Informe de Seminario para optar al grado de Licenciado en Lengua y Literatura Inglesa

No description available.

Tesis para optar al grado de Magíster en Literatura

I will particularly examine the work of Virginia Woolf, the 20th century novelist and critic, principally because her work exposes a very rich and extensive evidence of her awareness of the dichotomy women/men, putting special emphasis on female psychology. Her conviction was that an artist should never pervade the writing with judgements based upon sex distinctions or opinions full of resentment. Hence, the author’s inclination for the androgynous was used as a writing fashion, which in turn gave room to discussions on the topic of phallocentrism, taking subsequently the form of an embryonic feminist mode. Just as one wave does not really reflect the completeness and beauty of the sea, neither a single person reflects the splendour of mankind. I focus my attention on The Waves, since this novel has plenty of data that encourages an autonomous way of looking at humans, their gender, and the relations between them. The objective of this paper is to associate the author’s considerations about human distinctiveness and gender in The Waves. For this purpose I shall determine the feminist features presented in the novel as well as I shall establish the importance of characterisation and symbolism; these aspects communicate strong ideas concerning the fragmentation of reality with no hierarchic allusions related to gender, which as a result, comes to be a ground-braking conceptual reaction against phallocentrism.

Tesis para optar al grado de Magíster en Literatura / El trabajo que se presenta a continuación es una revisión, una discusión y una tentativa reflexión acerca del sentido que puedan adquirir los espacios físicos construidos en el relato Jane Eyre (1847) erigiéndose como 'tramos de formación' en la configuración de la protagonista. La propuesta para esta revisión y su análisis considera aproximaciones teóricas y aportes críticos en torno al tema y se moviliza en base a la noción de Bildungsroman y en torno a las nociones de lugar y espacio propuestas desde la literatura y desde otras perspectivas teóricas que colaboran en esta reflexión. Este trabajo se basa en la lectura y discusión en torno a la novela Jane Eyre (1847), utilizando una traducción al español de ella (2013), y una variedad de otros trabajos adyacentes. Revisar y observar esta temática nos abre la posibilidad de extrapolar esta reflexión a otras obras literarias, asunto que puede invitar a nuevas revisiones.

Informe de Seminario para optar al grado de Licenciado en Lengua y Literatura Inglesa

Virginia Woolf in Mrs Dalloway, through Clarissa Dalloway’s and other parallel stories, presents us with the situation of Septimus Warren Smith, a war hero who suffers shell-shock and that due to his apparent madness is victim of constant threats from two physicians who want to put him away because of his mental crises. He, in an attempt to preserve his soul from the terrible embrace of human nature, decides to kill himself before he is arrested. Taking into account this information, the topic of this thesis will be the treatment of madness in Mrs Dalloway, understanding the figure of the mad person as a literary archetype which is repeated with some consistency in English Literature, from classical to contemporary texts. The main focus will be the development of the figure of Septimus as a visionary poet, a modernist figure analogous to William Blake who, with his visionary poetic/pictorial work, drew the paths to the following romantic company. A comparison will be drawn between the two poets taking into account the evolution of the visionary poet from its pre-romantic sphere to the modernist shadow of a mad person, showing that madness suffers transformations from the ancient Greece to modernist times. One of the sub-topics will be the conception of nature in contrast to human nature, and how they seem to be components of a dichotomy that cannot be dissolved. My intention is to work on madness as a literary archetype, along with an examination of the mad person within the context of a modernist novel where it is manifest in the figure of the visionary poet. I will try to see how this has changed from the Platonic perspective of divine madness to the segregation and punishment of the Classic Epoch, and finally to our modern(ist) sensibility. Tentatively, the social apprehension towards the mad person would affect its characterisation in Mrs Dalloway, in which a post-war fragmented society is presented.

Informe de Seminario para optar al grado de Licenciada en Lengua y Literatura Inglesa / Our objective is to visualize how Beckett show us the ideas explained before in “Murphy” and how he configured them and gave them form through the story and the characters. In order to do so, we will support our analysis with the concepts presented by the theory of chaos and the ideas developed by Jacques Derrida in his theory of Deconstruction. All this in order to understand the phenomena of contradiction presented as the central element in the novel. We also will see how the symbolism present in the novel is used as a way to reinforce and clarify this phenomenon and finally we will be able to see how we can identify our human condition through this novel.

Autor no autoriza el acceso a texto completo de su documento. / The issue of dominance and submissiveness in Virginia Woolf’s (1927) To The Lighthouse will be the center of this study because of a number of reasons. Virginia Woolf shows an interesting mixture composed of governing and subservient figures in her novels. These first ones are represented mainly by men such as Mr. Ramsay, and the second ones, by women such as Mrs. Ramsay. The creation of this dichotomy is clearly influenced by the Post-Victorian environment in which Woolf grew up and wrote. There is an innovative way to present us these characters because she shows us the reality of dominance and obedience in a sarcastic way, that is, by saying something when she wants to state the opposite. Virginia Woolf’s novels are characterized by the presence of governing and subservient protagonists. This happens due to the context in which she created her novels, that is, the Post Victorian period. Nevertheless, there is an attempt to balance these two complementary forces, dominant and submissive, in order to criticize the established order. She did it in a subtle way, though; the social conventions at that period prevented her from going any further. The aim of this essay will be to discover the element that makes dominance and submission to be apparent in the characters, this key element could be the post- Victorian society or a personal contribution of the author, specifically a modern strategy, to change society from the individual rather than system. This work will be a contribution in the sense that as a starting hypothesis is that dominant and submissive figures in Woolf’s novels are presented in a non-traditional fashion. Therefore, one of the contributions of exploring these seemingly ascendant and passive representations would be to encourage a more realistic approach to characters, leaving aside stereotypical notions. Another contribution of this study, which lies on the examination of artistic and aesthetic motivations, is related to aesthetic purposes of the author. However, these are treated in an innovative way, not explaining much about their nature with practical language, but using rhetoric and poetic resources. Finally, it is important to relate these dichotomies to Woolf’s Modernism.

Informe de Seminario para optar al grado de Licenciada en Lengua y Literatura Inglesa / As human beings, we are in constant awareness of our past and memories. We tend to attach significance to life events, places and people that make up our lives. Remembering a memory allows us to relieve that moment once again, nevertheless it never evokes the same feelings that the original did. Moreover we are not able to remember everything, but unconsciously, we retain specific moments in our mind. Aware of all of this, Virginia Woolf wrote “A sketch of the past” published in “Moments of being”, A Collection of Autobiographical Writings. In this work, Woolf tells us about her early years, and she describes and introduces people and places that build her life. She feels so connected to these situations, that she made them part of her memory. But she also discusses that certain things may get remembered, while others simply fade away. Because of this, she says that she does not control these moments and in the same way that she kept them in her memory, they came to her present reality, making her feel powerless. Although all of these descriptions Woolf never gives an accurate definition of “moments of being”, instead she asserts that these episodes of “ecstasy” are “embedded in a kind of nondescript cotton wool” (Woolf, ‘Sketch’72) forgotten in the everyday life were “a great part of every day is not lived consciously” (Woolf, ‘Sketch’70). These moments are called “moments of non-being”. Moments of being can be related to a moment of evocation, as they reveal something beneath the “cotton wool”.