This dissertation draws upon Western literature in critical theory, aesthetics, art theory, and art history to explore how lying can foster aesthetic experience and the sociopolitical effects of this experience. It nominates the idea of pseudology—lying as an art—and outlines its distinguishing features from the dawn of postmodernism to contemporary practices. This study demonstrates an analysis of lying premised on an understanding of aesthetics as caught up in the wider issues of public pedagogy and everyday politics. Taking as case studies specific works of Marcel Duchamp, Robert Rauschenberg, VALIE EXPORT, and Carol Duncan, this dissertation argues for the narrative framing of artwork as paramount for its reception. As well, by examining the artistic mystifications of Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Coco Fusco, Joshua Schwebel, and Iris Häussler, this dissertation analyzes the use of pseudology in institutional critique. The study finds that perfidious practices can point to the importance of the relational boundary between what is real/unreal, highlight the social construction of this boundary’s aesthetic aspects, and reveal the ways in which each of us are active in the construction of a shared reality. Ultimately, our active framing of everyday life and the affective nature of our construction of a shared reality has been problematized by a contemporary prevalence of lying in the realms of public culture and politics. Pseudology reveals the power of narrative framing. The pseudological artworks discussed here expose, as models for the political aesthetic of lying, the need to debate the very tenets of reality constantly and continually—an essential civic action in the ethical, communal relationships of a democracy. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / An analysis of the use of lying as an artistic technique.

[ES] El mexicano Guillermo del Toro, ha contribuido a enriquecer la estética y mitología del cine fantástico y de terror. Gracias a los seres dentro de sus filmes, e inspirados en los espectros de las pinturas y grabados de Francisco de Goya y Lucientes, el realizador presenta, mediante ensoñaciones maravillosas, los traumas y conflictos que se han arrastrado durante la historia; sobre todo en épocas de conflictos bélicos y sociales. La investigación que aquí se plantea, busca reivindicar el valor estético y ético de la obra de Goya dentro del cine contemporáneo. Así se propone un recorrido iconológico comparativo que rescata la influencia del arte del aragonés en los largometrajes del latinoamericano. / [CA] El director mexicà Guillermo del Toro, ha contribuït a enriquir l'estètica i la mitologia del cinema fantàstic i de terror. Gràcies als éssers dins dels seus films, i inspirats en els espectres pictòrics de les pintures i gravats de Francisco de Goya y Lucientes, el realitzador presenta, mitjançant ensomnis meravellosos, els traumes i conflictes que s'han arrossegat durant la història; sobretot en èpoques de conflictes bèl·lics i socials. La investigació que ací es planteja, vol reivindicar el valor estètic i ètic de l'obra de Goya dins del cinema contemporani. Així es proposa un recorregut iconològic comparatiu que rescata la influència de l'art de l'aragonés en els llargmetratges del llatinoamericà. / [EN] Guillermo del Toro, the Latin American director, has contributed to enriching the aesthetics and mythology of fantasy and horror films. Thanks to the beings in his films, inspired by the pictorial spectrums of the paintings and engravings of Francisco de Goya y Lucientes, the director presents, through fantastic reveries, the traumas and conflicts that have dragged through history, especially in times of war and social conflicts. The research proposed here seeks to vindicate the aesthetic and ethical value of Goya's work within contemporary cinema. Thus, a comparative iconological tour is proposed that rescues the influence of the art of the Aragonese in the Latin-American movies. / Ponce Tarre, JE. (2023). Totalitarismo y ficción. Goya y sus espectros en el cine de Guillermo del Toro [Tesis doctoral]. Universitat Politècnica de València. https://doi.org/10.4995/Thesis/10251/194753

In the 1950s and 1960s, the Organization of American States (OAS), a multinational political organization headquartered in Washington, DC, attempted to mediate U.S.-Latin American political and cultural relations. This dissertation traces how, in the United States, Latin American art emerged as a field of art historical study and exhibition via the activities of the OAS. I center my analysis on José Gómez Sicre and Rafael Squirru, two prominent curators who influenced the circulation of Latin American art during the Cold War. Part I focuses on Gómez Sicre, who served as head curator at the OAS from 1946 to 1981 and who founded the Museum of Modern Art of Latin America in 1976. I offer an analysis of Gómez Sicre’s aesthetic tastes, contextualizing them in relation to his contemporaries Alfred H. Barr, Jr., Marta Traba, and Jorge Romero Brest. I also discuss his efforts to build a network of art centers across the Americas, indicating how his activities fed into a Cold War struggle around notions of the “intellectual.” Part II examines the activities of poet and art critic Rafael Squirru, who served as Director of Cultural Affairs of the OAS from 1963 to 1970 and who theorized Latin American art in terms of the “new man.” I reconstruct how the phrase “new man” became a point of ideological conflict in the 1960s in a battle between Squirru and his political rival, Ernesto Ché Guevara. Throughout this dissertation, I indicate how Gómez Sicre and Squirru framed modern art within different Pan-American dreams of future world prosperity, equality, and cooperation. By examining the socio-political implications behind those dreams, I reveal the structures and limits of power shaping their influence during the Cold War. My study concentrates on the period from the founding of the OAS in 1948 to the establishment of the Museum of Modern Art of Latin America in 1976, and I contend that the legacies of Pan-Americanism continue to affect the field of Latin American art today. / text

Whereas contemporary debates in Latin American studies addressing sovereignty often focus on dictatorships and the transitions to democratic governments in Latin America in the late twentieth century, Sovereignties Displaced: Avant-Garde Prose and Authoritarianism in Spain, Chile, and Argentina (1923-1936) adopts a transatlantic framework and directs critical attention to the cultural production of the interwar period. The historical and cultural events preceding and following 1929 are connected to World War I, the political crisis of democratic systems, and the global socioeconomic instability of the period. The three countries studied in the present work would be affected by these conditions, sharing an almost synchronic development of the authoritarian governments of Miguel Primo de Rivera in Spain (1923-1930), of Carlos Ibáñez del Campo in Chile (1927-1931), and José Félix Uriburu in Argentina (1930-1932). Additionally, the rise of authoritarianism and the decay of parliamentary institutions characterizing this epoch condition and inscribe the political essays and avant-garde novels composed by the intellectuals and writers analyzed in this study: from Spain, María Zambrano (1904-1991), Ramón Gómez de la Serna (1888-1963), and Benjamín Jarnés (1888-1949); from Chile, Alberto Edwards Vives (1874-1932), Juan Emar (1893-1964), and Vicente Huidobro (1893-1948); and from Argentina, Ramón Doll (1896-1970), Norah Lange (1905-1972), and Roberto Arlt (1900-1942). It should be noted that while considering national circumstances, my argumentation is divided into sections organized not by country, but rather by subject matter: a methodological and theoretical introduction, three analytical chapters, and concluding remarks. Established critical assessments of the avant-gardes, as offered by experts like Renato Poggioli (1907-1963), have underscored that democratic forms of government would provide the initial conditions of possibility of the historical avant-gardes. Other scholars, however, have recognized the interdependency of early twentieth century artistic discourses, revolutionary ideas, and authoritarianism. Informed by the theorization of sovereignty and democracy of Jacques Derrida (1930-2004), and the concept of community of Roberto Esposito (1950-), my research examines, in political essays and vanguard novels, the opposition of individual vis-à-vis collective forms of rule. The texts of my corpus manifest a recurrent concern relating to the tension between self-rule and collective-rule, a dynamic which organizes and destabilizes avant-garde formations themselves. Consequently, I analyze the philosophical and political ramifications of these authors’ defense, negation, or destabilization of the individual-collective opposition in the context of the deterioration of parliamentarism. In my first chapter, I examine the following essays that represent a range of political positions from the interwar years: Horizonte del liberalismo (1930) by María Zambrano, Liberalismo en la literatura y la política (Con una segunda edición de: “Democracia mal menor”) (1934, n/d) by Ramón Doll, and La fronda aristocrática en Chile (1928) by Alberto Edwards Vives. Framed by the sociological assessments of José Ortega y Gasset in La rebelión de las masas (1930), this chapter considers these essayists’ observations regarding mass politics and the role of political and economic elites. I foreground the ethical problems relating to these authors’ conceptions of the human subject and their concomitant formulations of governance, deriving from various ideological orientations. The essayists’ comparable anxieties regarding the limits of democratic politics reveal the complexities of the period and serve as a springboard for the subsequent chapters that study the politics of avant-garde novels. In my second chapter, shifting from essayistic discourse to vanguard fiction, I analyze philosophical oppositions central to the configuration of sovereignty, and to the theory and practice of democracy. These tensions organize various components of the following novels: Un año (1935) by Juan Emar (pseudonym of Álvaro Yáñez Bianchi), 45 días y 30 marineros (1933) by Norah Lange, and El caballero del hongo gris (1928) by Ramón Gómez de la Serna. I demonstrate that, although these narratives do not contain explicit references to the emergence of authoritarianism and the erosion of parliamentarism of the period, these narratives are structured by problems that have implications for a thinking of issues relating to sovereignty and democracy. These novels similarly present how individuals interact with groups, such that it becomes imperative to consider the political consequences of these relations in order to critique, for example, fraternalistic and nationalistic notions of political filiation. My final chapter studies the narrative presentations of radical political projects that aim to restructure society in Los siete locos (1929) by Roberto Arlt, La próxima (1934) by Vicente Huidobro, and Lo rojo y lo azul (1932) by Benjamín Jarnés. In contrast to the narratives included in the second chapter, these avant-garde novels establish an explicit dialogue with the conditions of crisis of the interwar years. From insurrections and utopian settlements, to revolutionary military revolts, these narrations depict small vanguard groups that propose various plots that seek to radically reshape the social order. Even though poetry is often positioned as the paradigmatic form of vanguard literary expression, my research theorizes the understudied phenomenon of Hispanic avant-garde prose. In particular, I account for the variation among avant-garde novels of the period, by sustaining that there are gradations of vanguard narrative depending on different factors that range from the transparency or opacity of linguistic expression, to the organization of the narrative material. In this sense, some novels considered vanguardist, while approaching a certain radicality in terms of language and form, may incorporate elements of the realist-naturalist novelistic tradition. Likewise, I assert the importance of attending to the varied uses of meta-reflexive procedures in Hispanic vanguard prose. Given their implicit and explicit interaction with contemporary historical conditions and political and artistic discourses of the 1920s and 1930s, I contend that the essays and avant-garde novels analyzed offer a fertile ground to examine the nature of sovereignty, while also presenting, in some crucial instances, potential images of what a democracy worthy of this name could look like. / Spanish

La relación entre la política y los medios de comunicación se ha estudiado desde diversas aproximaciones (psicología, filosofía, ciencias políticas, entre otras áreas) y durante el siglo XX se abrió un campo nuevo de investigación y debate debido a la aparición de medios masivos como la radio, el cine y la televisión: se dio inicio así a los media studies1 . Las teorías de la comunicación se han dedicado a investigar los efectos de los medios sobre la población; durante el siglo XX encontramos a los teóricos de la Escuela de Frankfurt, los funcionalistas, la perspectiva de McLuhan, entre otras. Todos estos estudiosos señalaron la influencia del cine para establecer patrones de conducta o simpatías hacia determinadas ideologías. La presente investigación se centrará en aquellas películas que han pretendido transmitir una ideología específica: el marxismo. Pero dentro de las películas que han tratado este corpus ideológico podemos encontrar dos grupos: las que se realizaron como filmes de resistencia frente a un gobierno de oposición y buscaban transformar las ideas de su nación (como el cine militante latinoamericano o el cine de Godard en su etapa de izquierdista radical), y las que, por el contrario, contaban con el apoyo de un gobierno de ideas marxistas interesado en legitimar el sistema político existente.

El propósito de nuestra investigación es analizar la imagen del París surrealista para luego ver su posterior recepción y variación por parte de Julio Cortázar en Rayuela. Los criterios analíticos de nuestra investigación constan en la importancia de la promenade y la visión en la construcción de la imagen de la ciudad a manera de espacio interior. Para comprender los orígenes e inserción en la tradición por parte de los surrealistas, fue necesario establecer los orígenes de las poéticas urbanas de la ciudad de París a finales del siglo XVIII, comprender el auge de París como tema literario a mediados del siglo XIX, analizar la importancia de la tradición noctámbula y la incidencia de Baudelaire en el París moderno para situar a los surrealistas en su manera de comprender la ciudad como un espacio psíquico e interior. Por último, comprenderemos los distintos elementos surrealistas de la construcción de París en Rayuela de Cortázar gracias a los textos escritos durante su período de interés surrealista (1947-1949) y su posterior variación en Rayuela. / The purpose of our investigation is to analyze the image of Paris forged in four Surrealist texts published between 1926-1928 in order to understand the Surrealist elements that allowed Julio Cortázar to forge his own image of the city in the novel Rayuela. Our analytical criteria are the importance of the regard and the promenade in the construction of the city as an interior and personal space. To understand the importance of the Surrealist production, it was necessary to visit the origins of Paris as a literary text in the late eitheenth century, the importance of the tradition noctámbule in the XIXth century, the incidences of Baudelaire's work regarding the modern Paris and the change of century that allowed the Surrealist movement to understand the city as an interior and psychic space. Through the establishment of certain criteria and images, we analyzed Paris in Cortázar's novel Rayuela as a Surrealist product, even if Cortázar himself never felt as as a Surrealist writer.