Thesis (Ph. D.)--Rutgers University, 2007. / "Graduate Program in Spanish." Includes bibliographical references (p. 313-322).

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Indiana University, Dept. of Spanish and Portuguese, 2009. / Title from PDF t.p. (viewed on Jul 15, 2010). Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 70-12, Section: A, page: 4699. Adviser: Maryellen Bieder.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1971. / Typescript. Vita. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliography.

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.

In this dissertation, I explore the connections between three post-colonial epics: James Joyce's Ulysses, Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children, and Derek Walcott's Omeros. Each work focuses on the disruption and loss that has occurred respectively in Ireland, India, and the Caribbean because of each country's encounter with the colonizing force of England. Out of this experience are born narrators who must contend with the fact of a hybridized and contentious inheritance as they struggle to articulate their experiences as members of nations gaining their political freedom. Using a blend of both European and indigenous theorists, I argue that by actively cultivating a stance of hybridity, these works use what Homi Bhabha has termed “border terrain” to locate new nations, along the lines of Benedict Anderson's “imagined communities,” that attempt to evade the prescriptiveness of both colonialism and emergent nationalism. Rather than continuing the Manichean Dichotomy used by English colonizers to subdue and divide indigenous populations, Joyce, Rushdie, and Walcott offer narratives that encompass elements from both colonial and indigenous inheritances in a volatile mixture. Having inherited a fractured and contentious world of narrative exclusion, the characters of Stephen Dedalus, Leopold Bloom, Saleem Sinai, Achille, and Major Plunkett actively transgress the boundaries between narratives, looking for dialogue and connection. Ultimately, the endings of the three texts provide clues toward a future where Edward Said's notion of reading and hearing “contrapuntally” will reflect both the multiplicity and the contentiousness of the post-colonial inheritance.

The dissertation examines the nomadism of contemporary migrant writers who deliberately resist location and deterritorialize the dérive and déracinement of the nomad. Through nomadism, these writers elude the fixed identity categories—le nègre, le migrant, l'autre—often imposed on them by the country of adoption. These three writers—Edwidge Danticat, Dany Laferrière, and Linda Lê—each write out the diasporic and exilic dislocations of nomadism: linguistic, geopolitical and schizo-social. The hybrid methodology informing this study includes postcolonial, poststructuralist and feminist theories. The first four chapters establish the theoretical parameters for reading nomadic literatures, and the final chapter offers nomadic readings of contemporary Haitian and Vietnamese migrant literatures in France, Quebec, and the United States. These subtitles are problematic; yet, I theoretically problematize these terms and the national boundaries (geopolitical, psychological, and schizo-social) that they signify. Thus, the terms—Vietnamese and Haitian, specifically as situated in France, Québec and the United States of America—are read less as discrete geographical or national domains, and more as a transmuting (if also transnationalist) impulse, a setting of the two states into creative tension. I examine the multi-cultural and plurilingual ‘border crossings’ which occur in nomadic migrant writers, such as Lê, who writes out the linguistic and identitary vicissitudes of migration. Similarly, I explore how two francophone Haitian writers—an émigré in Québec (Laferrière) and the other a refugee/immigrant in the United States (Danticat)—take flight in different languages: the first in a minor usage of French, the latter in a minor usage of English. My analysis of these writers emphasizes several core themes: espaces exilaires; the deterritorialization of fixed identitary categories (whether around issues of gender, nationality, sexuality, or race); the destabilization of language, both the mother-tongue and the colonial (‘colonizing’) language; and the literary and cultural nomadism of migrant writers who ultimately resist immigration. Each migrant writer nomadically deterritorializes the spaces and tropes of migratory writing—territories of old, new, natal, adopted, native, acquired, immigrant, migrant and citizen. Through my readings, I show that even in texts by migrant writers, who move from one place to another, a sort of nomadism persists.

This study examines the novels of Caryl Phillips, J. M. Coetzee, and Michael Ondaatje, writers originally from post-colonial countries—St. Kitts, South Africa, and Sri Lanka respectively—who explore the ambivalences engendered by colonialism rather than conforming to a one-dimensional understanding of postcolonial literature which focuses exclusively on the reactionary nature of this type of writing. What enables these writers to transcend the simple binarisms of colonizer and colonized and to concentrate on the ambiguities of the postcolonial condition is their use of postmodern stylistic elements which emphasize complexity and irresolution. Phillips embraces postmodern fragmentation by segmenting his fiction into multiple, often unrelated stories. In opting to juxtapose fragments of stories, Phillips matches his narrative form to his thematic interest in the dislocation experienced by people of the African diaspora. The first chapter examines The Final Passage, Higher Ground, and The Nature of Blood to demonstrate that fragmentation becomes more deeply embedded in Phillips's narrative structure as his novels advance. Coetzee's fiction is reflective of a postmodern aesthetic in its unreliability and indeterminancy. This stylistic feature enables Coetzee to address postcolonial concerns in South Africa where the reliability of any subject position has been undermined by rigid racial divisions. The second chapter analyzes Coetzee's various types of narrative voices: the untrustworthy narrator whose views are clearly objectionable (Dusklands); the unreliable narrator whose perspective is limited (Waiting for the Barbarians); and the unreadable narrator who escapes any certainties (Life & Times of Michael K). The third chapter explores Michael Ondaatje's use of a self-conscious playfulness with language. Ondaatje incorporates magic realism, intertextuality, and a poetic perspective in his novels, which are either situated in one particular setting (In the Skin of a Lion) or in a plurality of locals (The English Patient, to highlight the bizarre and traumatic circumstances that mark the postcolonial experience of exile and to depict the way that his characters' lives tend to be mythic in scale as a consequence. In turning to the intersection of the postmodern and the postcolonial, Phillips, Coetzee, and Ondaatje convey a highly nuanced understanding of postcolonial existence and of the human condition.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Cuban filmmakers had to rethink the socialist values and esthetics developed in Cuba after the revolution of 1959. A number of these precepts, encapsulated in Julio García Espinosa's 1965 manifesto "For an Imperfect Cinema," had been influential in both Cuban filmmaking and Latin America's socialist cinema in general. As a consequence of capitalist globalization, many of these cultural concepts had to be reinvented for a new, more skeptical era disinclined to romanticize their legacy. This dissertation opens a discussion of the heritage of Cuban cinema in Latin American culture through an examination of the post-Soviet production of Cuban filmmakers working within the framework of the Cuban Film Institute (ICAIC). An analysis of the films of Daniel Díaz Torres, Juan Carlos Tabío, Tomás Gutíerrez Alea, Humberto Solás, and Fernando Pérez traces these directors' struggle to create a new film vocabulary that depicts more accurately Cuban reality while remaining committed to revolutionary ideals. Further, the dissertation examines the reconstruction of history through the epic film adaptation of Alejo Carpentier's El siglo de las luces, and through Juan Padrón's animated features. It then reflects on issues of gender, auteurism, and superstardom centered on the persona of actor Jorge Perrugoría, as it speculates on the new path that Cuban cinema may follow in the 21st century with the new system of coproductions with countries such as Spain and Germany. In order to explore the changes in the Cuban film industry outlined above, I deconstruct the cultural and visual language developed by the Revolution. Drawing on the ideas of major schools of criticism such as Structuralism, Post-Modernism, Marxism, and Post-Colonialism, I prove that, while Marxist legacy is an essential part of the island's heritage, the multiethnic nature of Cuban culture is too complex to be limited or reduced to a single philosophy. This supports my argument that the Revolution's survival and finding its new place in the international community depends in part on an evolution from its original precepts, including an open dialogue with the other aspects of Cuban reality that constitute the fabric of the island's society.

The first two chapters of this dissertation present the evolution of the feminist movement and the evolution of the Puerto Rican female short story, from the later part of the XIX century to the decade of the eighties. During those years, short stories written by women received little recognition in and out of the Island. In regards to the female characters, they were introduced performing traditional roles that subordinated and subjugated them to the male figures. / Starting during the decade of the seventies, and as a result of the neo-feminist movement, a group of female writers took over themes that had been the exclusive domain of men. These female writers restated the social, political, economical, and cultural realities of Puerto Rico and the Caribbean. These writers are: Rosario Ferre, Magali Garcia Ramis, Mayra Montero, Olga Nolla, Carmen Lugo Filippi and Ana Lydia Vega. / Starting with the third chapter Ellen Morgan's critical study "Humanbecoming: Form and Focus in the Neo-Feminist Novel," (185-205) was used in the analysis of Carmen Lugo Filippi and Ana Lydia Vega's short stories compiled in the following books: Virgenes y martires, Encancaranublado y otros cuentos de naufragio, Pasion de historia y otras historias de pasion, Falsas cronicas del sur, Apalabramiento: diez cuentistas puertorriquenos de hoy and the journal Cariban. / This neo-feminist study reveals that Carmen Lugo Filippi and Ana Lydia Vega as well as their female characters rebel to the Puerto Rican male dominated culture. Furthermore, they managed to defeat the stereotypes and taboos that for decades had subordinated and subjugated Puerto Rican women. These two writers created a new self-directed woman, one who knows what she wants, how to make decisions, and has control of her own life. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 55-08, Section: A, page: 2413. / Major Professor: Ardis L. Nelson. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1994.

Critics have praised Roberto Fernandez's Raining Backwards since its publication in 1988. This investigation will use Mikhail Bakhtin's theories to show how the work challenges stereotypes and subverts authority by undermining cultural icons that Cubans and Americans revere. / Chapter I will focus on heteroglossia, the diverse language strata within one language. Chapter II studies polyglossia, and diglossia, more commonly known as bilingualism. Disglossia--the inability to speak in a language is also explored. Moreover, this chapter deals with chronotope and the subversion of authority. Chapter III focuses on structure, theme, motif, and dialogue. Chapter IV focuses on the different forms of parody and how the author uses parody to interilluminate other texts, or forms of authority. Chapter V, based on the background information provided in the previous chapters, focuses on the role of the speaker (author) of text and the idea of the traduttori traditorri as well as stylization. Chapter VI investigates menippea and skaz. Chapter VII explores choteo and carnival as well as post-modernism to conclude the study. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 56-01, Section: A, page: 0209. / Major Professor: Ernest Rehder. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1994.