This dissertation examines some canonical Central American autobiographical works of the 20th Century. The authors studied include Rubén Darío, Rafael Arévalo Martínez, Froylán Turcios, José Coronel Urtecho, César Brañas, Eunice Odio, Roque Dalton, Miguel Mármol and Rigoberta Menchú. The dissertation maintains that autobiographical writing always interpellates the Others story and that this interpellation is based in the need to incorporate into modern discourse the social sectors considered pre-modern. Indigenous people, peasants, women, artisans and workers, oral or illiterate cultures, represent a zone of autobiographical fear and desire. These combined impulses are connected to some cultural peculiarities of the Central American region: mainly, the way in which the rhetoric and practice of Liberalism is adapted by the regional elites from the end of 19th Century onward.
After a general overview offered in Chapter 1, this dissertation is divided in three parts that correspond to three different cultural epochsModernismo (Chapters 2, 3, 4), Vanguardia (Chapters 5 and 6), and Postvanguardia y testimonio (Chapters 7 y 8). In Modernista autobiography the class-racial-ethnic Other appears as something that haunts the traditional, representing both an object of fear and a limit to a Eurocentric concept of modernity. In contrast, the Vanguardista autobiography emphasized its desire of the Other. This general desires for incorporate the (national) Other is linked to the foundational /nationalist emphasis that the avant-garde showed in Central America. However, Liberalism never incorporated fully the utopian social models of the Vanguardistas. Due to the crisis of both the Liberal rhetoric and Vanguardista cultural projects, during the 1960s and 1980s the aesthetic-ideological project of the Vanguardia suffered a radicalization. One of the main outcomes was the popularization of testimonio, which has become the most analyzed form of Central American autobiographical writing today. In testimonio the Other and his/her cultural model (basically, orality) and the Gemeinschaft of rural community become embodied as a counter-hegemonic voice that seeks to interpellate the cultural models of the lettered city and modernity from a subaltern location.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:PITT/oai:PITTETD:etd-08252005-110243 |
| Date | 30 March 2006 |
| Creators | Delgado Aburto, Leonel |
| Contributors | Gerald Martin, John Soluri, Joshua Lund, John Beverley |
| Publisher | University of Pittsburgh |
| Source Sets | University of Pittsburgh |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | http://etd.library.pitt.edu/ETD/available/etd-08252005-110243/ |
| Rights | unrestricted, I hereby certify that, if appropriate, I have obtained and attached hereto a written permission statement from the owner(s) of each third party copyrighted matter to be included in my thesis, dissertation, or project report, allowing distribution as specified below. I certify that the version I submitted is the same as that approved by my advisory committee. I hereby grant to University of Pittsburgh or its agents the non-exclusive license to archive and make accessible, under the conditions specified below, my thesis, dissertation, or project report in whole or in part in all forms of media, now or hereafter known. I retain all other ownership rights to the copyright of the thesis, dissertation or project report. I also retain the right to use in future works (such as articles or books) all or part of this thesis, dissertation, or project report. |
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