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In 1960, Dominican Republican dictator Rafael Trujillo ordered the murders of the Mirabal sisters. He ordered the killing of Patria, Minerva, and Maria Teresa Mirabal because of their intellectual efforts to topple the Trujillo regime. Following their murders, Trujillo was assassinated, and this brought forth commemorative efforts seeking to recognize the sisters' rebellious acts. Over time, the representation of the Mirabal sisters became racialized and gendered. Drawing on various mediums including illustrations, films and poetry, this thesis examines the representation of the Mirabal sisters through the construction of race and gender in the Dominican Republic. It also analyzes how the Dominican feminists used the representation of the Mirabal sisters to advocate for gender equality, including awareness and prevention of gender-based violence. The feminist movement helped bring global recognition for the sisters.

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My dissertation consists of a critical, annotated and translated edition, in English, of the fin-de-siècle novel, De sobremesa (1896), a key work of Modernista prose in Spanish America by Colombian writer José Asunción Silva. The edition features the translation, endnotes, an interdisciplinary introductory study and bibliography. After an introduction of the writer, I consider the work's form as a hybrid travelogue, memoir and manifesto, or ars poetica in prose, and its relationship to Decadence in form and content. I invoke examples of the confessional genre and memoirs from the day, and support suggestions that the novel anticipates later novels of dislocation and fragmentation. I contextualize the work as a product of the epoch's nascent ideas of psychotherapy, psychopathology and illness, and thus duly examine the presence and function of “pseudo-science” and the cult of scientific authority in the work. Accordingly, the remnant Catholic apparatus the hero adheres to is considered against his amorality. I explain this value system as partially a product of Paris, a space that is invented/discovered in the Latin American imaginary. I then treat the body in the novel, in dialogue with critics who note the novel's “medical gaze.” In this connection I study the characterization of science, normalcy, power, and subversive erotics. Appropriately I characterize the professionalization of medicine at the time and the so-called “therapeutic ethos” counterpoised to the neurotic aesthetics then in vogue. Consequently I explore the tropes of illness in the novel, specifically tuberculosis, nerves and madness. Subsequently I examine consumer psychology, and insert the hero's neo-feudal values in that era's material culture. Finally I discuss the translation process in theory and praxis, and in my translation proper provide notes to allusions and intertexts.

The epic poem has served as a literary, cultural, and historical guide for literature students since at least the time of Homer. The richness and density of reference to sources outside the poem is one of hallmarks of the epic form, in which the poet serves as a guide, who leads the student to a more profound state of reflection on the nature of the human condition. This guide, however, is no mere tour guide, but extracts a rather demanding price of the traveler who wishes to cross the terrain of the epic. Each verse may appear to the uninitiated traveler as an insoluble riddle. Diego de Hojeda's La Cristiada, while among the best epic poems written in Spanish, suffers from relative obscurity because of the limited number of editions, and the demanding density of the verse. The present dissertation fulfills a double purpose: it serves as a guide to the student, to explore the richness of La Cristiada, by providing a student edition of the poem, and in the same spirit, it endeavors to make a contribution to the revival of the epic poem in general. The present edition has several parts. We start with an introductory study to provide a solid foundation to understand in context Hojeda's life, times and mission. This is followed by the complete original transcription of the poem from the archaic 16th century spelling into readable modern Spanish. Also, in the tradition of Chapman's Homer, context side notes are provided throughout as a further guide to the student. Each of the twelve books of the poem ends with a series of notes, to document every name and place reference in the poem, as well as all historical, mythological and literary references. Finally, in the interest of completeness we have included several documents related to the first edition of La Cristiada, and the laudatory works that accompanied the poem when it was originally published in 1611.

The first attempts to subvert the erotic representation in Puerto Rican literature can be found in literary works produced in the middle of the twentieth century. These representations were at first timid, and then gradually they became more explicit in the seventies, but it was not until the eighties and nineties that erotic visions became more common. The purpose of this research is to analyze the erotic representation in the works of Mayra Santos Febres, especially in El cuerpo correcto . The intention is to bring forward a topic that ironically has had both a persistent presence and a relegated position in Puerto Rican literary tradition. By taking into account Puerto Rican Erotic Literature from the end of the nineteen century to the present, predominantly women's short stories, I attempt to trace the erotic patterns that are subveredt in Santos Febres' short stories. I also study the correlation between Santo Febres' fictional and nonfictional works to establish if it is possible to talk of an erotic poetics in her works. My final objective is to show how the writing of this contemporary author shifts the erotic tradition in Puerto Rican literature. Santos Febres achieves this objective when, in El cuerpo correcto , she includes some sexual practices that are considered as paraphilias or perversions and places emphasis on their human part. This approach to perversions makes this book unique in Puerto Rican Literature.

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This project will focus on four Latin American writers' autobiographies: Autobiography, by Alberto Gerchunoff; A cross and a Star. Memories of a Jewish Girl in Chile, by Marjorie Agosín; Memories, by Adolfo Bioy Casares; and Stories from Happy Times, by Osvaldo Soriano. The selection of these texts was based upon the underlying themes that they have in common. Three of them are texts written from the outskirts of the social fabric: Alberto Gerchunoff is a Jewish immigrant in Argentina at the turn of the century, struggling to find a place in which to create his own roots. Marjorie Agosín, daughter of European immigrants in Chile fleeing Russian pogroms first and Nazism later, and an immigrant herself to the United States, writes about the difficulties of finding roots in the Latin America she loves so much. Osvaldo Soriano, a native of Argentina, recreates his childhood by stressing the significance of belonging to a lower middle class family involved in the political and social struggles of the 40's and early 50's in his country. Finally, Adolfo Bioy Casares, also Argentine born, is the only one writing from the center: he belongs to one of the very few old, affluent landowner families in the Province of Buenos Aires, and represents the feelings and the political skepticism that characterize the members of his class. This study will attempt to explore the purposes that these writers set for themselves in the creation of their texts. My thesis is that autobiographies are a particular case of discourse in which the writer's feelings of belonging to a group, be it ethnic, national, ideological, gender or class related, set the stage for the elaboration of autobiographical texts. The personal story embodies others, and politics, history, and ideology come together and justify the very existence of writing itself. The personal becomes a literary strategy utilized to render the ideological background visible and to assure the text's impact on the reader. This study will show that autobiography as a genre questions the assumption by which there is a clear-cut difference between reality as opposed to fiction.