No description available.

Inaug.-diss.--Freie Universität, Berlin. / Lebenslauf. "Literaturnachweis": p. 201-204. Also issued in print.

Inaug.-diss.--Freie Universität, Berlin. / Lebenslauf. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. "Literaturnachweis": p. 201-204.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Florida State University, 2005. / Advisor: Dr. José Gomariz, Florida State University, College of Arts and Sciences, Dept. of Modern Languages and Linguistics. Title and description from dissertation home page (viewed Sept. 14, .2005). Document formatted into pages; contains vi, 114 pages. Includes bibliographical references.

This thesis compares the autobiographic work of Esmeralda Santiago and Emine Sevgi Özdamar focusing on the aspects of ethnic identity, gender, as well as history and memory. The argument is that both authors' work not only reflects the cultural origins of each writer and her trauma of loss, but also each host country's social realities and conflicts. In spite of alienation and loss of home and language, both protagonists create "touching tales," a phrase coined by Leslie Adelson that refers to the entanglement between cultures, stressing more the common ground between them than the differences. Santiago's work stresses the dividedness of American society along racial and ethnic lines, but also the opportunity for the immigrant to reinvent herself and overcome racial and social boundaries. Özdamar on the other hand reflects on the dividedness and traumatization of Germany through World War II, the Holocaust, the East-West division, and the terrorism of the 1970s. She compares it to the political and social division within Turkey as results of the Armenian genocide and military coups. While Santiago views American culture with distance, Özdamar displays an enthusiastic reception of leftist writers like Bertolt Brecht and German literature in general. Both autobiographical subjects find a way to reconcile their own inner divisions through theater work, which combines universal and multicultural elements.

No description available.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, San Diego, 2005. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 173-180).

This dissertation analyzes the representation of sugar plantation societies in nineteenth and twentieth century Puerto Rican literature. Using an interdisciplinary approach, I study the socio-historical, political, and economic development of the sugarcane industry in Puerto Rico as represented in the literary works of Manuel Zeno Gandía, Enrique A. Laguerre, René Marqués, and Rosario Ferré. Scholars have tended to examine their works separately; however, I study how these writers from different literary generations develop a cohesive literary project, reshuffling the periodization of Puerto Rican literature by their focus on the sugar industry. Consequently, the literary works intersect with each other to provide a complete picture of the evolution and decline of the sugar plantation and its effects on the social imaginary of Puerto Rico. I use this term to mean both social practices of Puerto Rican society as well as its class stratification and political struggles. My theoretical approach is based on Antonio Benítez Rojo, "The Repeating Island: The Caribbean and the Postmodern Perspective" (1992), where the sugar plantation is defined as the principal unifying entity across the Caribbean, repeated continuously through time and space. I also rely on socio-historiographical approaches developed by Ramiro Guerra, Francisco Scarano, and Ángel Quintero Rivera, whose analyses of the sugar cane industry in the Caribbean shed light on class conflicts, primarily between the sugar oligarchy and factory workers. This dissertation suggests a homology between the socioeconomic structure of the sugar plantation and the Puerto Rican literary canon. I conclude that Puerto Rican writers have recoded the imaginary of the plantation in response to political events and economic shifts within the sugar industry. While Manuel Zeno Gandía and René Marqués promote and redefine its value system, other writers, such as Enrique A. Laguerre and Rosario Ferré, have transgressed the hacienda system to articulate the voice of those communities marginalized by the sugar plantation.

Tesis (Doctor en Filología)--Universidad de Valladolid, España, 2007. / Digitized and made available on the World Wide Web by Interamerican University of Puerto Rico, 2007.

This research aims to understand self-translation as a postcolonial, social, political, cultural and linguistic phenomenon and it focuses on how it communicates a hybrid transcultural identity that not only challenges the monolingual literary canons and concepts of national homogeneous identities, but also subverts to patriarchal society. Thus, I understand self-translation as a mean of empowerment and contestation. The cases under study are Puerto Rican writers Rosario Ferré and Esmeralda Santiago, and their novels The House on the Lagoon and América’s Dream, written in English and translated into Spanish by the authors themselves. I believe that Rosario Ferré and Esmeralda Santiago are representative of a group of writers, artists and intellectuals who through their work originated from the island and from the U.S. Diaspora, have aimed to give voice to a Puerto Rican postcolonial hybrid identity that has been silenced until recently. Therefore, they disrupt the official national cultural and linguistic discourse about the Puerto Rican identity that has been weaved by the Spanish language in opposition to U.S. colonialist attempts of linguistic and cultural assimilation. This dissertation is located in the intersection between the fields of comparative literature, translation, cultural, gender and postcolonial studies. The question that guides this research is: Is self-translation in the case of Puerto Rico, a result of cultural hybridity in Puerto Rico’s postcolonial context?Therefore, this is a multidisciplinary research project that integrates elements from the humanities and the social sciences. Methodologically, it integrates qualitative and quantitative approaches. Hence, hybridity is embedded in this research not only because it discusses English and Spanish writing, but because it includes textual analysis, content analysis and statistical analysis. The main finding is the deep conection between socio-political context, language, culture, identity, power and translation that supports the idea that self-translation is a postcolonial act, which in the case of Puerto Rico is strongly related to hybridity as an everyday practice of identity affirmation.