Throughout the decades of the 1970s and 1980s, literature written by Latin American women underwent a uniquely enriching narrative renovation. A preference for the theme of the erotic drove this process, and provided the primary source of power and the most salient characteristics of the texts in question. Three Latin American women writers from the last decades of the twentieth century who can be classified as representatives of this literary renaissance are Brazilian novelist Márcia Denser, Chilean writer Diamela Eltit, and Uruguayan novelist and poet Cristina Peri Rossi. In my dissertation I examine three novels from these authors that show their common interest in the theme of womens sexuality as a means to articulate a variety of attitudes, from the uneasiness caused by the rigidity of patriarchal norms and the repression of political regimes to the anxiety and anguish of daily life and the difficulty and complexity of human relationships. The novels are Densers Animal dos motéis (1981), Eltits Lumpérica (1983) and Peri Rossis Solitario de amor (1988). In these texts, the womans erotic desire is presented as a subversive act in which the woman appropriates power with the purpose of proposing not only new patterns of sexual behavior but also new political and cultural values and models that differ from those belonging to the male domain. As a comparatist, my work is to find differences as well. Thus, my research has also aimed to differentiate the treatment of eroticism in the fiction of Denser, Eltit, and Peri Rossi by contending that different narrative styles and perspectives toward female sexuality reveal the heterogeneity of the erotic imagination in Latin American womens prose.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:VANDERBILT/oai:VANDERBILTETD:etd-03292006-145055 |
| Date | 07 April 2006 |
| Creators | Asensio-Sierra, Isabel |
| Contributors | Professor Cecelia Tichi, Professor Emanuelle Oliveira, Professor Edward H. Friedman, Professor Earl E. Fitz |
| Publisher | VANDERBILT |
| Source Sets | Vanderbilt University Theses |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | http://etd.library.vanderbilt.edu/available/etd-03292006-145055/ |
| 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 Vanderbilt University 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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