Folklore and popular culture can be applied to the study and interpretation of literature, specifically, in the case of this project, to the works of contemporary Latin American women authors. The women in this study are representative of authors who incorporate folkloric elements into their works and, as a result, create works that contribute to contemporary popular culture. In their hands, folkloric elements such as traditions, proverbs, rules of behavior, folk tales, fairy tales, and others, find their way into popular and best-selling works of literature. The folklore they incorporate is subverted, shown from a feminine perspective, challenging the stereotypes and roles that have been assigned to them by a patriarchal system. The authors used in this study include Rosario Castellanos, Brianda Domecq, Laura Esquivel, Rosario Ferre, Elena Garro, Angelica Gorodischer, Luisa Valenzuela, and Ana Lydia Vega Many folklorists believe there is an inevitable presence of folklore in literature. It is, therefore, surprising that there have not been more studies which combine literature, folklore and popular culture. This study attempts to fill that void, using folklore as the basis for interpreting short stories, essays and novels by Latin American women Because some genres of folklore have traditionally been associated with women, both as narrators and protagonists, it is necessary to study a broad representation of the genres, rather than concentrate solely on one and in so doing reinforce stereotypes that need to be re-examined. My study demonstrates how women are using a variety of folklore to challenge and redefine their place in today's society. Rather than sharing a common theme, the works I have selected are united by the author's approach to her work. Each author returns to traditional folkloric elements as the basis for her story or novel, elements that have defined men and women's roles and behavior for centuries, and recycles them, showing a new perspective and an alternate way to think and/or act, and create a work a work that can be considered a part of popular culture / acase@tulane.edu

This dissertation will trace the representation of marginal feminine subjects in literary narratives produced in Puerto Rico in the nineties to see whether the peripheral position provides a space in which the feminine Puerto Rican subject can de-center and de-stabilize the dominant discourses of the West The discourse of miscegenation is embedded in the national fabric of the countries of the Hispanic Caribbean. As a result, the mulatta woman has traditionally represented the embodiment of the Spanish and African races in the narratives of national identity. In the first chapter, I propose to study the novels written by Mayra Santos-Febres and Mayra Montero to analyze the presence of the contemporary black woman and offer a vision of her struggles and desires, as well as to trace the relationship which exists between the woman of color and national identity. Furthermore, I will attempt to determine whether her racial identity reveals an emerging state of liberation or a continuing state of cultural dependency. This first chapter will include the theoretical framework provided by the works of Marco Moreno Fraginals, Antonio Benitez Rojo, and Vera Kutzinsky In the second chapter, I will study the transvestite subject in the works of Mayra Santos Febres in order to see how this presence parodies and disrupts the concepts of gender and national identity. Furthermore, the study will stress how the theatrical performance of the transvestite, accompanied with its elements of disguise, music and acting, can serve as a postcolonial satire which points to a Caribbean that masks itself so as to denounce the voyeuristic and fetishistic behavior of a colonizing First World. In this chapter, I will use the theories of performance and gender elaborated by Judith Butler, Marjorie Garber, and Chilean feminist critic, Nelly Richards In the third chapter, the investigation will focus on the feminine subjects that transgress heterosexual codes in order to show how their identities express erotic discourse as an element of resistance against the processes of objectification and heterosexual oppression. These subjects oppose compulsory heterosexuality and gender constructions in order to liberate their true selves and desires. This analysis will take into account the theories of feminist and gender critics such as Monica Wittig, Adrienne Rich, Luce Irigaray and Nelly Richards The literary narratives cited above offer discourses that oppose hegemony in an effort to counterbalance the distribution of power. These texts, which seek to challenge authoritative power, also aim to give marginal feminine subjects a space from which they can generate alternative interpretative modes and in turn speak out and become an agent of her own history. The dissertation will conclude that feminine subjects that are positioned in the peripheries move about in a series of resisting movements---translocations, transvestisms, masqueradings---which protect the Caribbean feminine subject from being totally exposed and decoded, and these acts of resistance serve as a buffer to help prevent continuing acts of appropriation and colonization on the part of dominant Western powers. (Abstract shortened by UMI.) / acase@tulane.edu

With the collapse of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s, the interpretive framework for cultural analysis in Cuba has shifted in fundamental ways. On the material level, the cultural institutions of the Cuban Revolution---the UNEAC, the ICAIC, or Casa de las Americas, for example---no longer fund the arts as they had for the first thirty years of socialist government. Cuban writers, filmmakers and musicians living on the island have thus come to depend, to a large extent, on the same foreign markets, and companies as their contemporaries in exile, blurring like never before the already confining categories of 'revolutionary' and 'counterrevolutionary.' Although the new market realities, together with the perceived failure of the socialist economic model throughout the world, constitute a crisis for the official narrative of the Cuban Revolution, the three texts that are the focus of this study rewrite not only the triumphant socialist narrative but the hegemonic narrative of exile as well. 'El lobo, el bosque y el hombre nuevo' by Senel Paz (1991), Las palabras perdidas by Jesus Diaz (1992) and Informe contra mi mismo by Eliseo Alberto (1997) do not participate in a common social movement or belong to a common literary school; all three, nonetheless, deconstruct the nostalgia-driven narrative of a paradise lost that has characterized much exile literature as well as the Utopian narrative of socialist revolution and redemption. The authors themselves, moreover, resist categorization as either old-guard exiles or militant revolutionaries---a fact that may not justify positivist or deterministic conclusions about the nature of their work but that does, nonetheless, structure the cultural significance or reception of that work. We are confronted, then, with works that occupy more ambiguous cultural and ideological spaces than revolution and exile had generated heretofore, and that cultivate, at the textual level, an ideological and cultural middle ground. The challenge these texts pose to the contending hegemonic narratives of revolution and exile, then, comes not in the form of an alternative and definitive counternarrative, but rather in the form of self-consciously partial and multiperspectival narrative modes that undermine the very premise of narrative authority or objectivity / acase@tulane.edu

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Because it has no distinct formal characteristics, the Bildungsroman genre is defined only through the reader's recognition of the protagonist's transformation from an inchoate identity to a fixed, mature one. This recognition depends on how the protagonist's development conforms to a model of maturation derived from Enlightenment ideals of the individual as autonomous and rational. By responding to the contested nature of identity in American culture, this re-generation of the Enlightenment paradigm as a natural expression of the self is the foundation for the Bildungsroman's popularity. When applied to ethnic American texts that critique the structures of racism and patriarchy, the genre destabilizes those critiques by reinforcing the Enlightenment paradigm from which those structures are derived The use of autobiographical ethnic Bildungsromane as representative texts often relies on reductive assumptions about the concept of truth, but key texts such as Black Boy, by Richard Wright, and The Autobiography of Malcolm X demonstrate the mediated nature of truth in autobiography, and the reception of their texts reveals the problems associated with the assumption of the transparent truth of the texts. Jamaica Kincaid also undermines the transparent relationship between truth and autobiography, as well as the independent self of the Bildungsroman, by presenting her development as a writer through accounts of her father and brother The role of ethnic Bildungsromane as representative texts inspires anxiety about the concept of authenticity. The texts of second generation immigrant writers Richard Rodriguez, Maxine Hong Kingston and Paule Marshall are recognized by readers as Bildungsromane, but that recognition, through the writers' struggle with cultural authenticity, celebrates a fluid conception of identity while simultaneously authorizing an overly personal interpretation of the protagonists' struggle to define their cultural identity The Bildungsroman implicitly posits a fixed cultural identity in its definition of the self, but cultural identity is fundamentally dynamic, formulated, in part, in a dialogic relationship with historical narratives. The adaptation of two prominent African American novels to films, The Color Purple and Beloved, by emphasizing the Bildungsroman element of personal development, sacrifice the richer historical, cultural identities of the novels / acase@tulane.edu

Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 34-10, Section: A, page: 6640. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1973.

The Cuban antislavery novel of the 19th century will provide the focus for this study. The cultural metamorphosis undergone by the black slave is revealed in this subdivision of colonial literature. From their colonial role as slaves, blacks went on to become an integral part of the cultural mosaic of the region. The purpose of this study is to demonstrate how blacks were incorporated into the society that enslaved them, how they claimed a presence in that society and how they fought to establish their own identity. The concluding remarks will demonstrate that it was the Cuban antislavery novel which granted blacks a voice, a presence. This is the modest contribution offered by this investigation. / A testimonial narrative, the antislavery novel, flourished in Cuba during the colonial period, specifically during the 19th century, and it can very well be considered as a prelude to the black search for a space, for a presence, in society. This investigation begins with an introductory chapter which deals not only with the testimonial narrative to be discussed, but also with the accounts which detail the manner in which the black presence became a reality in the region. The three subsequent chapters analyze the following Cuban novels: Francisco by Anselmo Suarez y Romero, Sab by Gertrudis Gomez de Avellaneda, and Cecilia Valdes by Cirilo Villaverde. The emphasis in each of these works is on the search for black identity: the transculturation and integration of blacks in colonial Cuba. These three novels reflect the social context of the Cuban colonial period; therefore, other antislavery novels which portrait the same subject will not be included since their theme is best represented by the aforementioned. / This investigation will conclude with a chapter reaffirming the ideological conceptions that allowed for the emergence of this type of narrative. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 56-04, Section: A, page: 1350. / Major Professor: Roberto G. Fernandez. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1995. / The Cuban antislavery novel of the 19th century will provide the focus for this study. The cultural metamorphosis undergone by the black slave is revealed in this subdivision of colonial literature. From their colonial role as slaves, blacks went on to become an integral part of the cultural mosaic of the region. The purpose of this study is to demonstrate how blacks were incorporated into the society that enslaved them, how they claimed a presence in that society and how they fought to establish their own identity. The concluding remarks will demonstrate that it was the Cuban antislavery novel which granted blacks a voice, a presence. This is the modest contribution offered by this investigation. / A testimonial narrative, the antislavery novel, flourished in Cuba during the colonial period, specifically during the 19th century, and it can very well be considered as a prelude to the black search for a space, for a presence, in society. This investigation begins with an introductory chapter which deals not only with the testimonial narrative to be discussed, but also with the accounts which detail the manner in which the black presence became a reality in the region. The three subsequent chapters analyze the following Cuban novels: Francisco by Anselmo Suarez y Romero, Sab by Gertrudis Gomez de Avellaneda, and Cecilia Valdes by Cirilo Villaverde. The emphasis in each of these works is on the search for black identity: the transculturation and integration of blacks in colonial Cuba. These three novels reflect the social context of the Cuban colonial period; therefore, other antislavery novels which portrait the same subject will not be included since their theme is best represented by the aforementioned. / This investigation will conclude with a chapter reaffirming the ideological conceptions that allowed for the emergence of this type of narrative.

In a literature that is so often depicted as that of the "minority" the image of the resistant female figure both in the work of African-American and Guadeloupean female writers, seemed appropriate for a comparative study. / This dissertation relies heavily on Reader-Response theories. The first chapter insists on how because of the narrative techniques we are led to read the female characters as victims. In three of the novels the narrator is also the heroine, which sets an element of intimacy between the protagonist and the (mainly female) reader. Intimacy is derived also from the insistence on the character's childhood. A third element of intimacy is the theme of suffering. / In the second chapter, resistance in the character is studied through her interaction with others and the world. Attention is given to four areas: the use of linguistics signs, the use of tools, the use of laws, and the use of esthetic canons. In the movement from victimization to resistance, the most visible changes are in regard to speech and savoir-faire. Both are related to the concept of creation. / The conclusion insists on the characteristics of woman's resistance and its originality. Compared to the male characters in the different novels we assert how are the heroines resist heroism, alienation and suicide, all choices that black people at any given period were and are still given to receive as the only alternatives. The female characters are not about war, but survival. They are not about solving, but resolving problems. And above all they never posit themselves against the world, as their male counterpart, but seek comfort and strength in the community of women. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 56-04, Section: A, page: 1345. / Major Professor: Antoine Spacagna. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1995.

This thesis considers the relationship between literary modernism and visual culture in the work of Caribbean modernist Jean Rhys. Through analysis of a range of visual modes—theatre, fashion, visual art, cinema and exhibition culture—it examines the racialised sexual politics of Rhys’s modernist aesthetics, as represented in her texts of the 1920s—30s. I read Rhys’s four interwar novels—Quartet (1928), After Leaving Mr Mackenzie (1930), Voyage in the Dark (1934) and Good Morning, Midnight (1939)—in the context of contemporary visual practices and the politics of empire. Rhys’s descriptions of artistic practices, acts of viewing and interpreting art, and the identification of her protagonists as both objects and consumers of art are a crucial aspect of her anti-colonial feminism. The politics of vision and of empire are always intertwined for Rhys. Chapter One studies theatrical spectacle and everyday performances of the self. Chapter Two moves to the fashioning of female identities and sartorial constructions of Englishness. Chapter Three turns to Rhys’s use of ekphrasis to question representational structures as they exist in the modernist, primitivist art context. Chapter Four reads Rhys and cinema, focusing on divided or fractured subjectivities as relayed through allusions to distorted mirrors. This conveys Rhys’s powerful evocation of themes of alienation and dislocation. I conclude by analysing what ‘exhibition’ means for those occupying both subject and object visual positions within the imperial metropolis. Analysis is supported by readings of unpublished short stories, letters and poems, works that are relatively absent from current Rhys scholarship. The conjunction of revolutions in the visual arts and the destabilization of the empire in the modernist period provides clear space for investigation into the creation of new ways of seeing that provided a degree of visual agency for those deemed incapable of aesthetic production. Crucial to this is Rhys’s own Creolité. Situated within and outside of European visual subjectivity, Rhys’s work becomes vital to any study of social acts of seeing, in terms of individual subjectivity and within the wider systems of vision produced through the arts. / published_or_final_version / English / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

Inarticulate Prayers: Irony and Religion in Late Twentieth-Century Poetry examines irony and its implications for religious belief within texts ranging from the New York School Poets to the Language Poets and, in Caribbean literature, within the poems of Derek Walcott and Kamau Brathwaite. Taking Jacques Derrida's distinction between deconstruction and negative theology as a point of departure, I argue that contemporary poets employ ironic language to articulate an ambivalent, and skeptical, system of belief. In "How to Avoid Speaking: Denials," Derrida contrasts his theory of differance--as a fundamentally negative and critical mode of inquiry--with negative theology, which ultimately affirms God's being after a process of negation. My study asserts that contemporary poets, in accord with principles of negative theology, engage in inarticulate, self-canceling and negative utterances that nevertheless affirm the possibility of belief and enlightenment. By postulating the affinity between contemporary poets and the apophatic tradition, I explain how the work of these poets, despite often being dismissed as arid exercises in poststructuralist thought, productively draws on linguistic theories and also advances beyond the "negativity" of such theories. Moreover, as it intervenes in recent debates over the absence of a spiritual dimension to contemporary poetry, my dissertation opens new perspectives through which to theorize postmodern literature. Demonstrating that experiments in language and form are driven by an ironic stance towards belief, authorship and literary tradition, Inarticulate Prayers ultimately redefines contemporary lyric and narrative poetry and asserts negation, inarticulateness, and contradiction as determining characteristics of postmodern writing.