My dissertation addresses the legal, philosophical, theological, social, intellectual, and literary framework around Mateo Alemánâs Guzmán de Alfarache (1599, 1604), which heavily influenced a large number of writers in and out of Spain. I demonstrate that political events caused a series of extreme governmental measures that impacted Spanish society and questioned everyday conceptions of the role of the individual in society. The ontological and legal conflicts that Mateo Aleman recreated in Guzmán de Alfarache are the driving force of the narrative action. Mateo Alemán´s recreation of the topic of Fortune launches the protagonist through a series of adventures that thrust him into a life sentence in the galleys. The whims of fortune set in motion the constant social and economic turmoil represented in the novel. This chaos creates the social imbalance that surrounds and consequently marginalizes Guzmán and numerous other characters. A persistent questioning of legitimacy of state power is in dialog with the fragile standing of the individual in premodern Spanish society. A scenery of fear, persecution, and punishment emerges from the conflict between the picaro and the malfunctioning society. I reconstruct the legal and judicial landscape that prevailed during the last years of the sixteenth century in Spain. I emphasize the parallel between the sociopolitical turbulence during the reign of Philip II and that in Mateo Alemán's masterpiece.

In Don Quixote, Cervantes captivates the reader with an unattainable Dulcinea, and he also presents to the reader a parade of female characters from a broad range of social, cultural, and economic backgrounds to portray real women, not an imagined lady. He establishes a poetic balance by mixing the imagined lady with a variety of other women: Muslim ladies, a duchess, farm girls, shepherdesses, warriors, ladies and prostitutes, victims and executioners, the submissive and the rebellious, the server and the served, the aristocrat and the plebeian, all of them under the same narrative mantle. In Don Quixote, women play a key position, from an esthetic and artistic point of view, which contributes to the different levels of rhetoric within the discourse. It is precisely the fiction of the text, which makes the reader rediscover the imminent reality. The inverisimilitude (the unlikely) locates the reader in the field of verisimilitude (the likely). The universe of women in this text provide us with an extensive selection: Aldonza Lorenzo, Marcela, Maritornes, Luscinda, Dorotea, Micomicona, Camila, Zoraida, Clara de Viedma, Leandra, Teresa Panza, Quiteria, Altisidora, Doña Rodríguez, the women of Barataria, Sanchica, Claudia Jerónima, Ana Félix, and many others. I have fashioned four chapters based on the following characters: Marcela, Zoraida, Dorotea, and the duchess. I have analyzed their voices in this text according to their narrative position, the level of fiction and its function within its discursive frame, and the rhetorical direction within the work. Also, the study of the female first names and/or surnames will show that the author took time and effort to select them as a part of his construction of body of the work.

The validity of development in Latin America as a cultural force has not been thoroughly questioned either by those from the industrialized world or by Latin American politicians, technicians, and military personnel. Within the Latin American cultural world, although the ideological effects of development have been considered, yet critics have neglected literary discourses. Recognizing the specific nature of development as a discursive construction and the adolescent character as a representation of the future of Latin American nations, this dissertation attempts to recognize the cultural discussion on the power of development, a key aspect of its modernity. The study shows the limits of development practices in Octavio Pazs 1950 essay El laberinto de la soledad, Mario Vargas Llosas 1963 novel La ciudad y los perros, Clarice Lispectors short stories and chronicles, José Lezama Limas 1966 novel Paradiso, and Elena Poniatowskas 1971 testimony La noche de Tlatelolco. These narratives exemplify the interplay between the rhetoric of development and the ensuing literary responses: texts and contexts feeding each other through characters and plots. Additionally, the traditions of the Bildungsroman and picaresque give insightful commentaries on the society, subject development, and integration with the nation, relating in different ways education and survival in preparation for the adolescents tasks for the future. All these aspects together conjugate to examine critically this chapter of the modernity. In this perspective, the incorporation of a social category such as "development" in the narrative creates a different registry within the Latin American literary tradition. The relationship between this symbolic representation of an adolescent group the Latin American nations future and the goal to mold them into industrious good citizens or new men exposes the interpellation of the development ideology inherent in Latin American literature and culture. Hence, this study reveals both the continuity and disruption of development discourse during Post War Latin America culture, using examples exemplary of the period.

The theater of Gabriel Téllez, better known as Tirso de Molina, frequently contains elements of female disguise and cross-dressing. In this study, the author examines four plays by Tirso de Molina in which female disguise is central to the plot. (La celosa de sí misma, El celoso prudente, Don Gil de las calzas verdes and El amor médico) In these texts, the use of female disguise is a means by which the female character is able to circumvent the conventions of society and gain a freedom to act that would otherwise be impossible. The danger that arises from this use of disguise is twofold. The first is the possibility of the premature revelation of the disguise. The second is that the character may lose herself in the disguise and act against her own interests. Both are examined here. Despite the potential dangers of disguise, in each play Tirso de Molina creates a strong female character who is able to manipulate events to achieve her goals. The author makes use of Jungian terminology and Foucauldian concepts of power and observation to examine the use of female disguise and cross-dressing as a power strategy, rather than in terms of sexuality, as is common in Lacanian approaches. Disguise in these plays is revealed to be a means to correct injustices and to achieve results that would otherwise be unobtainable.

In this dissertation I utilize Toni Morrisons Sula (1973), Helena Parente Cunhas Mulher no Espelho (1983), Rosario Ferrés Vecindarios excéntricos (1999), and Carmen de Montefloress Singing Softly / Cantando bajito (1989) to examine the representation of the mother-daughter relationship in works by women from the United States, Brazil and Puerto Rico. I aim to demonstrate that the protagonists of these novels are each interacting with archetypal images of mother. The novels serve as accounts of each protagonists journey toward a sense of balance and wholeness. The accomplishment of this course can be determined by how each central character interacts first with her mother as well as other maternal figures and then, with other entities that I argue carry the resonances of the archetypal mother. Successful individuation, in the Jungian sense, leads to a realization of balance, whereas the refutation of this process amounts to the metaphorical and literal death of the character.

This project explores the mechanisms of appropriation and re-elaboration of the metropolitan Baroque discourse by educated criollos in Colonial Peruvian society. Examining Juan de Espinosa Medranos works (which include a drama, sermons and the Apologético en favor de Góngora) under the concept of imitatio, I have adopted an original theoretical approach to explain the ambivalent relationship between Spanish models and the cultural production of the New World. Espinosa Medrano writes an ensemble of texts that show his capacity to master the metropolitan literary code, while simultaneously undermining the natural preeminence of Spanish intellectuals over the colonized.

This study examines the tensions and variations of the surrealist aesthetic in Spain, specifically in the late poetic, dramatic, and graphic works of the Spanish poet Federico García Lorca. While many intellectuals recognize that the application of surrealist precepts in Spain is problematic on many levels, my research investigates what contemporary art critics have called dissident, ethnographic, or undercover surrealismvariations of surrealism rooted in the theories of the renegade French intellectual Georges Bataille. In the Spanish context, Batailles early writings (which appeared in the dissident surrealist review Documents), including his exposition on formlessness, base matter, putrefaction, and mutilation, offer a de-sublimated reading of surrealism and succinctly capture the emptiness and anguish that are evident in many strands of Spanish poetic expression in the second and third decades of the twentieth century. <p> Initially, I focus on the performative nature of Bataillean formlessness [informe] and the manner in which aesthetic, thematic, and structural manifestations of the formless in Lorcas work critique and undermine social, cultural, and artistic conventions. Reading Lorcas surrealist texts (including Poeta en Nueva York, Viaje a la luna, El público, and others) through the Bataillean lens offers an innovative and relevant approach to surrealist variations in Spain which focus on the base and more primal drives that, in addition to the sublimatory goals of Bretonian surrealism, were also evident in the Spanish avant-garde. As such, the reworking of the surreal which I propose rethinks the avant-garde in Spain and reconsiders Lorcas involvement therein. Additionally, my reading of Lorca and Bataille focuses on the ethical implications that are recognized in their interest in poetry and in their use of spaces of informe. In essence, the poetic utterance is treated as a site open to otherness and to the expression of concerns both social and aesthetic.

SPANISH AND PORTUGUESE DIMENSIONES DE LA TEMPORALIDAD DE LA MODERNIDAD ESTÉTICA EN AMÉRICA LATINA FÁTIMA REGINA NOGUEIRA Dissertation under the direction of Professor Cathy Login Jrade This dissertation explores the portrayal of time in Latin American Literature starting at the end of the nineteenth century and concluding with works published in the 1970s. Latin Americas distinctive realization of modernity, which allowed for the coexistence of various temporalities within the context of socio-cultural life, impinged upon the formulation and representation of time in the literary texts of this period. My dissertation explores the concept of an imagined modernity and shows how it allowed Latin American writers to present themselves and their countries on an equal footing with Europe, reaching a state of cultural synchronicity. They achieve this synchronicity despite the survival of elements from the colonial and neocolonial past which tended to alter the nature of Latin America modernity, creating a sui generis mode of artistic expression. The mixed temporalities that surface in Latin American literature appear as a struggle between a personal, subjective time and a more traditional, linear, and historical time that points to an improved future through progress. They also appear in the coexistence of the persistent critique of rationalistic thought and the formulation of a new concept of history in which discontinuity and randomness play decisive roles. These recurring perspectives are related to political concerns, most notably issues of globalization and neocolonialism. The most significant contribution of my study to the field is to elucidate how the tensions between modernity as a new, transformational, socio-cultural force and History as a measure of progress played a crucial role in the artistic constitution of the multidimensional depiction of temporality in Brazilian and Spanish American prose and poetry of the period. From Dario to Carpentier and from Machado de Assis to Oswald de Andrade, I examine how the dialectics of time in a constantly evolving society reflected the awareness of an uneven modernity that originated in the fissure between its aesthetical and social goals.

This study examines the cultural cross-pollination occurring between Spain and Portugal during the early modern period. More specifically, it argues that a number of Portuguese authorsincluding Manuel de Faria e Sousa, Ângela de Azevedo, Jacinto Cordeiro, and António de Sousa de Macedoused their proficiency in Spanish to articulate and spread a collective sense of national identity throughout the Castilianized peninsula and Europe. Despite emerging from an ambiguous state of social, political, and cultural hybridity, these Portuguese writers clearly identified with and claimed allegiance to their native land. Overall, this investigation attempts to situate Portuguese literature written in Spanish within the greater literary production of the time and reappraise a body of works that uniquely addresses the intersection of language, literature, and politics on the early modern Iberian landscape.

In this study, I analyze Memórias Póstumas de Brás Cubas and Dom Casmurro by Machado de Assis, La amortajada and The Shrouded Woman by María Luisa Bombal, Juan Rulfos Pedro Páramo, and João Guimarães Rosas Grande Sertão: Veredas. The common theme of death and the solitary narrator/protagonist strengthens the links between Brazilian and Spanish American narrative traditions of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This study examines the way in which death functions as a literary trope that destroys the concept of the traditional reader and reconstructs him/her as an integral participant in the creation of the narrative. Relying on Barthess concept of writerly texts, I apply Wolfgang Isers theory of aesthetic response and Roberto González Echevarrías theory of the Archive to explore the ways in which death appears in primarily first-person narratives in which the narrator/protagonist has either died and speaks/writes from the grave, or remains the only living character of the narrative. In each work, the reader is expected to abandon the conventions of literary realism by engaging the narrator/protagonist in a metafictional space within the narrative itself. As the reader enters the texts, s/he is encouraged to reevaluate the society represented in the narrative, as it is filtered through the narrators lens of death. This lens strips away the conventional wisdom and hegemonic discourse of the society portrayed in the novels. Each of the novels in this study presents its social order from a different perspective, but the common element of each work is the awakening that the narrator experiences through his or her association with death. In each of the works, the reader must fill in missing pieces of the text or decipher the speech acts of marginalized characters in order to understand the position and perspective of the narrator/protagonist. By doing so, the traditional reader dies as a newly constructed, more engaged reader is created.