Lino Novas Calvo (1905--1983) was an outstanding Cuban short-story writer and a pioneer in the modern narrative in his country. I consider point of view as a web of stances that the narrator takes vis-a-vis his narrative world---mainly perceptual and phraseological stances---made possible by a certain status of the narrator, and semiosically contributing to the expression of an ideological stance attributable to the implied or inferred author. My thesis concentrates on the perceptual stance or focalization in three of the most characteristic short stories by Novas Calvo---"La noche de Ramon Yendia", "Cayo Canas" and "La vision de Tamaria"---this stance constituting the central one in the functioning of point of view in Novas Calvo's narrative; the main focus of this stance is triple: character, space and time, and it often produces sequences of a cinematic kind. I also pay close attention to the modes of phraseological stance that generate the principal perceptual-stance phenomenon, namely the mediation of focalization. Coupled to these techniques, I examine the role of Cuban and popular language as well as poetic language. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)

L'objectif de cette these est d'examiner le processus de formation d'une identite nationale tel qu'il apparait dans deux romans mexicains du XIXe siecle, Clemencia et El Zarco, d'Ignacio M. Altamirano. Son hypothese de lecture est que l'identite nationale idealisee dans les romans obeit en fait a un objectif ideologique clair qui correspond a la legitimation de la condition de classe sociale emergente d'une elite dirigeante, c'est a dire, les liberaux mexicains Reformistes. Pour verifier cette hypothese, la these se penche sur trois aspects des romans: les espaces fictifs, les personnages, et les desirs que ceux-ci representent. Ces trois noeuds concentrent le systeme de preferences ideologiques des romans. La perspective theorique de notre analyse s'inspire a la fois de la sociocritique des textes (Angenot, Robin) et de la critique generique (Brooks). Chaque element des romans etudies dans la these est donc rigoureusement relie au discours social de l'epoque, d'une part, et, de l'autre, aux productions romanesques europeennes contemporaines. Ceci met donc en evidence les ambiguites du processus de formation d'une identite nationale a partir de matieres premieres discursives et textuelles essentiellement heterogenes.

Maten al leon, is a novel written in 1969, by Jorge Ibarguengoitia. This thesis will try to establish the present importance of the prevailing 1960's social discourse, when, due to the lack of all critic's voices for direct and transparent expressive causes, it is forced to act out in an indirect manner, in the interstices and gaps offered by the official discourse, using the ironic double voicing, the parody double voicing, the allusion and through other methods of discourse based in the textual implicity, in the unmentioned. Throughout this novel, the author deglorifies the Mexican heroes and calls for an interpretative revision of Mexico's historic past. Furthermore, the thesis analyses Ibarguengoitia's displacement of the governing regime's imposed official memoir and clarifies the way in which the historic assumptions become ideological statements.

Cette these a pour objet d'etudier la trajectoire discursive de Lope de Aguirre, le fameux rebelle basque de la periode de la Conquete de l'Amerique, dans l'imaginaire culturel hispanique du XVIe siecle a nos jours. Durement vilipende par les chroniqueurs du XVIe siecle, notre personnage sera tour a tour repris par des historiens des XVIIe et XVII1e siecles, par Simon Bolivar et un medecin de l'elite creole du XIXe siecle, et par des historiens, romanciers et cineastes du XXe siecle, qui l'utilisent dans un dialogue implicite avec le nationalisme basque, le nazisme, le franquisme, la guerre des guerrillas latino-americaine et ainsi de suite. Nous essayons donc de demontrer qu'a chaque occasion les diverses appropriations d'Aguirre repondent aux conditions sociales, politiques et historiques propres au contexte de production donne. Mais une question s'impose: pourquoi la figure d'Aguirre, un rebelle parmi d'autres, genere-t-elle un nombre aussi grand de discours et textes a son sujet? Etait-il vraiment un rebelle comme les autres? La methodologie que nous utilisons pour traiter ce theme est fort eclectique et puise, entre autres, dans la sociocritique, l'etude du personnage ainsi que du langage, les notions d'intertextualite/interdiscursivite et d'ideologie. Nous esperons demontrer qu'ici l'utilisation d'une approche multi-conceptuelle est des plus productives dans le cadre d'une critique qui se veut a la fois diachronique et textuelle.

Delmira Agustini (Uruguay 1886--1914) enjoys the reputation of being the first feminist poet of Latin America. Her poetry book Los calices vacios (1913), her best work, was received with much acclaim by the critics and the public. The heart of this investigation lies in the examination of the images which express the main theme in Delmira's Los calices vacios. Starting from the proposition that this is love both erotic and transcendent, we proceed to find two categories which help understand the duality of love: the concept of love and the concept of the lover, expressed by a number of dual images. Subsequently we study the presence of literary currents in Delmira Agustini's Los calices vacios. The examination of different aspects of Romanticism, Parnassianism and Symbolism (which make up Modernismo, the most influential literary current of Delmira's time) contribute to deepen the understanding of the nature and functioning of the images which belong to the concepts of love and the lover. It is hoped that this contribution will throw more light on the complexity and high artistic achievement of Agustini's love imagery. The erotic-transcendent love so masterly expressed in her poetry is worthy of her short, rich life.

The following study deals with the soldaderas of the Mexican Revolution (1910--1917). Chapter one examines the relationship between the feminine discourse and the masculine discourse with regards to the participation of the soldaderas in the Revolution and how the latter, the dominant discourse, has served to marginalize the former. In chapter two, we analyze the influence of patriarchal discourse in the representation of the soldadera in artistic forms such as the corrido , painting, film and literature. Chapter three focuses on the representation of the soldadera in Como agua para chocolate (1989) by Mexican author Laura Esquivel. The focus here is on the author's use of sub-literary forms intended for mass consumption and her construction of images that challenge the stereotypical images of the soldadera discussed in the previous chapters.

This thesis is a pragmatic analysis of the irony in the novel Viernes de dolores by Miguel Angel Asturias. It presents the following hypothesis: the irony in this novel breaks away from the monological discourse characteristic of the narrative of social realism in Latin America. In order to carry out this analysis a corpus of ironic enunciatory sentences was selected which correspond to three levels of irony: the irony between the narrator and the narrated context, in the dialogue between characters and the author's relation with the reader. The theoretical framework of the methodology used includes a summary of past and present-day linguistic pragmatic studies in which some of the most well-known researchers in this field are cited. It is divided into three parts: the evolution of linguistics which dealt with only the message conveyed to one which deals with the speakers and the communication situation, a historic summary of pragmatic linguistics and the analysis of irony from a pragmatic point of view.

Heredaras un mar que no conoces y lenguas que no sabes (Mama Zoila), the Latin American bestseller by Alfonso Barrera Valverde, has been the subject of many newspaper and critical reviews but rarely has consideration of the novel gone beyond this medium. This thesis attempts to do this by studying the fact that, while Heredaras is a novel entrenched in the realities of Ecuadorian society, it adopts a critical view of the foundations upon which this society was built. Heredaras is highly critical of the social, political, economic and ecclesiastic realities of Ecuadorian life. The critical perspective permeates the ideological stance of the novel, that is, of the narrator/implied author. Two main components inform this ideological stance: socialism and liberation theology. Thus the first chapter of the thesis is divided into two sections. The first describes the socio-political and economic realities in Ecuador from a socialist perspective. This is followed by a discussion of how these realities are incorporated or represented in the novel--in the characters. their relationships and the situations in which they find themselves. The second section does the same for liberation theology, by underlining its main features and by discussing how they are represented novelistically. The second chapter of the thesis offers a study of the narratological elements which contribute to the ideological stance of the novel: the status of the narrator and the narrator's phraseological and perceptual stances. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)

All Rosario Castellanos' work (1925-1974) reflects her vital concern: women and their historical relationship of subordination within the system of patriarchy that we can trace through different periods of history. In her varied production of poems, short stories, novels, plays and essays, Castellanos explored in particular the devices that from within the patriarchal logic have undermined women's being, making them develop dependent, unsatisfied subjectivities, always under male tutelage. Within this framework, this study analyses four of the later poems of Castellanos. Our interest is to see how in her quest for a re-definition of femininity, which still has resonance today, Rosario Castellanos seeks alternative ways to define the categories of female and male as traditionally determined by Western Social Imagination. An extensive critical bibliography already exists on Rosario Castellanos, and from the 80s onwards she has been studied more and more within the context of women's studies, gender studies and feminist theory. Some of these studies examine Castellanos' poetry from feminist viewpoints, but practically none of them concentrates exclusively on her poetry. This study attempts to partially fill that gap. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)

The purpose of this thesis is to analyze two works of the doctrinal theater of New Spain: the Auto de la destruccion de Jerusalen and the Nican motecpana in inemiliztzin , from the perspective of modern reception theory. This study is divided into three parts. The first outlines the research methodology used, which is based primarily on the main tenets of reception theory and its application to the analysis and criticism of dramatic texts. The second part studies the origins and early manifestations of the doctrinal theater in New Spain and its development during the sixteenth century. The third part, which is the main body of the work, studies the transmission of the legend of the destruction of Jerusalem from the perspective of literary reception through two New Spanish dramatic works: the Auto de la destruccion de Jerusalen, a work written in verse, and the Nican motecpana in inemiliztzin, written in prose in the nahuatl language. This thesis also analyzes certain aspects which have not been dealt with satisfactorily by other critics, such as literary sources, dramatic characteristics, probable date of composition and staging in New Spain during the sixteenth century and so forth. This thesis, therefore, aims to make a positive contribution to a rather neglected field of study: doctrinal theater in New Spain. It also hopes to add to present-knowledge about these two important works.