A comparative study of Bernardo Bertoluccis cinematic adaptation of Jorge Luis Borges short story, The Theme of the Traitor and the Hero and Federico Fellinis film based on Edgar Allan Poes Never bet the Devil Your Head, this thesis approaches such themes as space, subjectivity, narration, and the role of the viewer through the analytical framework of suture theory. In examining Bertoluccis construction of three particular spacesthe labyrinth, the monument, and the theaterin the film The Spiders Stratagem, I address how the active role imposed on Borges reader is transformed into cinematic subjectivity through Bertoluccis formal choices, considering the effects of failed suturing on the subjective interpretation and reception of the film. The second half of the study builds upon the notion of unsutured subjectivity proposed in the first chapter, and explores the shift from third- to first-person narration in Fellinis Toby Dammit. In addition to tracing each protagonists capacity for linguistic discourse, I suggest that in adapting the narrative structures that present the literary Toby and his transformation, Fellini gives us a protagonist whose fall from language demonstrates in his choice of the physical world over verbal abstraction, image over word, the process of adaptation itself.

SPANISH WRITING AND REBELLION IN PLÁCIDOS POETRY JACKIE VERNON WILLEY Thesis under the direction of Professor William Luis Gabriel de la Concepción Valdés popularly known as Plácido is considered one of the most influential and prolific poets of early nineteenth-century Cuba, yet his works continue to face marginalization from the literary canon. As a free mulatto, Plácido operated within intellectual circles dominated by white elites in an epoch in which Afro-Cubans faced growing repression by the Spanish colonial regime. Not surprisingly, his poetry exemplifies his precarious situation. With its ambiguities, complexities of meaning, and contradictory messages, the poets oeuvre defies singular categorization. His imitation of European forms, praise of aristocrats coupled with trenchant barbs against colonialism and slavery, and consistent identity fashioning underscore the liminal space occupied by a free poet of color attempting to navigate a racial caste system that employed both psychological and physical violence to maintain its power. This thesis places Plácidos poems within their sociohistorical context to uncover both their multiple subversions of dominant discourse and their tremendous contradictions. Frantz Fanon, Kelly Oliver, and Homi Bhabhas theoretical contributions toward colonialism, racial violence, and identity formation, as well as James Scotts political theory of hegemony and everyday resistance, underpin my analysis uncovering camouflaged meanings in the poets polysemic texts. Approved __________________ Date _____________ Approved __________________ Date _____________

SPANISH AND PORTUGUESE EL RETRATO DE ARTISTA EN HISPANOAMÉRICA: HISTORIA DE UN GÉNERO A TRAVÉS DE LAS NOVELAS DE ROBERTO BOLAÑO ALBERTO DEL POZO MARTÍNEZ Dissertation under the direction of Professor Andrés Zamora This project is a study of the main novels written by the Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño (1953-2003). It explores Bolaños obsession with creating fictional artists in his works, and how this obsession should be understood as the culmination of a literary tradition in Spanish America: the tradition of the portrait of the artist. My work explores the polemic between literature and philology/literary criticism with regard to this specific genre. It traces the presence of the portrait throughout the history of Spanish American Literature, from Daríos Los raros to Moterrosos Lo demás es silencio. Finally, it analizes in detail the different ways in which Bolaño used the portrait of the artist in five of his novels (La literatura nazi en América, Estrella distante, Nocturno de Chile, Los detectives salvajes and 2666). My conclusion is that this genre functions for the purpose of generating a powerful critique of the role of literature today.

In this dissertation, I analyze literary texts deemed as obscene and the inquisitorial documentation against them in transatlantic Spain during the early modern period, in order to argue that obscenity and censorship are two sides of the same coin. Contrary to popular belief, obscenity does not always challenge hegemony. Rather, it often reinforces repression and intolerance. Conversely, censorship reproduces the same obscenity that it condemns by publicizing it and mirroring the sexual excitement of obscene discourse. By examining works written by Luis de Góngora, Francisco de Quevedo, Nicolás Fernández de Moratín, Félix María de Samaniego, Leandro Fernández de Moratín, Tomás de Iriarte, Juan Meléndez Valdés, as well as anonymous texts and folksongs such as Chuchumbé and Jarabe gatuno, I identify how femaleness, sexual deviance, blackness, and social class have played a major role in the qualification of the obscene. Drawing from Jacques Rancières approach to the collusion between aesthetics and politics, I juxtapose the poetics and politics of obscene texts with the poetics and politics of censorial documents with the aim of showing how these two seemingly opposite discourses both intersect and work against each other. In doing so, this project contributes to studies on transatlantic Spain by addressing the ambivalent and complementary relationship between discipline and deviance, and, on a wider scale, to current feminist debates on the censorship of obscenity and on freedom of speech.

Mario Vargas Llosas socio-political concerns are woven into the fabric of his creative narratives. Despite an impressive corpus of criticism on the recent Nobel Prize laureates writings, scholarship has not fully recognized the import of his evolving concept of literature. My approach is unique in that it evaluates the Peruvians novels, essays, and life history through his definition of literature and its role in society. Through an analysis of Vargas Llosas literary theories, I contend that his earliest descriptions of literature as revolution have been replaced by more recent commentaries on writing as a secondary course of action toward socio-political reform. I also argue that the closer Vargas Llosa comes to politics in his personal life, the more his literature diverts from his former notions of its function in society. My dissertation, therefore, concludes that a series of literary and political disillusionments resulted in a significant transition in Vargas Llosas concept of literature from its original revolutionary character in the 1960s to a more subdued role at present as the guardian of cultural memory.

This dissertation contextualizes the formal innovations and social critique of twentieth-century Spanish avant-garde theater by reconstructing two important elements of the nineteenth-century cultural landscape from which they emerged: the rise of modern print culture and the appearance of a vibrant commercial theater industry. The first chapter examines theoretical concepts from cultural studies and media studies to consider how evolving reading and viewing practices in Spain engendered new forms of social and cultural engagement with modernity. Chapter two explores how newspapers and commercial theater works adopted a fragmentary aesthetic that embodied the emerging realities of the modern, industrialized city and performed new modes of social interaction and emerging narratives of Spanish nationalism. The third chapter takes the illustrious career of Carlos Arniches as a case study of the interconnections between the commercial and artistic theater, arguing that his later work utilizes the stereotypes and facile comicity of the commercial theater as the basis for a more thoughtful critique of the dehumanizing tendencies of modern society. The fourth chapter considers Ramón del Valle-Incláns aggressive, parodic reworking of popular dramatic forms in his idiosyncratic esperpento and contends that his distorted, grotesque representation of contemporary Spain emerges from a broader denunciation of the manipulative powers of contemporary mass media. This study concludes with a reflection on directions that future studies of the relationships between mass media, textual practices, performing arts, and popular entertainment might take through a brief consideration of the lasting legacy of the nineteenth-century commercial stage in cinema and socially-engaged theater in Spain through the 1970s. In the final analysis, media are a conduit of human interaction and arise to meet the social needs of a population in a given historical moment. By bringing our examinations of drama into contact with the broader contours of modern media culture, we see how the performing arts fit within a much larger cultural process.

In 1909, Vicente Blasco Ibáñez (1867-1928), a Spanish journalist, radical politician and acclaimed realist and naturalist writer, made a trip to Argentina that would transform him into an internationalist and separate him from the inwardly nationalistic focus of movements such as the Generación del 98 and Novecentismo. His Argentine work, the novels Los argonautas (1913-1914) and La tierra de todos (1922) as well as some speeches, was met by myopic, ethnocentric criticism in Spain exacerbated later by Francos censorship. My project includes an original survey of this poorly-understood period and its foundation in modern nationalism, and establishes it as the ideological basis of all of his subsequent writing. Moreover, it presents a radical re-definition of his author as a global figure and demonstrates that he is one of the most international, visionary, iconoclastic, and modern writers of his time. In Argentina, Blasco joined the most important movements of the so-called Literature of the Disaster (The Generation of 98, Regenerationism, and Hispanoamericanism) in promoting Spain as a country determined to overcome its leyenda negra (the Black Legend). However, in the face of the concentration of these movements on el dolor de España (Spains grief), he added an aspect of internationalism to these ideas and promoted an optimistic nationalism of the masses. Furthermore, Blasco exploited, more than any of his contemporaries, the growing animosity among the Latin American ruling class against British and North American materialism and utilitarism in favor of Spains cultural prestige. He understood as no other of his generation that his contribution toward the restoration of the nation would involve a campaign for a Spanish-Creole alliance that would bring about a shared identity that reached beyond national borders. In fact this study reveals for the first time the profound the ways Blascos Argentine work overlaps with that of Argentinas Generation of the Century writers and champions of the Creole cause particularly Manuel Gálvez and Ricardo Rojas. In addition, it demonstrates that Blasco Ibáñezs affinities with the Creole cause and its lucrative consequences are what initiated the deeply-entrenched and widely-perpetuated misinterpretation of his post-1909 writing.

This dissertation explores both the Hispanic and Anglo-American modernist traditions from the common standpoint of the palimpsest. Central to the diverse body of modernist writings is the appropriation of French symbolism, the rewriting of tradition, and the adaptation of these factors as a space for identity construction. My project involves a comparative study of the trope of the palimpsest in the poetics of R. Darío (1867-1916), T. S. Eliot (1888-1965), P. Gimferrer (b. 1945), and L. A. de Villena (b. 1951), and examines how these poets engage in a modernist and neo-modernist rewriting of a vast and universal literary heritage. By adapting the symbolist model of the revalidation of tradition, these poets articulate strong critiques of national and international culture during the tumultuous turn-of-the-century period and, later, during the 1970s in Francoist Spain. They create a kind of literature and a type of intellectual that emerges from the literary and cultural conformism that defines the artistic and social movements that surround them, reflecting on modernist modes of aesthetic production that defy the limitations of post-romanticism and socio-realistic poetry. In my dissertation, I assert that the articulation of (neo)modernist poetics of the appropriation of tradition and symbolism is central to the development of a culture of aesthetic alternative and its resistance against exhausted modes of artistic representation. By reading a variety of poetic texts and essays, Modernist Palimpsests contributes to an understanding of the role played by overwriting and identity construction in the formation of global modernisms multidisciplinary landscape.

Silvina Ocampo belonged to a prestigious intellectual group in Argentina that had its heyday in the 1930s with the foundation of Sur, the most important intellectual magazine in Latin America until the 1950s. The writers surrounding Silvina Ocampo achieved more fame and received more critical attention than she did; for this reason her work has not been given the importance it deserves. It is only in the last twenty years that the Ocampos literary production has begun to be studied and valued both inside and outside of Argentina. Various studies have mentioned the interest that Silvina Ocampo had in painting and music, but she also felt a great enthusiasm for theatre. This passion, which has essentially been overlooked, had an impact on the writer, influencing the way she conceived her stories. In many of her stories, there are plenty of theatrical elements, such as masks, costumes, mirrors, and doubles, where it is possible to observe the construction of scenarios. Theatricality becomes a way for Ocampo to envision her short stories, their structure, and their development. In my dissertation I show that form and function come together in her work and that theatricality serves as a literary device for displaying the different conflicts within Argentina, a nation riven by political ideologies and social changes that have dominated the public sphere during the Peronist period, the military dictatorships, and throughout the difficult return to democracy.

This thesis studies the state of current border politics as it can be read through three objects of representation. These correspond to the three chapters. The first deals with a map, read as a text that represents death, made by the Humane Borders organization. The second treats a literary text (2666 by Roberto Bolaño) that also represents death and the border landscape and announces a failure of representation when treating a contemporary horror. The third chapter treats a technological tool thought of as electronic disturbance, designed to help migrants navigate the arduous terrain while crossing to the U.S. On one hand this work is concerned with death at the border as an irreversible fact and also as a matter of representation. Death at the border has been used as a trope to represent migrants and their afflictions (regarded many times as a consequence of ignorance, wildness or uncivilization). It has also been used as part of a political agenda: constructing migrants' illegality and death as a consequence for misconduct. On the other hand, this thesis is concerned with the trope of the desert as the space and a landscape that today is not dissociable from the meanings of death. The analysis takes a discursive angle, but also takes the desert as a material environment, which constitutes a tangible reference in which the practices of sovereignty are carried out. It also considers death as a real, embodied fact. This landscape of death has been marked by the intensification of border control as well as the intensification of humanitarian activism. Indeed, the desert is a site that highlights the precariousness of what is understood to be human life. "The human" moves in and out of being through the interaction of physical political and social elements. This thesis, thus, is concerned with the material and the discursive dimensions that shape the Sonoran Desert as the border between states, between human and non-human matter and as a bordering practice regarding the governance of a population.