Matching Items (19)
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- All Subjects: Latin American literature
- Creators: Tompkins, Cynthia
- Creators: García-Fernández, Carlos J.
Description
In the last years of the twentieth century, while the narrative of women in other Latin American countries has received critical attention, Bolivian women's narrative has been widely ignored. The fact that the voice of Bolivian women in Latin American feminist discourse is rarely discussed in Latin American criticism is enough to justify the present study. This work focuses on three prominent Bolivian writers: Gaby Vallejos, Giovanna Rivero Santa Cruz, and Erika Bruzonic. The short stories of these three authors are characterized by accentuating certain telluric features revealed in the background of their feminine/feminist narratives. At the same time, based on the American and European feminist literary critique, this work analyzes the feminine/feminist themes mounted in the narrative of these authors. Gaby Vallejos, with a cinematic style, chronicles the life and customs of the "valluno" context, building a mosaic of different voices in dialogue. Her topics revolve around binaries: life-death, and pain and pleasure, voicing condemnation for a patriarchal society. Ericka Bruzonic deals with women and identity, memory and the breaking of lineage as an imposing structure. Her themes are built around the cosmopolitism of "paceña" urban life, and her voice transgresses the binomials established by a patriarchal society. Finally Giovanna Rivero Santa Cruz takes the life and customs of the Santa Cruz and the Guarani culture and her plots weave these elements reaching for myths and taboos, involving the reader into her stories. In this manner, her narrative makes an incursion into the conscious and unconscious realm of the readers questioning their wealth of moral and social values, their notions of heterosexuality, and sexual taboos. The three writers, with different narrative styles yet dialogical, narrate various experiences of women from different regions, social classes, ages, education, and sexual orientations. Our authors give high value to the word and the body embedded in the culture, thereby affirming their woman's voice as Bolivians and their literary presence in the context of Latin American literature.
ContributorsLopez, Norma (Author) / Urioste-Ascorra, Carmen (Thesis advisor) / Tompkins, Cynthia (Committee member) / Rosales, Jesus (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
Las personas públicas de mujeres fuertes mexicanas generalmente se definen como desafiantes y contrarias a los roles sociales generalmente aceptados de las mujeres sumisas. Dichas personas públicas exigen atención y buscan incluirse en la cultura popular. Sin embargo, cuando se analizan mediante los rubros de la teoría queer, se revelan arquetipos heternormativos. Esta tesis examina cronológicamente la obra de tres cronistas mexicanos de los siglos XX y XXI, Salvador Novo, Carlos Monsiváis y Sara Sefchovich, analizando su retrato de mujeres fuertes que ocupan sitios urbanos públicos en la Ciudad de México. Se investigan los efectos sociales elitistas de las imágenes públicas de mujeres fuertes, revelando restricciones patriarcales de mujeres en espacios públicos y construcciones subsecuentes de personas públicas como exóticas y cosificadas, asimismo facilitando interacciones con una sociedad sumamente masculinista y machista. La falta de agencialidad social real se revela cuando el patriarcado se reafirma, a pesar de la índole disconforme de las mujeres retratadas. Los constructos de familia y de masculinidad exigen la existencia tanto del padre y del esposo ausentes como del hipermacho y de la acompañante mujer sumisa limitada a sitios privados. El retrato de mujeres fuertes en la obra analizada desnaturaliza la imagen de domesticidad, señalando que las mujeres mexicanas salen del hogar para ocupar sitios públicos en la Ciudad de México. Como la normalización del constructo de familia se cuestiona, la teoría queer se utiliza en una manera innovadora para analizar dichos retratos de mujeres fuertes y agencialidad sociopolítica.
ContributorsHolcombe, William Daniel (Author) / Foster, David William (Thesis advisor) / Tompkins, Cynthia (Committee member) / Urioste-Azcorra, Carmen (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
This dissertation analyzes three films from Mexico, Spain, and Argentina--Kilómetro 31, El orfanato, and Aparecidos (2007)--and their interplay with the historicism that has traditionally served as the default referent for "reality" in Western narrative. While grounding my approach in temporal critique, I borrow from deconstruction, psychoanalysis, and queer theory to explore ways in which ghosts and the rhetorical figure of the family are manipulated in each national imaginary as a strategy for negotiating volatility within symbolic order: a tactic that can either naturalize or challenge normative discourses. As a literary and cinematic trope, ghosts are particularly useful vehicles for the exploration of national imaginaries and the dominant or competing cultural attitudes towards a country's history, and thus, the articulation of a present political reality. The rhetorical figure of the family is also pivotal in this process as a mechanism for expressing national allegories, for articulating generational anxieties about a nation's relationship with its history, and for organizing societies and social subjects as such, interpellating them into or excluding them from national imaginaries according to its grammar/logic. The proposed trajectory through these films will help facilitate a study of the potential of these rhetorical figures to either reinscribe or question two of the most fundamental processes that go into the cartography of ideology: the imposition of (a) time and the negotiation of social subjectivity within it. Competing political narratives may use any number of rhetorical strategies to position themselves in time to promote their agendas while continuing to reinforce the overall framework that determines the parameters of what is visible, and thus debatable. As temporal anomalies who are defined by their (in)visibility, ghosts can be used to either reinforce this framework or they can be used to articulate alternative relationships to time, and consequently, other political possibilities. Ghosts, families, and children are especially volatile rhetorical figures because of their potential to expose the mechanisms of societal organization--the construction of social subjects through their relationship to the time and the families of which they are presumably products--as negotiable processes rather than self-evident truths.
ContributorsSt-Georges, Charles (Author) / Foster, David W (Thesis advisor) / Urioste, Carmen (Committee member) / Tompkins, Cynthia (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
This work aims to deepen the construction of identity of the Korean-argentinian through the "koreanity" and "koreanism". Therefore, we will analyze the short story collection La peonia y su sombra (2002) in search of evidence that discover the difficult definition of the "koreanism", or the practice of Korean culture, in which the language is included. The "koreanity" is a feature based on physical traits, while the "koreanism" is defined by the use of the language and the culture. While the "koreanity" is an exogenous factor, and it is well defined, the "koreanism" is defined through cultural impressions that are more difficult to distinguish. To do this we will use the Argentine native vision to find the "koreanism" and, if necessary, will exhibit different forms of subsistence of the "koreanism" in Argentina.
ContributorsLee, Jaekeun (Author) / Foster, David W (Thesis advisor) / De Jesús Hernández-G., Manuel (Committee member) / Tompkins, Cynthia (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
ABSTRACT This thesis aims to demonstrate the validity of political violence in contemporary Chicano and Peruvian American narratives as a reflection of the sociopolitical situation of immigrants and their descendants in the United States (U.S.). The thesis explores the various ways in which contemporary Chicano and Peruvian American narratives present the political violence in the U.S. towards Mexican and Peruvian immigrants and Chicanos and Peruvian Americans examining the intersections that exist between the resistance and violence discourses and its sociopolitical consequences. Although the topic of political violence has been previously studied in U.S. and Latin American narratives throughout its history, its analysis has been insufficiently explored as far as contemporary narratives of the XXI century are concerned. With this in mind, two texts will be used to study this discourse of violence in Chicano and Peruvian American literature: Alejandro Morales' "Pequeña nación" (2005) and Daniel Alarcón's "Guerra en la penumbra" (2005). The thesis examines the immigrant as a center of discourse exploring the conflict between them and the institutions or groups in power that instigate this political violence. The first chapter covers the socio historical background regarding Mexican and Peruvian migration flows to the United States in the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The second chapter introduces "The Triangle of Violence" proposed by Norwegian mathematician and sociologist Johan Galtung as the basis for the theoretical framework and approach of this analysis. Chapter three analyzes the Chicano short story "Pequeña nación" by Alejandro Morales. The analysis of the Peruvian American short story "Guerra en la penumbra" by Daniel Alarcón follows in chapter four. The conclusion emphasizes the problem of political violence experienced by immigrants in the U.S. in contemporary Chicano and Peruvian American narratives and possible solutions contained therein, protesting a problem that can hinder immigration policy reforms and the defense of human rights.
ContributorsSifuentes, Ana (Author) / Rosales, Jesus (Thesis advisor) / García-Fernández, Carlos J. (Thesis advisor) / Alarcon, Justo (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
From Impossible Angles Towards Strategic Ones: Narratives of Death, Life, and Disability in La Muerte me Da and El Huesped The glamour of single-handedly overcoming adversity, sidestepping obstacles, or defying the odds makes for great mystery or adventure fiction, but fails to do justice (poetic or otherwise) to lives that are both physically and conceptually "marked" by more complex challenges. From a theoretical view, a similar desire to escape or maintain the perceived "dividing line" between fact and fiction, nature and nurture, mind and body, is confronted by a diverse set of human experiences, all of which have come to be defined, and continue to define themselves, along both sides of such a divide. Disability, typically viewed as an "emerging" branch of literary and cultural critique, is perhaps the most pervasive. Hidden under the covert language of the "grotesque", "monstrous", "doppelgänger", "freak", "eccentric" or "queer", disability has historically represented something other than itself. Two texts that attest to both the real and imagined possibilities of resignification and new modes of articulation surrounding disability are La muerte me da (2007) by Cristina Rivera Garza and El huésped (2006) by Guadalupe Nettel. From different points of departure, both texts offer a narrative approximation towards the disabled mind, body, and perceptual experience. In ways that are both similar and different, these narratives question one's perceived access to that which is otherwise understood to be the physically and conceptually "inaccessible" or "illegible" space of disability. Such approximations towards, and articulations of, the disability experience are processes that move, largely unnoticed, both within and beyond texts. As this construct continues to transform itself from both within and outside itself, disability acquires intellectual and practical value while requiring the "experts" in fields beyond the narrow scope of medicine, education, and rehabilitation to (re)consider their own approaches to, and apprehensions of, disability in order to redefine what or who is accessible or viable for literary and cultural debate.
ContributorsNewland, Rachel Renee (Author) / Tompkins, Cynthia (Thesis advisor) / Urioste-Azcorra, Carmen (Committee member) / Rosales, Jesus (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014
Description
The revolution that took place in Nicaragua during the 70's led the country into misery; this war was a consequence of the Somoza dictatorship that had been in power for forty-five years. The Nicaraguan people were hoping to recover their peace and freedom by rising in arms against the dictatorship. Augusto Cesar Sandino is known to be the most significant patriotic figure for the Sandinista revolutionaries. His legacy inspired the foundation of the revolutionary party Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional (FSLN). The FSLN was able to overthrow the Anastasio Somoza regime and declared their victory on July 19, 1979. The memories of the Sandinista Revolution are portrayed in the autobiographies of two Nicaraguan writers: Gioconda Belli and Sergio Ramirez. El país bajo mi piel (2001) y Adiós muchachos. Una memoria de la revolución sandinista (1999) are the texts analyzed in this study as part of those remembrances that revive the most significant events of the revolution from very unique perspectives. In order to develop this analysis we have consider the theoretical work of Phillip Lejeune. We have based our research in his definition of autobiography, his concept of autobiographical pact and the idea of contract between author and reader. Also, we have incorporated Evelyne Ender´s research on memory as the principal element in the literary construction of reminiscences. Ender explains the role of the rememberer, who is responsible of constructing their memories based on a subjective, cognitive, emotional and esthetic performance. At the same time, we have included the concept of biographical space explained by Leonor Arfuch, which is perceived as multi-faced space where different tendencies coexist. The purpose of this study is to explore the autobiographies of these Nicaraguan writers as an esthetical process where remembrances of the Sandinista Revolution come to live in a prose reflective narrative. Analyzing Belli and Ramirez's memoirs, we perceived their private and public stories of life that depict the most significant events of their lives and nation. The Sandinista Revolution is part of the Nicaraguan history and it cannot be forgotten that's the purpose behind this autobiographies to document these transcendental happenings.
ContributorsMorales, Nallely (Author) / Volek, Emil (Thesis advisor) / Acereda, Alberto (Committee member) / García-Fernández, Carlos J. (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012
Description
Globalization has brought a renewed interest in the discourses of the past and national/ethnic identities that has been reflected in the cultural production and the social sciences around the globe. Historical novel (and their sequel telenovelas), a literary field closely linked to historiography, reflects, and has contributed to (re)shape the discourses of the past and identity in Latin America. Since the first decades of the 19th century until nowadays, Colombian novelists have explored Colombian identity through historical novels. Their plots and characters are highly influenced by new historiographical trends. During the19th and the first half of the 20th century, Romantic and Realist novels were generally constructed over historicist assumption of the past: the belief that it is possible to acquire a completely “objective” knowledge of the past. However, some outstanding Colombian historical novels, such as La Marquesa de Yolombó (1928), challenged this notion of the past. Since the last decades of the 20th century, Colombian historical novels share an attitude toward the past that Linda Hutcheon has defined as Historiographical Metafiction. This approach to history challenges the idea of an objective total history, and emphasizes the importance of the personal experiences, the subjectivity, of their characters and of the narrative voices. Donde no te Conozcan (2007), Trí¬ptico de la Infamia (2016), and Mancha de la Tierra (2014) are three Colombian historical novels written in the 21st century that share this attitude towards history. They question the nineteenth-century interpretations of Colombian history, especially those related to the role of Jews, Moors, Indigenous, Africans, and mestizos in the colonial social dynamics, and, therefore, in Colombian culture.
ContributorsRuiz-Olaya, Andrés F (Author) / Foster, David W (Thesis advisor) / Tompkins, Cynthia (Committee member) / Sarreal, Jualia (Committee member) / Fredrick, Sharonah (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2018
Description
Coming out from under the shadow of sight, blindness has a story to tell. From Tiresias to The Miracle Worker, literary and visual representations of blindness are cornerstones of compelling tales of loss and overcoming. In support of the inherent value of sight, these conventional narratives overshadow the stories and lived experiences of blind people themselves. In light of this misrepresentation, I explore what it means to read, write, and see blindness, as well as consider the implications of being blind in present-day Latin America. I achieve this through a transnational and interdisciplinary analysis of novels, short stories, film, and photography by blind and sighted artists and writers whose work has been published or exhibited after the year 2000. In this context, I will demonstrate how blindness can serve as a lens through which the production and reception of narrative and visual culture can be critically evaluated from a blind person’s perspective. Most importantly, this dissertation showcases the critical and creative work of blind people in order to demystify stereotypes and contextualize anxieties surrounding blindness, perception, and identity.
ContributorsNewland, Rachel Renee (Author) / Tompkins, Cynthia (Thesis advisor) / Foster, David W. (Committee member) / Urioste-Azcorra, Carmen (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2018
Description
Narrativas no-convencionales en cuentistas hispanoamericanos contemporáneos: Iván Thays (Perú), Jorge Volpi y Ricardo Chávez Castañeda (México) y Héctor Libertella (Argentina) se centra en cuentos contemporáneos de autores de diferentes tradiciones nacionales dentro de un marco de tiempo veinticinco años, que convergen en la práctica de las narrativas no-convencionales. Defino narrativa no-convencional como un efecto narrativo controlado e intencional que implícita o explícitamente cuestiona procedimientos o convenciones generalmente catalogados como "realismo" y por lo tanto se desvía de él. Este estudio establece conexiones, afinidades y potenciales diferencias entre los textos del corpus seleccionado, y se enfoca en los procesos por medio de los cuales las narrativas no convencionales se desvían en mayor o menor grado del "realismo".
El marco teórico que utilizo se compone de dos enfoques. Me centro, por un lado, en una área muy reciente de estudios definida como narrativas no naturales, que abarca teorías narratológicas que exponen extrañamiento y experimentación en una variedad de textos literarios y permiten el análisis de la representación del espacio-tiempo de manera innovadora. Por el otro lado, me baso en teorías epistemológicas, complementadas con un enfoque fenomenológico desarrollado por Darío Villanueva, según la cual el lector es capaz de crear una simulación intencional de realismo/antirrealismo interactuando, reconociendo y comparando los sistemas de referencia o esquemas con otros marcos a los que ha tenido acceso anteriormente. Todos los textos despliegan un conjunto de prácticas narratológicas para crear o destruir la ilusión de realismo. Además de poner de relieve la narrativa no-convencional, la disertación enfatiza la narrativa antimimética como uno de los géneros menos explorados dentro de la tradición hispanoamericana.
El marco teórico que utilizo se compone de dos enfoques. Me centro, por un lado, en una área muy reciente de estudios definida como narrativas no naturales, que abarca teorías narratológicas que exponen extrañamiento y experimentación en una variedad de textos literarios y permiten el análisis de la representación del espacio-tiempo de manera innovadora. Por el otro lado, me baso en teorías epistemológicas, complementadas con un enfoque fenomenológico desarrollado por Darío Villanueva, según la cual el lector es capaz de crear una simulación intencional de realismo/antirrealismo interactuando, reconociendo y comparando los sistemas de referencia o esquemas con otros marcos a los que ha tenido acceso anteriormente. Todos los textos despliegan un conjunto de prácticas narratológicas para crear o destruir la ilusión de realismo. Además de poner de relieve la narrativa no-convencional, la disertación enfatiza la narrativa antimimética como uno de los géneros menos explorados dentro de la tradición hispanoamericana.
ContributorsJiménez Salazar, Arturo (Author) / Tompkins, Cynthia (Thesis advisor) / Garcia-Fernandez, Carlos J (Committee member) / Rosales, Jesus (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2015