This thesis postulates the narrative of Venezuelan psychiatrist and novelist Francisco Herrera Luque as one that demystifies the official historical discourse of his nation. Our argument is developed through a two-part analysis. First, we present and examine the author's characteristic method, one that he called "fabled history", and the way it deals with elements of Venezuela's historical past. Secondly, we analyze the way Herrera Luque, while crafting an undoubtedly historical narrative, also analyzes many elements of the Venezuelan idiosyncrasy and identity through the illustration of colonial life in the nation, in particular within the oligarchic social class known as mantuanos, a group of people who controlled the beating of the nation's young heart from its birth until its independence. To support our idea, we have used the theories of French philosopher Roland Barthes as our main theoretical basis for the mystification-demystification argument, for it is our view that his theory about myth as a self-justifying discourse is very proximal to what we believe to be Herrera Luque's vision about the role that patriotic or official history has played in Venezuela. We have also relied on the works of Linda Hutcheon and Hayden White to bring up the relationship between literature and history, especially regarding the narrative element in historiography, an essential element in what has been called the "new historical novel", a genre that presents new narrative approaches to history. Our work also presents several elements that show how Herrera Luque's work not only seeks continuity in a usually fragmented discourse, but also takes advantage of its literary condition to present some observations and analysis about Venezuelan collective identity. His attempt to narrate Venezuelan history from its beginnings until the first quarter of the 20th century has produced not only an irreverent look at the historical record, but also an effort to make sense out of a series of events whose disconnected condition has influenced the way that Venezuelans relate to their past. Furthermore, we conclude that perhaps the strongest message of Herrera Luque's narrative is that because of this distortion of the past, Venezuela is unable to have a clear understanding of its present.

La hipótesis que sostendré en este trabajo es que el relato testimonial es intertextual, que recupera el discurso factual y deconstruye los sentidos institucionalizados produciendo un nuevo conocimiento. Con esos presupuestos, afirmo que el sujeto se configura en la relación intersubjetiva a la que abre el relato a partir de la memoria materializada en la escritura. Estas ideas se apoyan sobre la lectura del sistema literario de la Argentina de fin de siglo, operación que me permite recuperar ciertos textos que considero pertenecientes a una clase discursiva a la que he identificado como "relato testimonial".

Poetics as Joyful Resistance: Exploring Juan Felipe Herrera’s Jabberwalking, engages in narrative teacher research to examine how the philosophies and practices of Juan Felipe Herrera’s hybrid text on poetry, composition, and creativity, titled Jabberwalking (2018), might extend the pedagogical principles and practices in teaching poetry to resist the norm of literary criticism as the purpose of teaching poetry. By examining three curricular experiences where the pedagogical principles of Jabberwalking guide my teaching practices, I document both students’ and my learning using narrative and spatial justice methodologies. The findings reveal that Jabberwalking may function as not only a pedagogical Thirdspace (Soja, 1996) that works against colonial norms around standardization and high-stakes assessment but may be a belief system about teaching literature and language. When I began this research, a problem that I encountered was the lack of scholarship in response to Jabberwalking. A survey of the literature in response to Herrera’s text, an English y Español retelling of Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky,” reveals that the principal source of criticism consists of reviews. This dissertation contributes to the field by being the first of its kind to consider his philosophies on writing as a pedagogical style guide as well as a tool to work against institutionalized norms around standardized writing instruction. Since the focus of this study was to examine the pedagogical principles and practices that invite in diverse learners and decolonize and expand the literacy practices most often used in writing/literature classrooms, I used narrative research to re-tell the stories of ten participants who reflect the diverse student and teacher population of New York City schools. Through Zoom interviews with a total of ten New York-based teachers from a broad range of personal and professional experiences, I examine Jabberwalking, a text that straddles the polarity of the literary borderland (Templeton, 2019) for its pedagogical implications. My purpose was to examine what happened when the pedagogical principles of Jabberwalking were implemented in three separate curricular experiences that were facilitated in 2019–2022: one site was an improvisational music-oriented workshop in response to Jabberwalking, a second site was a Zoom-based Jabberwalking teaching and learning practices workshop, and a third site was a workshop that incorporated a project-based version of Jabberwalking. Two to three hour-long Zoom retrospective interviews with the ten participants from each of the three workshops were conducted. Their writing or projects produced from the workshop-based writing prompts were then analyzed to consider how or if their work reflects the principles of Jabberwalking I intended to incorporate. I also reflected on my own pedagogical practices because of the interviews and analysis of student work from these three curricular experiences. I transcribed and coded an average of forty pages of interview data for each participant, for a total of over four hundred pages of interview transcription analysis. Each of my research questions were addressed in different ways, depending on the site. I found the following themes in the data for each site: a) Jabberwalking as text, b) Jabberwalking as pedagogical method, c) the detrimental impact of standardization and high-stakes assessment, and d) changes in pedagogy and performance standards since 2020. Through the lens of poetics and the theoretical underpinnings of nonsense (Templeton, 2019), and the candid, expansive stories of the participants, this study arrives at a definition in process that formulates a new understanding of pedagogical possibility utilizing Herrera’s methods. This research has important implications for teachers, students, and policymakers that help us understand how Jabberwalking can present learners of all abilities with new methods of composition to inspire critical, analytical, and restorative writing through a sense of “serious play” (Burgess, 2019).

Silenced for almost half a century, testimonies of those who lost the Spanish Civil War are now surfacing and being published. The origin of this dissertation was the chance discovery that Martín Herrera de Mendoza, a Spanish Civil War exile living in the United States, was truly a Catalonian anarchist named Antonio Vidal Arabí. This double identity was a cover for the political activist dedicated to the fight for change in the anarchist workers’ union CNT (National Confederation of Workers) and the FAI (Federation of Iberian Anarchists). He founded the FAI chapter in Santa Cruz de Tenerife and planned a failed assassination attempt on General Franco’s life in an effort to avoid the military takeover in 1936. This dissertation is the reconstruction of Antonio Vidal Arabí’s life narrative. It is based on the texts written during his seventeen-month stay as a refugee in Great Britain. Copies of his writings were left in a suitcase with a fellow anarchist who he instructed to have sent to his family upon his death. In 1989, “The English Suitcase” was delivered to his children in Barcelona. Based on his own account, this study follows his service as an intelligence agent for the Spanish Republic during the War. When it was over, he attempted to evacuate his family from France, to save them from the threat of the Nazi invasion and reunite with them in England or America. The analysis of the letters he wrote to his wife and children in France documents how he hid from Franco’s spies using his dual identity. In his letters, always signed as Martín Herrera de Mendoza, he invents a persona in order to help his family. The present study narrates his transformation into the persona he created and the events that brought about his translation into his “other.” Antonio Vidal Arabí’s bilinguism and biculturality is underlined as the main factors in his change into Martín Herrera de Mendoza. His was a voyage into exile documented by his own words; a story of survival and reinvention. / Includes bibliography. / Dissertation (Ph.D.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2017. / FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection