Thesis (M.A.) -- Central Connecticut State University, 1998. / Thesis advisor: Dr. Lilián Uribe. "...in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Spanish." Includes bibliographical references (leaves 132-138).

Thesis--Université Paris III. / Includes bibliographical references and index.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Indiana University, Dept. of Theatre and Drama., 2009. / Title from PDF t.p. (viewed on Jul 14, 2010). Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 70-12, Section: A, page: 4529. Adviser: Rakesh H. Solomon.

<p> This dissertation studies how the melodramatic mode shapes the approach to political violence in six novels: <i>Libro de Manuel,</i> by Julio Cort&aacute;zar, <i>El beso de la mujer ara&ntilde;a,</i> by Manuel Puig; <i>Historia de Mayta,</i> by Mario Vargas Llosa; <i> Estrella distante,</i> by Roberto Bola&ntilde;o; La hora azul, by Alonso Cueto; and <i>La vida doble, </i>by Arturo Fontaine. Beyond the realm of sentimental formulaic melodrama, I define this term as the interpretation of events after subjective emotions. By studying these novels, I propose that the melodramatic imagination has become the most employed set of tropes for the interpretation of public and private interactions in contemporary fiction. My analysis exposes how literary writing addresses commercial, political, and artistic aspirations through a combined use of strategies such as moral polarization, pathos, emotional interpretation, scenic emplotment, and sensationalism. </p><p> Chapter One analyses the connections between political violence and melodrama in Latin American literatures and cultures. Chapter Two is a study of Cort&aacute;zar&rsquo;s <i> Libro de Manuel,</i> a novel which fictionalizes what I call melodrama of the revolutionary, an emotional, uncritical identification with leftist urban subcultures. Chapter Three studies Puig&rsquo;s <i>El beso de la mujer ara&ntilde;a</i> to illustrate the existence of reactionary practices in progressivist and queer sectors, limiting their capacity to generate political change. Chapter Four is an analysis of Vargas Llosa&rsquo;s Historia de Mayta, a dystopian diatribe against leftist politicians in which a melodramatic understanding of experience appears in both dominant and marginal sectors. Chapter Five studies Bola&ntilde;o&rsquo;s <i>Estrella distante,</i> a novel in which the search for a neo-avantgardist artist obsessed with the use of corpses as material allows the dramatization of melodrama in artistic sectors, leading to the normalization of totalitarianism. Chapter Six is a reading of Cueto&rsquo;s <i>La hora azul,</i> a novel in which national reconciliation becomes a middle-high class subjective conflict, interpreting historical experience in terms originated in audiovisual melodrama. Chapter Seven analyzes Fontaine&rsquo;s <i>La vida doble,</i> in which the voice of a former revolutionary and intelligence agent reinforces the idea that leftist convictions are futile, normalizing emotions that normalize material and symbolic inequity. Finally, the last section summarizes this work&rsquo;s contributions.</p><p>

<p> This thesis explores the possible creation of a new categorization of American Literature as presented in the Andean novel <i>El pez de oro: Retablos del Laykhakuy</i> (1957) by Gamaliel Churata. In <i>El pez de oro</i>, Gamaliel Churata presents a strategy for the recuperation of native Andean cultural agency that enables the Andean subject to reclaim traces of their ancestral past under more verisimilar and verifiable terms. Churata argues that through a recuperation of native language and its infusion into the body of the major colonial language, Spanish, the Andean subject is equipped with a new culture producing tool that enables the recuperation of language, agency, history, and, ultimately, representation and inclusion within cultural and political institutional frameworks. By introducing his own function of bilingualism, vernacular language, and mythological infusions into the body of colonial letters, Gamaliel Churata is able to destabilize and disrupt colonial historical and textual authority to the point where the invented concept of America and the colonial product of American identity can be re-examined. Through this examination emerges a new option for the categorization of American identity as an aesthetic construct. Within this new categorization of aesthetic American identity, the Andean subject can begin his own process of self-identification through his native language toward the production of a future Andean American subject.</p><p>

This dissertation is a study on the role of race mixing in the formation of national identity in Mexico. It analyzes the cultural and political phenomenon of mestizofilia in 1920s Mexico, examining the national and international ideological crosscurrents that shaped it. This first chapter uses post-colonial and anthropological paradigms to explore the concept of the Other as a Western construct that objectifies the primitive, and rationalizes colonialism. Chapter two of the dissertation examines the history of thought on race mixing in Mexico, from the Conquest to the Revolution of 1910. The study looks at the effects of Western models for assimilation of the ethnic Other in New Spain and Mexico, as well as examines how negative European stereotypes of the primitive influenced Latin Americans' collective self-perception. Chapter three of the dissertation studies the ideological polemic of early 20th century between science and culture, and how it affected notions of the primitive as related to the post-revolutionary project of national construction. This chapter highlights the thought of three writers whose ideas express the socio-political and aesthetic sensibilities of the era: Manuel Gamio, premier Mexican anthropologist during the Revolutionary period; José Vasconcelos, writer/philosopher and Minister of Education under Obregón; and D. H. Lawrence, British travel writer and novelist who resided in Mexico during the mid-1920s. For the two Mexican writers, assimilating the primitive was part of their country's project of national construction. Both sought to create a sense of national unity around the symbolic figure of the Mestizo. The indigenous Other must become a part of the mixed-race body politic if Mexico was to progress. D. H. Lawrence was a vitalist thinker and primitivist artist who journeyed to the New World in order to write his novel, The Plumed Serpent (1926), about the necessity of assimilating a primitive “blood consciousness” into the modern experience. For the European writer, reintegration of primitive tendencies was part of an aesthetic awareness and a personal endeavor that modern man must undergo in order to save Western civilization, but he denied that mestizaje could solve the problem of the lack of a shared collective consciousness in Mexico.

This dissertation deals with part of Juan de Velasco's (Riobamaba 1727-Faenza 1792) historiographical work. While exiled in Italy he wrote the History of the Kingdom of Quito in Meridional America (1789). With this work he engages in the famous polemics known as the “Dispute of the New World” as other ex-jesuits such as Clavijero or Molina had done before him. Using an interdisciplinary approach, I look at the way Velasco articulated his historiographical discourse in the first part of his History, the Natural History, in order to see how it already reflects a strong regionalist consciousness. In this sense, Velasco's work is particularly relevant since it is the first written history of what we today know as Ecuador. Conscious of this fact, the author develops a historiographical project that seeks to define a “Quitean” historical and cultural identity, different from Spain as well as from other Spanish American regions. It also seeks to make the Quitean creole community conscious of this identity. The first chapter describes the development of the Jesuit Company within the Spanish American historical and political context, with special attention to the second half of the 18th century. It also describes the situation of the creole community during that same period as well as the “Dispute of the New World.” The second chapter situates the History of the Kingdom of Quito within the whole of Velasco's work examining the criticism it originated, mainly in Ecuador. The chapters that follow analyze in detail the different parts of the Natural History to show how Velasco's patriotic feelings reveal themselves throughout in this part of his work: in the regional specificity of his History, in the body of autoctonous tradition and folklore recorded in this part, in its defense of the “Quitean” native man and “patria,” in the intolerance towards the attempts to discursively appropriate “Quitean” territory (Father Gilij), and in its effort to show the actual existence of a historical written record for the “Kingdom of Quito” through the elaboration of a “Catalogue of Writers who Wrote about Peru and Quito.”

No description available.

No description available.

This study seeks to understand the ways in which colonial settlements, located within the Municipality of Gurupá, in the Lower Amazon Basin in Brazil, played a key role in the formation of ribeirinho culture. The term ribeirinho, meaning âriverbank dweller,â is a designation that is widely used throughout the Brazilian Amazon to identify the descendants of mixed Portuguese, African and indigenous heritage who today predominate the Lower Amazon Basin landscape. In this thesis, I design arguments for potential avenues of archaeological research at sites such as forts, settler villages, and missions, in order to understand how unequal power relations within the colonial encounter would have taken shape through practice, and would have subsequently been inscribed in both objects and on the cultural landscape. By utilizing this framework, archaeological correlates have the potential to reveal the complex cultural and ethnic transformations experienced by colonial inhabitants, thus defying overarching and essentializing generalizations commonly found in cultural change and continuity dichotomies. Through the exploration of the material culture found in the archaeological record, investigations into historical source material, and direct involvement of community members, future results may help to shed light on the formation of a proto-Amazonian society made up of different groups experiencing varying forms of cultural change and/or continuity, simultaneously, both across and within sites.