form of democratic dialogue combined with critical appreciation for the cultural uniqueness of nations.

Jorge Luis Borges is considered by many to be a pioneering author in 20th-century Latin American literature. Although he had a wide variety of themes and leimotifs in his literature, one of his most apparent was religion. However, given that he was agnostic, the way in which Borges often utilized it varied, creating a tangled web of many different religions and traditions in his literature. Further, the religious representations one sees in his literature serve a greater purpose by allowing him to both uncover his own concept of literary creation while at the same time exploring philosophical and metaphysical themes. This analysis explores the ways in which Borges represents religions and how the religious symbolism seen within his short stories are a means of purporting philosophical and metaphysical questions, specifically the ideas of the infiniteness of time and space, the absurdity of the human condition, and man’s incapacity to understand how the world works, among others. The analysis will begin with a discussion of Borges’ strong affinity for Judaism and demonstrate how although his concept of what Judaism is varies, the religion as a whole serves as a branch towards these metaphysical ideas. In particular, I will analyze the stories “El milagro secreto”, “La muerte y la brújula”, and “El Aleph”. Many of these same philosophical and metaphysical ideas can be see in Borges’ representations of Christianity, represented here with “Tres versiones de Judas” and “El evangelio según san Marcos”. Finally, I will also discuss Borges’ representations of other religions, such as Islam and the Maya religion, in order to show that his questioning of metaphysical concepts extends beyond Judaism and Christianity. In this case, I will discuss the stories “Los dos reyes y los dos laberintos”, “La escritura del dios”, “La secta del Fénix”, and “Las ruinas circulares”.

This dissertation explores myth-making in Latin America by focusing specifically upon four Amerindian and mestizo figures: Doña Bárbara, mestiza protagonist of Rómulo Gallegos’ 1929 novel; Anacaona and Hatuey, Taíno caciques who first appeared in Bartolomé de las Casas’ Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias (1552); and Andrés Chiliquinga, indigenous protagonist of Jorge Icaza’s Huasipungo (1934). The present analysis examines the evolution of these myths from their original appearance to literary and film versions throughout the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries in the Caribbean and Andean regions. The project focuses upon the ways in which artists have interpreted these myths, their embedding in society’s collective memory, and their mythical functions in anti- and postcolonial discourse. By breaking down each myth into its most basic structure, this project identifies the core connotations contained within that reveal each myth’s function as a cultural foundation in Latin America. It also examines how the versions of a myth depart from one another, thus underscoring possible critiques of the myth. Finally, it examines the ways in which some of these myths have become commodities, particularly in contemporary popular culture. By examining these figures as cultural myths—bridging past and present—, this research argues that a mythic-interpretive model proves effective as it leads us to a deeper understanding of the universal connotations contained not only within the stories chosen here, but the Latin American narrative as a whole.