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- All Subjects: Theater
- Genre: Doctoral Dissertation
- Creators: Foster, David W
- 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
In this dissertation I use Henri Lefebvre's concept of the production of social space to study how political theatre companies and artists in the city of San Juan, Puerto Rico, appropriate and resignify, through performance, their current social space as a strategy to contest Puerto Rico's neoliberal state policies. As Lefebvre suggests, modern industrial cities like San Juan maintain hegemonic power relations through spatial practices, processes through which users and inhabitants of the city conceive, perceive and live space. Lefebvre further suggests that for social justice to be possible, space must be resignified in ways that expose otherwise invisibilized struggles for social belonging and differentiation. I argue that theatrical performance, by staging various social conflicts and contradictions between the dominating space and the appropriating space, can produce new "performance cartographies" through which its audiences – in large part disenfranchised from the neoliberal processes so celebrated elsewhere on the island – may find ways to resignify space or envision new spaces for social justice on their own behalf. Specifically, I examine five theatre groups and artists from oppressed sectors in San Juan, whose work is to various degrees in opposition to neoliberalism, to reveal how both their artistic and quotidian performances might be resignifying space toward these ends. How does the work of Agua, Sol y Sereno, Y no había luz, Teatro Breve, Deborah Hunt and Tito Kayak strategically claim or appropriate space? What kind of knowledges emerge from these spatial tactics, and how are they helping envision new forms of living and social justice in the city?
ContributorsGonzález, Jorge (Author) / Underiner, Tamara (Thesis advisor) / Foster, David W (Committee member) / Tompkins, Cynthia (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2015
Description
Drawing from Foucault's notion of heterotopias, my dissertation identifies and examines three distinct but related events that resignified (re-imagined) Chile during 2010, the year of its Bicentenary, namely: the Rescue of the 33 Miners trapped in the San José mine, the Chilean Military Parade performed in celebration of Chilean Independence, and the Mapuche Hunger Strike of 32 indigenous people accused of terrorism by the Chilean State. My central hypothesis states that these three events constitute heterotopias with strong performative components that, by enacting a utopian and a dystopian nation, denounce the flaws of Chilean society. I understand heterotopias as those recursive systems that invert, perfect or contest the society they mirror. In other words: heterotopias are discursive constructions and material manifestations of social relations that dispute, support, or distort cultural assumptions, structures, and practices currently operating in the representational spaces of a given society. In addition to following the six heterotopological principles formulated by Foucault, these case studies have performance as the central constituent that defines their specificity and brings the heterotopias into existence. Due to the performative nature of these heterotopias, I have come to call them performance heterotopias, that is, sets of behaviors that enact utopias in the historical world, the place in which we live, the site in which "the erosion of our lives, our time and our history occurs," as Foucault puts it. Here, performance would act as the interface, the point of interaction, and suture between the conceived, the perceived and the representational spaces each heterotopia articulates. Thus, a performance heterotopia would be a particular type of heterotopia which is enacted through performance. A relevant aspect that emerged from my research is that heterotopic places not only mirror, contest, and compensate their own host society, but also refer to, and intersect with other contemporaneous heterotopias enacted in that society. In my conclusion I suggest that such interactions also happen between heterotopias that emerge in different countries and cultures. If so, the mapping of utopias enacted in the macro socio geographies of Latin American countries could offer new perspectives to understand the sociopolitical processes that are underway in the region.
ContributorsBravo Goldsmith, Néstor (Author) / Underiner, Tamara (Thesis advisor) / Melo, Carla (Committee member) / Foster, David W (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2011
Description
En contexto del desarrollo urbano culturalmente acrítico, el cual con la gentrificación amenaza el bienestar del barrio y sus habitantes, esta disertación interpreta la dialéctica barrioización y barriología como atmósfera dramática en la dramaturgia chicana. Como tropo de supervivencia social y ontológica en la producción cultural chicana, la recurrencia literaria del barrio también queda reflejada en la temática y las formas de numerosas obras de teatro chicano. De tal modo, el análisis de la conciencia espacial chicana en Bernabé (1971) y Heroes and Saints (1994) revela la significancia de un sentido de lugar colectivo y sitúa esta interpretación dramática del barrio en torno al matiz ideológico de la evolución de la conciencia espacial chicana. Manifestada como una dialéctica entre muerte y vida social y ontológica, la representación y representatividad del barrio en La trampa sin salida (1973), Water and Power (2009) y A Drunkard’s Tale of Melted Wings and Memories (2016) ilustra el efecto dramático de la dialéctica entre barrioización y barriología. Mientras algunos estudios precedentes a este han explorado la espacialidad chicana y el significado sociocultural del barrio, esta disertación es la primera en demonstrar concomitantemente la función temática y semiótica del barrio en la configuración de la atmósfera dramática en el teatro chicano. Más aún, la intersección entre barrio, espacio social y teatro no solo revelan la significancia semiótica de la atmósfera dramática, si no que también sostienen la urgencia de fomentar la (re)producción socioespacial urbana históricamente informada y culturalmente crítica.
ContributorsGómez-Becerra, José Juan (Author) / Rosales, Jesus (Thesis advisor) / Foster, David W (Committee member) / Urioste-Azcorra, Carmen (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2018
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