Cristina Peri Rossi (Uruguay, 1941) highly privileges sexual and erotic themes in her writing. Although literary critics have tended to eschew this facet of the author's work in favor of her irreverent social critiques, this study proposes to show how the author's erotic representations act both directly and indirectly to articulate such arguments. In this regard, my objectives are twofold: First, I examine how Peri Rossi inscribes her erotic writing into a male-dominated tradition of erotic literature. To this end, I discuss her revision of canonical works which govern/reflect social norms of gender and sexuality, particularly traditional psychoanalytical theory and classic mythology. I then explore how the author's erotic representations relate to the various social concerns she addresses in her writing, specifically issues of sex/gender, sexuality and authoritarian government. Regarding sex/gender, I focus on Peri Rossi's deconstruction of the binary engendering system, resulting in the possibility of change in and/or ambiguity of both sex and sexuality; the author's literary transgressions of social gender roles are also considered. With respect to sexuality, I discuss how Peri Rossi challenges social norms of sexuality through representations of homosexuality, children's sexuality and incest. Finally, I address the author's allegorical indictment of military abuses though sexual and/or erotic depictions. In each of these cases, Peri Rossi transforms eroticism, a traditionally private matter, into a public vehicle capable of opposing and subverting social oppression.

The literature of Ernesto Sabato is by its very nature revolutionary, but does not promote or attempt to describe a particular point of view but instead to change or destroy our complacent view of reality and inspire social change. This dissertation involves the analysis of Sabatos first three major novels, El tunel, Sobre heroes y tumbas, and Abaddon el exterminador, studying the main conflicts of Ernesto Sabato with society and the ghosts of the past, present and future which continue to haunt him, through the experiences of the problematic hero and his experiences with the socio-political climate of Argentina of which he is an integral part but at the same time feels has contributed to his marginalization and self-marginalization. This study also includes many of the primary essays of Ernesto Sabato and two "memoirs" entitled Antes del fin and La resistencia which reveal him also as a problematic hero ever-present in his narratives. The basis of the interpretation stems from the Theory of the Novel (1916) of Georgy Lukacs which treats the protagonist as a reflection of man in 20th Century society. The action of the protagonist, is a crime of absolute heroism, the insanity of a wisdom capable of dominating life and shifting boundaries, purely psychological even when the end, reached with terrible clarity of deviation without hope becomes self-evident. The realistic writer, according to both Lukacs and Sabato, expresses a vision of the possible totality which embraces these contradictions, a totality acquired upon giving a body to what is typical of historic movements (a character can protect as a relic a complex body of historical forces). What really matters is the personal and internal experience of the protagonist evident in the structure of the novel itself, given the object which is summarized, the subjective expression and objective reality because the relationship of the protagonist with society poses nothing spontaneously harmonious. It is necessary to incorporate all of the faults and failures and all of the abysses that the historical situation consists of and which cannot and should not be recovered but by artifices of composition.

The purpose of this dissertation is to study the depictions of women through certain genres of oral tradition, specifically as found in myth, legend and song (corrido), and covering the pre-Columbian period through colonial Nicaragua. I propose to characterize and explain the elements that shed light on the development of womanhood during that specific era. Additionally, this work will explore the way in which the conqueror, the chronicler, and the friar manipulated the oral genre until it conformed to their own vision of the world. In Nicaragua, there is a body or oral tradition ripe for study that portrays the function and role of women. Studies that address the theme of women in Nicaraguan oral tradition are scarce, and those that do exist may provide only a social registry. The need for a literary-feminist study is imperative. Without claiming to fill that void in its entirety, this dissertation will examine more closely the depiction of women in myth, legend, and song. As part of this analysis, I will explain the manner in which the conqueror configured the original traditional oral genres. For example, the myth "La diosa del volcan Masaya" was changed to "La vieja del volcan", and the legend "La Mocuana" was changed to "El relato mitologico de la Mocuana". Finally, I will analyze the patriarchal version the historians reported regarding Rafaela Herrera's courage in defending her country in contrast with the song (corrido), which in fact recognized her valor. In order to proceed, I will initially address the pre-Columbian period to describe the state of the Indian and their sacred stories before the arrival of the Spaniards. I will then move on the chronicler Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo's arrival on Nicaraguan soil. Lastly, during the colonial period, we will learn about the era of English attacks on the Fort of the Immaculate Conception on the San Juan River. In recounting the historical background, I will refer to various texts written or compiled by Nicaraguan historians such as Jaime Incer Barquero, Antonio Esgueva, Eduardo Arellano, Tomas Ayon, Jose D. Gomez, and Carmen Collado whose works mark the milestones of the Nicaraguan historical process.

This dissertation studies selected works of the Guatemalan writer Augusto Monterroso and documents related to a cultural event known as the Huelga de Dolores, which takes place annually in Guatemala City during the days preceding Holy Week. These texts are analyzed from the perspective of humor, understanding humor not simply as one element among others but--more fundamentally--as an oblique way to approach and apprehend reality. In this way, humor constitutes an organizing principle of the writings of Monterroso and the documents published by the huelgueros. Chapter one reviews several theoretical interpretations of humor. Here, special attention is given to the theory of incongruity. It is argued that most theories of humor are rooted in a Cartesian epistemology and that a different approach should be considered, one that is more in line with the modern episteme. Chapter two is a biographical profile of Augusto Monterroso, which offers insight into his artistic sensibility. This chapter also includes a discussion of the history and evolution of the Huelga. The event began as an informal and spontaneous student celebration, and it has evolved into a social institution whose agenda includes a carnivalesque attack on different aspects of Guatemala's contemporary economic, political and social situation. Chapter three begins with a characterization of the extant literary criticism of Monterroso's works, from the 60s to the present. This chapter also examines the author's distinctive trait of obliqueness, which is evident not only in his use of irony, satire, and parody, but also in his pessimism, skepticism, relativism, and displacement of literary genres. Chapter four compares the notions of obliqueness and dialogism, and it offers the conclusion that they refer to the same essential characteristic of humor. Additionally, this chapter addresses the dialogical nature of humor and how such nature is related to several characteristics of medieval carnivals. The fourth chapter also establishes connections between the carnival and the Huelga de Dolores and it analyzes the oblique modes of the huelgueros' discourse.

<p> This doctoral dissertation examines the intersection between body and nation in the context of Spanish American naturalist short stories from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The many forms of naturalism are useful for exploring national and societal concerns, yet most existing scholarship focuses exclusively on the naturalist novel. By combining the theories of Michel Foucault, Benedict Anderson, and Cesare Lombroso, among others, this dissertation considers the treatment of characters' bodies in their historical contexts and the larger national concerns they portray. Collections by three authors from the Southern Cone are studied: <i>Sub terra,</i> Baldomero Lillo (Chile, 1904); <i>Cuentos de la Pampa,</i> Manuel Ugarte (Argentina, 1903); and <i>Campo,</i> Javier de Viana (Uruguay, 1896). </p><p> The prologue introduces the theoretical framework that supports the analyses in subsequent chapters and describes the cultural context of the literary movement. It argues that the short story is a particularly useful tool for exploring this topic because, due to its brevity, characters' bodies must often relay vital information. Chapter one analyzes <i>Sub terra</i> and the Chilean miners it presents, studying its connection to the Chilean national body's exploitation at the hands of foreign capitalists who are solely interested in extracting its wealth of natural resources. Chapter two moves to Argentina and examines <i>Cuentos de la Pampa,</i> exploring those characters who reside in limbo between past and present, civilization and barbarism. Chapter three is dedicated to the study of <i> Campo</i> and the ways in which Javier de Viana uses the degraded gaucho body to represent the societal decay plaguing the Uruguayan countryside. </p><p> For all of these authors, naturalist short stories prove an effective means of exploring national concerns. Within the genre of short fiction, every word is of vital importance and, thus, the body frequently serves as a vessel to communicate ideas such as moral and physical decay, weakness, abuse, and excess. Characters' bodies are a microcosm of the national body as a whole, whose maladies these three authors explore in a variety of ways.</p>

Guerra en el Paraiso tiene como su tema la guerrilla de Lucio Cabanas durante los anos 1969-1974 en el estado de Guerrero, Mexico. Se estudian los recursos narrativos utilizados para mostrar las semejanzas tanto con su precursor, la novela de la Revolucion Mexicana, como con el testimonio. La proliferacion de voces autenticas, de juegos espacio-temporales y de percepciones de la realidad permiten un cuestionamiento de la version oficial de los acontecimientos que ocurrieron en Guerrero. Se estudia y se compara el corpus de testimonios publicados al que Montemayor pudo haber tenido acceso para mostrar su influencia en la novela. Aparecen muchos de los mismos actores, dialogos y eventos en Guerra en el Paraiso y en estos testimonios, demostrando su fiel representacion de la experiencia guerrerense. Aunque no es exclusivamente testimonial, la novela puede considerarse una contribucion a dicho genero por su estilo innovador.

<p> While reconsidering Julio Ram&oacute;n Ribeyro's short fiction, this dissertation re-examines the discourses about realism that predominated in the 1960s and 1970s, during the eruption of the Latin American literary and cultural phenomenon known as the boom. Situated at the intersection of philosophical reflection and literary criticism, it interrogates the boom's totalizing conception of realism and its equally exhaustive corollaries while arguing that Ribeyro's fractured form of realism forges new models to critique the relations between fiction and the real. </p><p> The first chapter of the dissertation studies the concept of realism that the boom denigrated while promoting their project of totalizing novels predicated on antirealist aesthetic forms. Assorted texts are examined to complicate the boom's conceptualization that realism, trammeled and outdated, simply mimics reality whereas antirealism conjures a richer view of it by contradicting it. Chapter two argues that Ribeyro's short story, whose form at once absorbs the structure of the fable and disavows the latter's allegorical compass, comes into being upon his failure to write the totalizing novel. His finite short story form occupies the absence enacted by the novel that never was. The last two chapters explore the everyday and the gesture in Ribeyro's short narratives as spatiotemporal reconfigurations&mdash;rather than figural constructions&mdash;that set the critical structure to re-imagine the short story form and by extension realism as assemblages of autonomous fragments of a never completed whole. Chapter three interrogates the time of realism when it becomes unhinged from teleological and etiological temporalities of fixed linearity. By mobilizing the gesture as a critical tool that amplifies interrupted actions rather than their dramatization, chapter four argues that Ribeyro's realism pieces together finite and contingent fragments that flatten the erstwhile hierarchical relations between things and people. </p><p> From the antipodes of figural or tropological regimes of interpretation, <i> Gestured Realism</i> advances new frameworks for the analysis of realism in short and long form fiction outside the paradigms of allegory and symbolism. By cracking echoes of doubt in the disciplinarian order of sequential and coherent signification, it proposes a realism that remains on the verge of disarticulation and incompletion.</p>

El objetivo de esta tesis es el estudio de dos novelas de Jose Donoso: El jardin de al lado y La desesperanza en el contexto del proceso politico y personal del exilio y regreso. Este trabajo consta de tres capitulos. En la introduccion se hable del exilio y regreso de Donoso a su patria y, especificamente, del ciclo de separacion, iniciacion y regreso. El primer capitulo trata de los protagonistas de las dos novelas y sus experiencias con el exilio en varias formas. En el segundo se estudia la muerte simbolica de los protagonistas y en el tercero se analiza su renacimiento, esto es, el regreso simbolico. En la conclusion, se relacionan los sucesos de la vida de Donoso con los de sus protagonistas dentro del contexto de la busqueda humana.

With the publication of her first novel, The House of the Spirits. Isabel Allende has become a Latinamerican voice that needs to be heard. This saga, of four generations of a family, combines mythical and historical elements with a passionate voice. The mythic level is seen through various elements, the most important being magic, as seen through the figure of Clara, and the myth of the dominant male as seen through the figure of Esteban Trueba. The historical level concentrates on the history of Chile starting with the beginning of the 20th century and ends in 1975 when General Pinochet is firmly in control. These two levels combine in a circular form which shows that history repeats itself and the same mythic elements combine over and over again. Through this novel we also see that various parts of the history have a base in mythical elements.

Jose Donoso is a well known Chilean writer whose narrative has received international recognition. A recurring theme in his work from the beginning of his literary career to his most recent works has been the crisis of identity of his protagonists. To achieve the credibility of these characters, Donoso uses a wide variety of narrative techniques. This thesis is divided into three chapters. The first one discusses the factors that influence and form the identity of Donoso's characters and the masks that they are given by the society in which they live. The second chapter deals with the crisis of each individual protagonist, the inception, how the character reacts to the crisis and the outcome. In chapter three we will discuss some of the aspects that these protagonists have in common and ways in which they differ. The manner in which Donoso presents his characters will also be discussed.