Informe de Seminario para optar al grado de Licenciado en Lengua y Literatura Hispánica mención Literatura. / En este análisis, partiendo de la hipótesis de que los géneros son culturales, es decir, son construidos por los seres humanos a lo largo de su evolución social, pretendo explorar las identidades de un personaje en especial, a saber, Cobra, que yendo del travestimiento a la transexualidad, hará un viaje sin fin en búsqueda de una identidad que siempre se fuga. De este modo, demostraré cómo se subvierten todos los cánones establecidos sobre los géneros y cómo también la obra se articula considerando a éstos como constructos culturales.

This dissertation analyzes the theory and practice of the Cuban postmodern writer Severo Sarduy (1937-1993) from his early adult years in Cuba to his exile period in Paris, France, where he lived until his death. By studying his narrative through the light of his theoretical essays, this paper demonstrates that the author created his own type of reading model –from and for Sarduy. His literary work is influenced by three major elements: (post)structuralism, psychoanalysis, and Buddhism, which combined form what Sarduy himself called the Neobarroque style. The Sarduyan writing is a transgressive exercise expressed through his concept of simulación. This style breaks with the traditional art concept of mimesis (the representation of reality in the western world), and therefore with the correspondence between the signifier and the signified. Sarduy does not intend to represent reality but to go beyond it, achieving, by his technique of signifying exhaustion, to represent absence itself. The Neobarroque of Severo Sarduy is an aesthetic of the empty signifier based on the reckless expenditure, and ultimately exhaustion, of the artifices of language that precipitates in a signifier chain towards the infinite. His language does not transmit a message but it signifies itself, that is, a means without an end. Paradoxically, this signifier chain produces an excess of metaphors beyond the material limits of language and its support, the page. The space beyond language is the hipertelic technique inherited by Sarduy from his literary master, José Lezama Lima. This is also the empty space of no signification or nonsense in which occurs the depersonalization of the speaking subject; in Buddhist terminology this becomes the dissolution of the ego. The Sarduyan language is determined by a Lacanian psychoanalytic erotic drive (pulsion) known as the Barroquean desire, a death drive which directly relates to the exile condition of the author. But the genesis of this desire lies in a primordial desire of encounter with his origin: mother, maternal language, paradise, God. That is the reason why Sarduy not only poses an aesthetic question but also an ontological one. This other dimension of the Sarduyan writing is based on a liberating drive that permeates all his work –an ontological liberation expressed through language. The empty space created in the text provides the subject with the possibility of fusion with the all. Ultimately, Sarduy strives for a language that goes beyond the symbolic limits towards a place of constant dissolution, evanesce, and death –horror vacui.

This dissertation discusses the implied reader in the EnCuento series illustrated childrens stories. All the stories are written by well-known Hispanic authors. This work elucidates historical, cultural, and semiotic gaps in the reading process. It explores the ways in which textual elements- such as style, focalization, and manipulation of readers expectations - affect the implied readers ability to produce or extract meaning. Our study will add to knowledge of the function of the implied reader in childrens texts. This study is divided into four chapters, each focusing on the implied reader. Chapter 1 provides an introduction to the series discussing three books that are easy to understand, with simple vocabulary, chronological plots, and strong protagonists. Chapter 2 explores irony in two horror stories; Chapter 3 discusses books that promote a particular ideology. Finally, Chapter 4 explores books with protagonists who are outsiders. The books within each chapter have enough in common in terms of decodability that they seem to pursue the same kind of implied reader. Each chapter illustrates the way that style, point of view, manipulation of readers expectations, and telltale gaps affect the implied readers ability to make meaning. Within the series, each contributing author creates a system through which the reader can participate in the story. The authors intent is to communicate meaning to the implied reader. In sum, interpreting texts is communication between author and reader. In all of the EnCuento texts, authors employ response- inviting structures, making them interpretable on many levels. This study further analyzes EnCuento stories the better to decide if their primary purpose is didactic. Because of the political content of texts written for adults- as in the case of the stories written by Benedetti, Paz, and Valenzuela - I expected them to communicate a clear political message to their child readers. The thesis also inquires into whether books are, in fact written for children and children exclusively. Because the EnCuento authors are accomplished writers of adult literature, this study analyzes the degree to which the authors communicate specifically with a child audience. Finally, the dissertation analyzes the illustrations in several of the texts and finds that book illustrations are essential to making connections with the reader. It also explores cultural references to decide if they are specific to Latin America.

This thesis project explores the connection between Cuban identity and the twentieth-century Neobaroque. The paper approaches the Neobaroque as a concept that reoriginates or "refracts" culture, implying a relationship between Baroque forms and post-colonial Latin America that creates a transformation of cultural expression. Furthermore, the Neobaroque is seen relating to questions of cultural identity, post-colonialism, transculturation, mestizaje, and Latin American modernity. The Neobaroque's relevancy with Cuba is stipulated in twentieth-century writings of three Cuban authors known as the Cuban triumvirate: José Lezama Lima, Alejo Carpentier, and Severo Sarduy. Similar themes of these writers concerning the Neobaroque's connection with the urban environment of Havana as well as connections to José Martí's writing Nuestra América are highlighted as key components connecting the Neobaroque with Cuban culture. / Graduate / 0336 / 0626 / scruiksh@uvic.ca