<p>The following chapters access kitchen narratives through the lens of the Bildungsroman to help bridge an important gap in the reception and criticism of the theme. In particular, I examine the trope of food and the kitchen space in texts that also deal with coming of age, and how the criticism surrounding these texts has helped or hindered critical understanding of female experiences.</p> <p>In my Introduction I conduct a survey of the way literary criticism has approached culinary texts and women’s writing about kitchen spaces. I propose that viewing kitchen narratives in Latina authors’ texts as a form of female Bildungsroman serves as a platform for women to communicate their own stories in a way that highlights their contribution to a literary genre through their own personal experiences. In parts 1 and 2 of Chapter 2 I investigate further into the history of culinary writing in Latin America as well as how the Bildungsroman and the kitchen intersect in women’s writing respectively. In Chapter 3 I conduct a critical analysis of one of the most widely studied culinary fictions, Laura Esquivel's <i>Como agua para chocolate</i> (1989), and examine how this text and its scholarship have set the stage for food narrative criticism for women across Latina texts. Chapter 4 focuses on kitchen narratives in texts and how they can be viewed through the lens of the Bildungsroman utilizing Judith Ortiz Cofer's <i>Silent Dancing: A Partial Remembrance of a Puerto Rican Childhood </i>(1991)<i>.</i></p>

<p>Mariátegui, Arguedas, and Gálvez Ronceros represent important leftist voices in Peruvian literature that used their writings as a tool for political and social change. With this scholarship it is my aim to present an in-depth analysis on the origins of leftism in the context of Peruvian literature and the changes it experienced over time. Given the pluralism in the way the concept of leftism is interpreted and understood today, this research also provides a guide on how it should be defined in Peru’s context, given that mere importation of European leftism does not fully explain the unique characteristics of Peruvian leftism. In chapter one, I argue that the José Carlos Mariátegui played a significant role in shaping Peruvian society by championing a form of socially engaged leftist literature that reflected the realities of life for the working class and marginalized communities of Peru. To this day, Mariátegui’s ideas continue to influence leftist writers in Peru and in all Latin America, as well. While his role as a leftist author must not be undermined, this research also addresses the need that exists today to reexamine his figure and highlight the shortcomings that are found in his writings; namely, the underrepresentation of women and racial stereotypes used against Asians and people of African descent. In chapter two, I study the life and work of José María Arguedas who played a significant role in shaping Peruvian literature by giving voice to the experiences of indigenous people and challenging the dominant literary and cultural norms of Peru’s Andean region. His works deal with themes such as identity, culture, and oppression while insisting on a uniquely Andean expression of leftist thought that highlights the importance of indigenous spirituality, customs, and traditions. The final chapter of the dissertation is one of the first works to present an in-depth analysis of the role and writings of a contemporary leftist Peruvian author, Antonio Gálvez Ronceros. Gálvez Ronceros has utilized his work to give a greater representation to Peru’s most marginalized groups, namely Afro-Peruvians, and mestizo <em>campesinos</em> living on Peru’s southern coast. Leftist literature in Peru has played an important role in shaping the country’s political and cultural landscape, and it continues to be an important means of political and social resistance and activism. By analyzing the works of these three authors, we are given a unique opportunity to not only study the origins of leftism in Peru, but to also highlight its evolution over time to better understand its continued influence on Peruvian society.</p>

<p>  </p> <p>This dissertation concentrates on the writings of José María Arguedas and Mario Vargas Llosa, the two most important Peruvian authors in the 20th century. While many prior critics studied the representation of the racial and the social identities depicted in the fictions of these two writers, the masculine identity and the central role of the emotions have received little interest. </p> <p>The analysis develops the links between indigenous and mestizo masculinities and emotions in their novels and short stories published between 1935 and 1969: <em>Agua</em> (1935), <em>Los jefes</em> (1959), <em>Los ríos profundos</em> (1958), <em>La ciudad de los perros</em> (1963), <em>Amor mundo</em> (1967) and <em>Los cachorros</em> (1967). I propose the term <em>melodramatic affection</em> to describe a device that shapes the ideological substratum and outlines its melodramatic formalization and emotional deployment. In that sense, under the realistic and sophisticated Avant-garde styles of narrating, there are melodramatic schemes and an emotional repertoire that help to convey the authors’ ideological point of view regarding Arguedas’ defense of indigenous identity and the Vargas Llosa’s condemnation of the abuse of power. </p> <p>Furthermore, the influence of Latin American melodrama —romantic poetry, popular music, radionovela, Mexican cinema— is traced with the intensification of some emotions such as hatred, fear, pain and shame. Those affect the masculine characters and the plots, have political implications in relation to the institutional power represented, and connect with readers intellectually and emotionally. </p> <p>  </p>

<p>Alcohol has been present in almost every society throughout history, and so has a double standard around alcohol usage: women are stigmatized far more than men for excessive drinking. In this dissertation, I explore the intimate association between wine consumption and gender relations in Spanish late medieval and early modern literature. In late medieval and early modern European society, distinctions of gender, age, class, religion, and occupation were reflected in what one chose to eat and drink. Wine was undoubtedly the most popular and highly regarded beverage, especially in the Iberian Peninsula and the rest of southern Europe. Wine has always been deeply integrated into the Spaniards’ lives, not only as a daily beverage but also as a marker of individual and group identities. While references to wine have flowed through Spanish literature, thorough examinations of women’s drinking have surprisingly been left unexplored. </p> <p>This study fills that gap, analyzing representations of female drinking in Spanish literature, specifically the ambivalent approach to wine as it relates to the construction of gender identities. This study analyzes the representation of female drinking throughout the Spanish literary canon, especially focusing on the <i>Libro de buen amor</i> (ca. 1343), the <i>Arcipreste de Talavera</i> (also called as <i>Corbacho</i>, ca. 1438), and the <i>Tragicomedia de Calisto y Melibea </i>(also known as <i>Celestina</i>, 1502) with the purpose of demonstrating how wine consumption constitutes, reflects, and questions normative gender roles. In medieval and early modern Europe, gender identities were either masculine or feminine, attached to rigid, stereotypical gender roles for men and women. Drunken women, therefore, presented a threat that needed to be contained. During the Middle Ages, while drunken women were represented as personifying gluttony and violating both moral and gender norms in didactic, moralizing treatises, there were literary fictions that depicted female drunkards who openly enjoyed wine, praised its virtues, and socialized by drinking with other women. The gender ideology of Spanish patriarchy created masculine anxiety around unfeminine women, like female drunkards, who were unsuited to a life of purity and chastity. I argue that this anxiety, evident in the extreme condemnation of drunken women, paradoxically reveals the contradictions underlying the patriarchal agenda. I also interpret female drinking practices as performative acts of resistance against normative gender roles. Drawing on the notion that gender is a performative act, alcohol drinking by women can be understood as a subversive act that transgresses and reconfigures social norms around gendered identities in late medieval and early modern Spain. </p>

<p>As a woman who claimed to experienced supernatural phenomena, such as spiritual visions and raptures, Teresa of Ávila had to face accusations of deception while confronting her own doubts of being self-deceived. Both religious authorities and visionary women in sixteenth-century Spain used the idea of deception to either dictate or challenge the dominant religious discourse. Ultimately, Teresa succeed at convincing ecclesial powers of the legitimacy of her experiences, a mandatory step for her canonization. Other visionaries were not as successful, and I analyze whether Teresa’s rhetorical strategies played a role in ensuring her effective defense of the authenticity of her visions.</p> This analysis of Teresa of Ávila as a visionary woman who felt the need to confront the problem of deception questions the usefulness of the traditional interpretation of visionary women as either deceivers or deceived. I argue that deception has traditionally functioned as a tool of sociopolitical marginalization, and that rulers of public discourse have ignored or dismissed the voices of visionary women. This work indicates the urgency of including their stories in the larger discussion on the credibility of women’s accounts of their own life experiences.

<p>This dissertation defends the <i>microrrelato</i>, an extremely brief work of narrative fiction, as the “fourth narrative genre,” as informed by research in embodied cognitive science, often referred to as the field of “neurohumanities.” The hallmark brevity of the <i>microrrelato </i>means that the literary perception of the text—and the creation of an imagined story world—is highly influenceable by its context, though the traditional literary criticism often published regarding the <i>microrrelato </i>does not seem to defend its distinction. I offer a reexamination of the <i>microrrelato </i>by defining it using a radial-structure conceptualization as informed by research from cognitive science on prototypes to inform a more comprehensive approach to defining the <i>microrrelato </i>and its relationship to other narrative, fictional, and literary forms. By looking at the prototypical conceptualization of the <i>microrrelato </i>through the lens of the neurohumanities, its distinction as its own category of narrative prose becomes clearer. Whereas the vast majority of research in the neurohumanities uses larger works of literature as summative case studies, very little has yet been applied to such short, “sudden” pieces of narrative fiction. It is through this examination that I demonstrate that fictional texts do not need to be extensive in order to afford the realization of cognitive processes in readers that construct imagined story worlds or afford them enriched narrative experience. The brevity or “suddenness” of the <i>microrrelato </i>is precisely what affords the reader the opportunity to do so. Furthermore, by applying empirical research from the field of neurohumanities, including data that I have collected, to the <i>microrrelato</i>, this dissertation also provides insight into the nature of fiction and the act of reading itself. </p>

<p>This dissertation proposes a definition and methodology to analyze the literary canon: the canon is the set of producers and products that accumulate the greatest amount of literary capital granted by institutions of consecration. In this concept, two categories are fundamental: literary capital and institutions. Literary capital refers to objectivations of literary value: manifestations of the agreement on the importance of authors and their literary work (inclusions in reading lists, awards and prizes, mentions in literary histories, among others). Institutions are communities that participate in literary activity; they are governed by norms and exercise power over other agents.</p> <p>This theoretical framework allows for the examination of the canon formation in literary criticism, anthologies, and Wikipedia. The accumulation of capital explains the existence of three positions within the Peruvian literary field: consecrated, legitimized, and aspiring writers. Furthermore, trajectory of capital is a concept that elucidates the changes in literary value. An ascending or descending trajectory shows when a writer's prestige has increased or decreased over time. Institutions located inside or outside the literary field is the basis for positing the difference between prestige and popularity: both concepts have a similar functioning, but literary agents have little or no involvement in the latter.</p>

<p>The narrative of the Ecuadorian César Dávila Andrade (Cuenca, Ecuador 1918 - Caracas, Venezuela 1967) is of great importance for the literature of his country; however, it has not been studied very frequently, as critics have focused on his poetry. This has mainly shown Dávila Andrade as a poet, rather than a narrator. However, his short stories constitute a considerable body of work and must be considered for a global understanding of his work. This dissertation aims to show that the short stories have to be considered an important part of the literary work of Dávila Andrade. Furthermore, the dissertation is part of a process of a contemporary rereading of Ecuadorian canonical authors; specifically, I propose an innovative analysis, based on abjection, gender and body, of texts that have traditionally been studied from narratological and stylistic perspectives only. For this study, I selected stories from different periods in Davila Andrade's career: “Un centinela ve la vida aparecer” (1966), “El hombre que limpió su arma” (1966), “Cabeza de gallo” (1966), “La autopsia” (Revista Tomebamba 1943), “Autopsia” (1952), “Las nubes y las sombras” (1952), “Un cuerpo extraño” (1955), “El último remedio” (1955), “La batalla” (1955), “La mirada de Dios” (1949), and “Ataúd de cartón” (1952). In these short stories, abjection is a subversive category that allows the author to question the constitution and ontology of reality. Julia Kristeva’s theoretical proposal defines abjection as what reminds the individual of a state of being of undifferentiation (before and after existence), in which he/she ceases to be; the presence of the abject puts at risk the existence of the subject within a social system. Specifically, the body in different states in the Davilian narrative is the main abject element that disfigures the categories and hierarchies of symbolic systems (patriarchy and religion are some examples). The Davilian body is essentially feminine and constitutes abjection; it is presented as a border space where reality loses its contours. Similarly, the diseased body and the corpse are constant elements in the Davilian narrative, inhabitants of unstable worlds, which invade places and the characters’ psyches. In conclusion, Dávila Andrade's short stories are occupied by the abjection of bodies, which functions as a concept that allows the dismantling of imposed, closed systems, based on hierarchies, such as patriarchy and religion.</p>

<p>  </p> <p>The garden and garden like spaces are ubiquitous in the Romantic narrative and my argument engages the (neo)colonial politics involved in their creation and maintenance within and outside of the Spanish Empire: the majestic and creole garden of Colombia and Cuba, the enslaved subsistence plot or <em>conuco </em>in Cuba, and the sacred, indigenous garden of Mexico, through writers such as Jorge Isaacs, Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda, Anselmo Suárez y Romero, Cirilo Villaverde, and Ignacio Manuel Altamirano, amongst others. I address how these garden spaces exist within and alongside of what I term the garden state: the transformation and domestication of nature through agriculture and horticulture. This is an imperial and neo-imperial environmental aesthetic that emerges in response to the rise of liberal agro-economic policies in the light of industrialization, the entrance of the West into ‘modernity,’ and the proliferation of the <em>hacienda </em>and <em>ingenio</em>. It is with the garden’s function as descriptor for nation and as discrete, enclosed space for the cultivation of nature that I engage with its capacity to mediate the politics of belonging and civilization in Romantic literature and mid-century cultural and political discourse. Traditionally read, the Romantic narrative centers around erotic productivity, through romantic couplings as a measure for the success or failure of the family. Parallel to this erotic drive, the garden state introduces a narrative of economic productivity that the presence of the garden, its creation, maintenance, and decline interrupts. The failure of the garden state parallels not only that of erotic productivity in the narratives, but rather it brings to the fore the fundamental contradictions of the civilizing project. These narratives are predicated on the continued exclusion of those exploited and displaced under the Spanish Empire—namely Indigenous Peoples, the enslaved, and women. However, as I develop a politics of belonging and labor, I posit that these same narratives complicate exclusionary politics through the environmental emplacement of their marginalized protagonists. As such their subsequent deaths or further displacement undermine the very places they were to uphold, causing the gardens’ destruction. I analyze the interaction of the politics of race and gender within the garden and garden state through death, labor, desire, and secularization to highlight the complexity of “civilization,” offering novel readings on how nature aides in questioning the broader limits of the nation in nineteenth-century Latin America and the waning Spanish Empire. </p>

<p><i>Children of Globalization: Diasporic Coming-of-age Novels in Germany, England, and the United States </i>is an exploration of contemporary Diasporic Coming-of-age Novels written in the context of globalized and de facto multicultural societies. Framed in the long tradition of <i>Bildungsroman </i>studies, this study illuminates the structural transformations that the coming-of-age genre has undergone in contemporary diasporic communities. <i>Children of Globalization</i> analyzes the complex identity formation of first- and subsequent-generation migrant protagonists in globalized rural and urban environments and dissects the implications that these diasporic formative processes have for the tercentennial genre. While the most traditional iteration of the <i>Bildungsroman </i>genre follows male middle-class heroes who forge their identities in a process of complex introspection to become citizens and workers, contemporary Diasporic Coming-of-age Novels represent formative processes that fit into, resist, or even disregard, narratives of nationhood. Recent changes in the global genre are the direct consequence of the intricacies of the formative processes of culturally-hybrid protagonists who must negotiate their access into adulthood and citizenship, and puzzle over sexuality and gender identity, in host societies that at times regard them with contempt and distrust. The study spans three centuries as it traces both perennial and volatile elements of the genre through its contemporary state. In doing so, it identifies thematic and structural seeds which, planted through the centuries in varied locations, have bloomed into nuanced explorations of the self in an interconnected world where regional and national definitions of identity are increasingly contested and in flux.</p><p>In order to contextualize the genre and provide evidence of its enduring malleability, the study begins in Germany, tracing what I term Proto-<i>Bildungsromane, </i>long medieval narrative poems that follow the formative processes of knights and heroes in grandiose style. Wolfram von Eschenbach’s thirteenth-century poem <i>Parzival </i>and the coeval Gottfried von Straßburg’s <i>Die Geschichte der Liebe von Tristan und Isolde </i>ponder the development of the self but too heavily rely on destiny to be considered <i>Bildungsromane. </i>Still in Germany, I illustrate the fundamental characteristics of the genre in Wolfgang von Goethe’s <i>Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre. </i>In order to showcase the flexibility of the genre, I analyze its early transformations in England in prominent works by Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, and E. M. Forster. The last four chapters focus on the exciting development of Diasporic Coming-of-age Novels in England, the United States, and Germany. Despite the stark differences between these societies and the particular cultural wealth of diasporic groups that have migrated there, the Diasporic Coming-of-age Novel has enabled sophisticated explorations of identity and belonging in all three countries. As the chapter summaries show, contemporary writers have used the Diasporic Coming-of-age Novel to untangle complicated formative processes, understand the expectations of their social environments, and achieve different levels of belonging and maturity.</p><p>With <i>Children of Globalization, </i>I seek to deepen our understanding of the exciting influence that contemporary diasporic movements have on the coming-of-age genre in particular and literary studies in general. Additionally, it is my hope that the exploration of Diasporic Coming-of-age Novels contributes to a capacious understanding of the important role of literature in the study of migration.</p>