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This doctoral dissertation examines the intersection between body and nation in the context of Spanish American naturalist short stories from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The many forms of naturalism are useful for exploring national and societal concerns, yet most existing scholarship focuses exclusively on the naturalist novel. By combining the theories of Michel Foucault, Benedict Anderson, and Cesare Lombroso, among others, this dissertation considers the treatment of characters' bodies in their historical contexts and the larger national concerns they portray. Collections by three authors from the Southern Cone are studied: Sub terra, Baldomero Lillo (Chile, 1904); Cuentos de la Pampa, Manuel Ugarte (Argentina, 1903); and Campo, Javier de Viana (Uruguay, 1896). The prologue introduces the theoretical framework that supports the analyses in subsequent chapters and describes the cultural context of the literary movement. It argues that the short story is a particularly useful tool for exploring this topic because, due to its brevity, characters' bodies must often relay vital information. Chapter one analyzes Sub terra and the Chilean miners it presents, studying its connection to the Chilean national body's exploitation at the hands of foreign capitalists who are solely interested in extracting its wealth of natural resources. Chapter two moves to Argentina and examines Cuentos de la Pampa, exploring those characters who reside in limbo between past and present, civilization and barbarism. Chapter three is dedicated to the study of Campo and the ways in which Javier de Viana uses the degraded gaucho body to represent the societal decay plaguing the Uruguayan countryside. For all of these authors, naturalist short stories prove an effective means of exploring national concerns. Within the genre of short fiction, every word is of vital importance and, thus, the body frequently serves as a vessel to communicate ideas such as moral and physical decay, weakness, abuse, and excess. Characters' bodies are a microcosm of the national body as a whole, whose maladies these three authors explore in a variety of ways. / Spanish

Really, Daddy is a collection of twelve stories that explore the dynamics of racial, intra-racial, gender, and religious power clashes. In narratives that range from realistic to postmodern, characters move through conflicts on a path to self-realization. Ostensibly the responsible ones, the protagonists’ identities are elucidated in the context of the burdens that they carry. At the center of this collection are women and fathers in crisis, as they attempt to save their families or to nourish their own spirits. Whether the character is an African-American Muslim mother shocked into indecision when the Qur’an doesn’t lead her family in its crisis, or an enslaved woman torturing other slaves out of anger over losing her female love, fabulist techniques are combined with realism to unfold the haunting and humorous tales of the imposition of family responsibilities on the lives of the most vulnerable. Here, the reader will find the lapsed Catholic and her wife seeking help from African religion devotees who don’t approve of lesbian relationships, the maid who sacrifices her daughter to a lecherous boss so the rest of her family can eat, and the gay Muslim brother and his lesbian sister in conflict over what to do with his baby. Reflecting the contemporary world in which people live in overlapping marginal spaces of society, these are the stories of America’s forgotten subcultures. / Master of Fine Arts

Changing Lines is a collection of five short stories that focus on pairings of opposites. In the title story, a boy in split custody chooses whether to live with his fundamentalist Christian father or his occult mother. In "Diminishing Returns," a gifted girl is paired with an incompetent girl for a badminton tournament in her high school gym class. In "Invisible Orbits," a talented guitarist in poverty joins the band of a wealthy and well-connected singer. In "Unable to Die," an older therapist confronts her past as she consoles a grieving student facing his uncertain future. The collection closes on "The Color in Your Cheeks," the story of a successful game developer who finds out his younger brother has run away from home to make adult videos with their childhood next-door neighbor. The stories all center on the tension and change liable to occur when heavily contrasting individuals are forced to interact, portraying how these worldviews are formed with an aim at psychological and sociological nuance. While each story is told in a traditional linear narrative style, the collection is varied in its use of point of view and vantage point. Questioning truisms serves as the main driving force of the collection, while the themes of how neuroses are formed in childhood, spirituality, projection of one's own weakness onto others, coping mechanisms, the psychological effects of demographical status, and internalized contempt are all explored in varying degrees.

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Grow Up is a collection of five short stories that explore the parentification of bourgeois youth and the concerns of growing up in a postmodern, performative culture. The characters are faced with circular situations where the causality of their feelings and actions are often obscured or scattered. Special attention is given to identity through emotion and perception where youth react against the marginalization, homogenization, or the commoditization of their experience. The stories also attempt to describe the condition of neglected youth in social situations and environments that are polarized, paradoxical, and fractured because of isolation among their many parts. The fictional characters and their environment raise the question as to whether their environment is anachronistic in its attitudes and approaches to youth and their relations, or whether youth today is becoming anachronistic in itself.

This dissertation seo out to investigate if use of visually symbolic representations in addition to the more traditional written methods of the key elements 9theme, setting, characterisation) of a short story would support South African ESL learners to grow in their interpretation and appreciation and appreciation of English literary texts. The assertion was that using a multimodal (verbal-visual) transmediated interpretation of the key elements (theme, setting, characterisation)of a short story might afford ESL learners a "deeper reading" (inferential comprehension and appreciation) of a literary text, and that the learners could also be supported to grow in their interpretation and appreciation of English literature. The research findings of the literary analysis project revealed that ESL learners with a "satisfactory" English proficiency can be supported by using transmediation to engage them in rich interpretations of literary genres to realise their interpretations linguistically in written academic eesays. / English Studies / M. A.