Matching Items (3)
Filtering by
- All Subjects: Narrativa
- All Subjects: Comparative Literature
- Genre: Doctoral Dissertation
- Creators: Acereda, Alberto
Description
The subject of this study is the work of Spanish novelist J. Á. González Sainz, comprised of Los encuentros (1989), Un mundo exasperado (1995), Volver al mundo (2003) y Ojos que no ven (2010). His work, which is structurally demanding, treats themes such as morality, terrorism, the nostos or return to one's homeland, and nature. He has been connected to the "dehumanized novel" of Juan Benet, though his career demonstrates an attempt to make clear references to historical reality. González Sainz has acquired a measure of prestige in the estimation of important critics. With his latest book, he has furthermore gained recognition for his moral commitment in opposing the terrorism of ETA, and his work has entered debates on current events. In my study I argue that this formally rigorous narrative has a singular capacity for political engagement. I argue that González Sainz is an example of the integration of ethics in a narrative discourse whose semantic density allows a commitment with moral conflicts. To situate it in the context of contemporary Spanish fiction, I relate Pierre Bourdieu's notion of the literary field to the proposals concerning the history of literature of Pablo Gil Casado, Gonzalo Sobejano, Ramón Buckley, Ignacio Soldevila Durante and others. I follow three lines of investigation: terrorism in literature; ethics; and the political engagement of the writer. Ethics, whose relation to literature has been studied by Zachary Newton, Wolfgang Hallet or Nina Rosenstand, has allowed the author a political engagement in opposition to terrorism in general and in particular in opposition to ETA. González Sainz exhibits an equilibrium between aesthetic and ethical values of literature. In the plural context of the latest fiction in Spain, his novels have found a place in the tradition that since the middle of the twentieth century has been characterized by a dialectic between political engagement and the autonomy of literature. The theme of ETA terrorism and his structural rigor situate González Sainz's work in a position that maintains the validity of this dialectic.
ContributorsMartín de Marcos, Gonzalo (Author) / García-Fernández, Carlos Javier (Thesis advisor) / Volek, Emil (Committee member) / Acereda, Alberto (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012
Description
ABSTRACT
This dissertation focuses on the narrative fiction of three women writers from the Spanish-speaking Caribbean who have been publishing since the nineteen-nineties. The short stories and novels of Mayra Santos-Febres from Puerto Rico, Ena Lucía Portela from Cuba, and Ángela Hernández Núñez from the Dominican Republic, have been analyzed within a theoretical framework composed of Antonio Benítez Rojo and Édouard Glissant’s ideas about Caribbean cultural expression and Rosi Braidotti and Elizabeth Groz’s writings about the body in current feminist studies. In doing so this study has sought to demonstrate how contemporary Caribbean women writers employ a nomadic aesthetic that opens up a multitude of possibilities of meanings for bodies, and by extension subjects, that have traditionally been obscured by the Cartesian binary that separates the body from the mind. In spite of being culturally, sexually and racially specific bodies, the bodies that appear in the work of Santos-Febres, Portela and Hernández Núñez are in constant movement and metamorphoses. Therefore, special attention is paid to the ways in which these bodies are open to social completion making them favorable locations for negotiations of power, resistance to normative identities, and the production of new systems of knowledge that not only recognize the importance of the body but also acknowledge the value of the affects.
RESUMEN
Esta tesis trata la narrativa de tres escritoras del Caribe hispano-hablante que comenzaron a publicar a partir de los años noventa. Los cuentos y novelas de Mayra Santos-Febres de Puerto Rico, Ena Lucía Portela de Cuba, y Ángela Hernández Núñez de la República Dominicana, han sido analizados a través de un marco teórico compuesto de las ideas sobre la expresión cultural caribeña de Antonio Benítez Rojo y Édouard Glissant y los escritos sobre el cuerpo en los estudios feministas actuales de Rosi Braidotti y Elizabeth Grosz. Al hacerlo, este estudio se ha propuesto demostrar cómo las escritoras caribeñas contemporáneas emplean una estética nómade que abre las posibilidades de significado para los cuerpos y sujetos que han sido ocultados tras el binario cartesiano que separa el cuerpo de la mente. A pesar de ser cuerpos cultural, sexual y racialmente específicos, los cuerpos que aparecen en los textos de Santos-Febres, Portela y Hernández Núñez están en continuo movimiento y metamorfosis. Por lo tanto, se presta especial atención a los modos en los cuales estos cuerpos permanecen abiertos hacia la terminación social lo que los hace espacios propicios para las negociaciones de poder, la resistencia a las identidades normativas y la producción de nuevos sistemas epistemológicos que no solo reconocen la importancia del cuerpo sino que también el valor de los afectos.
This dissertation focuses on the narrative fiction of three women writers from the Spanish-speaking Caribbean who have been publishing since the nineteen-nineties. The short stories and novels of Mayra Santos-Febres from Puerto Rico, Ena Lucía Portela from Cuba, and Ángela Hernández Núñez from the Dominican Republic, have been analyzed within a theoretical framework composed of Antonio Benítez Rojo and Édouard Glissant’s ideas about Caribbean cultural expression and Rosi Braidotti and Elizabeth Groz’s writings about the body in current feminist studies. In doing so this study has sought to demonstrate how contemporary Caribbean women writers employ a nomadic aesthetic that opens up a multitude of possibilities of meanings for bodies, and by extension subjects, that have traditionally been obscured by the Cartesian binary that separates the body from the mind. In spite of being culturally, sexually and racially specific bodies, the bodies that appear in the work of Santos-Febres, Portela and Hernández Núñez are in constant movement and metamorphoses. Therefore, special attention is paid to the ways in which these bodies are open to social completion making them favorable locations for negotiations of power, resistance to normative identities, and the production of new systems of knowledge that not only recognize the importance of the body but also acknowledge the value of the affects.
RESUMEN
Esta tesis trata la narrativa de tres escritoras del Caribe hispano-hablante que comenzaron a publicar a partir de los años noventa. Los cuentos y novelas de Mayra Santos-Febres de Puerto Rico, Ena Lucía Portela de Cuba, y Ángela Hernández Núñez de la República Dominicana, han sido analizados a través de un marco teórico compuesto de las ideas sobre la expresión cultural caribeña de Antonio Benítez Rojo y Édouard Glissant y los escritos sobre el cuerpo en los estudios feministas actuales de Rosi Braidotti y Elizabeth Grosz. Al hacerlo, este estudio se ha propuesto demostrar cómo las escritoras caribeñas contemporáneas emplean una estética nómade que abre las posibilidades de significado para los cuerpos y sujetos que han sido ocultados tras el binario cartesiano que separa el cuerpo de la mente. A pesar de ser cuerpos cultural, sexual y racialmente específicos, los cuerpos que aparecen en los textos de Santos-Febres, Portela y Hernández Núñez están en continuo movimiento y metamorfosis. Por lo tanto, se presta especial atención a los modos en los cuales estos cuerpos permanecen abiertos hacia la terminación social lo que los hace espacios propicios para las negociaciones de poder, la resistencia a las identidades normativas y la producción de nuevos sistemas epistemológicos que no solo reconocen la importancia del cuerpo sino que también el valor de los afectos.
ContributorsTorres-García, Solymar (Author) / Foster, David W (Thesis advisor) / Tompkins, Cynthia M (Committee member) / Urioste, Carmen (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2015
Description
The 1920s have played a key role in the formation of the Latin American consciousness of its own cultural identity. In approaching the selected three heterogeneous regions of Latin America, the Southern Cone, the Andean Zone and the Afroantillan Caribbean, this research focuses on Latin American identity issues as a literary avant-garde construct found in the poetics and in the programmatic texts of the leading avant-garde journals of each corresponding region: Martín Fierro (1924-1927) in Argentina; revista de avance (1927-1930) in Cuba, and Amauta (1926-1930) in Perú. To carry out this kind of analysis and to fully understand the historic implications characteristics of each region, one of the initial tasks of the study has been to contextualize the period in each country in which the journals were published. After that, an analysis of each region's avant-garde production has been performed in order to categorize and situate the underlying questions of identity expressed in corresponding journals. Each region has been studied separately, yet all in view of contributing to a comprehensive and comparative study of the regions selected. The final result has been an organization of diverse principal semantic and ideological fields overlapping in and cross-crossing different regions as represented by the selected literary journals. Starting from the very same literature, which was inspired by the spirit of its time, this research has aimed at reconstructing the notions of identity that were common within the intellectual circles of the avant-garde times as expressed in the journals Martín Fierro, revista de avance, and Amauta, and, in the end, played a signal role in the development of national and continental cultural identity consciousness throughout Latin America from the beginning of the 20th century until today.
ContributorsNaciff, Marcela (Author) / Volek, Emil (Thesis advisor) / García Fernández, Carlos J (Committee member) / Acereda, Alberto (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012