Matching Items (19)
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- All Subjects: literature
- Creators: Volek, Emil
Description
In the first thirty years of the XX century, an old literary visual tradition was reborn in a series of new striking visual texts better known as calligrams. They were produced by some avant-garde poets such as Vicente Huidobro, José Juan Tablada, Alberto Hidalgo and Carlos Oquendo de Amat in Latin America, and Juan Larrea, Guillermo de Torre, Francisco Vighi, Luis Mosquera, and others in Spain. However, with few exceptions, the interpretation of those written drawings has caught little attention from literary critics. This research, contrasted to that of Willard Bohn's, is a contribution to the deciphering of such literary art form, designated here as the figurative visual poem. It is a proposal for its visual reading which draws from the fact that this type of text is concretely a drawing formed by written verses. As such, it can be regarded as a plastic writing, combining pictorial and verbal signs in one perceptible configuration on the page. The result of this semiotic operation is a hybrid product in which the iconic forms become symbolic and vice versa. It is in fact, an art object which should be approached as a text that can be seen as well as read. The study leads to the conclusion that Willard Bohn misreads the order in which language and image are articulated in the visual poem identified with the second order semiological system proposed by Roland Barthes, placing preeminence on language over image. This results in reading the avant-garde visual figurative poem in an ekphrastic fashion. Consequently, the role of the image in the system is left in an ambiguous realm at the time of deciphering this hybrid text. Our contribution to re-conducting this undertaking has been equally drawn from a semiotic stance taken from Louis Hjemslev that balances language and image as correlates of a semiotic function. Due to the signaling nature of both, language and figure, a visual poem becomes an iconic metaphor as well as a metaphoric icon, and moreover a self-referential sign, thus justifying its status of an autonomous art.
ContributorsSuarez, Nelson M (Author) / Acereda, Alberto (Thesis advisor) / Volek, Emil (Committee member) / Garcia-Fernandez, Carlos J (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2011
Description
The hagiographic comedy written by Tirso de Molina Los lagos de San Vicente (1607) presents the journey of Santa Casilda in search of the cure of an illness in her blood that affects her. Casilda rejects the medical assistance offered to her by Muslim doctors and miraculously she finds the cure in the Christian world. In this quest, the intellectual and theological evolution of the future saint in defense of the Christian faith is presented. This dissertation will study the resources that Tirso de Molina employs to show the rejection and displacement against the Islamic world represented by a series of erotic behaviors that, in the effort of dramatizing these impertinences they are characterized within a second discourse. Tirso de Molina takes advantage of the hagiographic comedy's discourse nature and the baroque's obscure literary characteristics to express his messages. This dissertation will study in detail how the combination of hagiographic theatrical elements with linguistic expressions are used to convey a subversive discourse that therefore suggests the application of queer theory as a frame of reference. As a result of this investigation it is concluded that Tirso de Molina promotes the hagiographic model and in order to contrast the triumph of the moral Catholic world over the immoral Muslim world the play writer makes references to the nefarious sin.
ContributorsMurphy, Anayanci (Author) / Foster, David William (Thesis advisor) / Sanchez, Angel (Committee member) / Acereda, Alberto (Committee member) / Urioste-Azcorra, Carmen (Committee member) / Volek, Emil (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2011
Description
Chris Miller's Souvenirs of Sleep is as serious as it is whimsical, if this is a possibility. The "Museum of the Zoo-real" may be an equally appropriate title as animals are often in performance. In this visual and spiritual investigation, childhood, dream, and the loss of a mother to suicide are the currents. Miller's work is informed by the cinema of Werner Herzog, Andrei Tarkovsky, Robert Bresson and beyond. Miller believes in the power of implication. The poems begin with intense focus, but are often in the business of expansion. Souvenirs of Sleep is a journey toward sense-making, a search for language that might allow it.
ContributorsMiller, Christopher (Author) / Dubie, Norman (Thesis advisor) / Hogue, Cynthia (Committee member) / Ball, Sally (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
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
A collection of poems that explore what it means to be from the Atomic City-- a city built atop cleared-out rural communities in East Tennessee during World War II, and with the sole and secretive purpose of enriching uranium for the atomic bomb. The poems look back to the more isolated Appalachian culture of previous generations, discovering the identity rifts caused by such massive and rushed development. In trying to understand the poet's own cultural inheritance of both nuclear weaponry and an Appalachian hardness, the poems begin to meditate on inhabitation. They ask what it means to live in a country, a local community, a body. The poems travel far beyond the Atomic City's limits, incorporating characters that live, in some sense, at the edge of a community. As he crosses the Atlantic, the Spanish poet Jiménez wonders if either sound or vision are more trustworthy tools for perception; an aging grandmother in Tennessee realizes that she still "drives" her younger body in her dreams; an American woman becomes aroused after touring the killing fields in Cambodia; and the prophet of Oak Ridge, who supposedly predicted the Manhattan Project, considers how his baby daughter has become a thing after death. The various voices show the poet grappling with her own guilt over Hiroshima, and ultimately attempt to understand the limits of both grief and love, how one inherits a tragedy.
ContributorsSams, Sara (Author) / Hogue, Cynthia (Thesis advisor) / Ball, Sally (Committee member) / Dubie, Norman (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
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
Description
Este trabajo examina la producción literaria y cultural chicana/méxicosudoesteña de las distintas épocas coloniales del sudoeste: la época colonial española (1521-1821), la época colonial angloamericana (1848-1965) y la época poscolonial (1965-presente) para ver hasta qué punto siguen vigentes los legados coloniales dentro de un contexto contemporáneo. Avanzamos la hipótesis que, de la larga residencia histórica y geográfica de las personas hispanomexicanas en el sudoeste, se han producidos textos simbólicos donde se registran dos o más discursos residuos cuyo origen es una ideología dominante. El capítulo 1 plantea y detalla la hipótesis, reseña los numerosos estudios existentes, describe el marco teórico y da la división en capítulos. En el capítulo 2, se da de manera detallada el método crítico: la definición del colonialismo clásico según la teoría de Mario Barrera, la relación colonizador/colonizado aportada por Albert Memmi y los conceptos del tercer espacio híbrido, el mestizaje y el imaginario decolonial asociados con la época poscolonial como ofrecidos respectivamente por Homi Bhabha, Rafael Pérez-Torres y Emma Pérez. El capítulo 3 ofrece un análisis de la época colonial española vía dos obras nuevomexicanas: el poema épico Historia de la Nueva México (1610) de Gaspar Pérez de Villagrá y el drama Los comanches (c.1779) de anónimo. El capítulo 4 trata la colonización angloamericana en las obras The Squatter and the Don (1885) de María Amparo Ruiz de Burton y Dew on the Thorn (escrita en los 1940; publicada en 1997) de Jovita González de Mireles. El capítulo 5 examina la época poscolonial vía la obra Los muertos también cuentan (1995) de Miguel Méndez. Una lectura de la literatura chicana/méxicosudoesteña revela la presencia de varios personajes típicos asociados cada uno a una diferente época histórica desde el conquistador español hasta un mexicano recién inmigrado, quienes no han podido evadir la correspondiente presencia de un grupo dominante u colonizador. Con base en una investigación de las cinco obras seleccionadas, se muestra cómo las relaciones coloniales se forman y se transforman y luego se manifiestan en un contexto contemporáneo, desplazando por ende nuestro entendimiento de las relaciones coloniales como un simple proyecto binario de dominación y subordinación.
ContributorsFonseca, Vanessa (Author) / Hernández-G., Manuel De Jesús (Thesis advisor) / Rosales, Jesus (Committee member) / García-Fernández, Carlos Javier (Committee member) / Volek, Emil (Committee member) / Horan, Elizabeth (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
ABSTRACT This research aims to investigate the work and impact of the prolific and popular Pablo Parellada y Molas. Although the author is now forgotten, he is an important figure regarding the struggles between Modernist writers and their critics. Pablo Parellada was one the key detractors of literary Modernism, a movement which he attacked through his parodies as evinced in his poetry, drama and short stories. His works contain the main pejorative features that would become the standard critique of these young poets of Spain in the early 1900's. Through the work of Pablo Parellada, this study seeks to understand the literary debates of Modernism in Spain that took place in the early twentieth century. Through this understanding, this study becomes important for it reveals the many personal characteristics that were attributed to the young Modernist poets. Some of these characteristics continued to be used by literary critics and as well became part of the collective imagination at the time and were still circulating several decades later.
ContributorsHerrería Fernández, Antonio (Author) / Acereda, Alberto (Thesis advisor) / Urioste, Carmen (Committee member) / Volek, Emil (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012
Description
En esta disertación se exploró el desarrollo del sistema de la literatura infantil decimonónica en México. La investigación se inscribió dentro de una perspectiva interdisciplinaria, exploratoria y descriptiva (e interpretativa, aunque en menor medida) de los aspectos histórico-culturales y literarios a los que pertenece el sistema, autor y obra. En la búsqueda de una todavía limitada pretensión interpretativa, en este estudio se trazó una periodización para caracterizar el desarrollo que la literatura infantil adquiere en los dos períodos delimitados para el siglo XIX: sujeto educando de la divina revelación y sujeto educando de la ciudadanía. Se concluyó que en la fábula compleja de la literatura infantil se introduce y construye un discurso integrador de la nación mexicana. En esta formación identitaria, las publicaciones periódicas y los libros para niños fueron un discurso formativo de fundamental soporte a las políticas sociales que guiaban al país, la joven nación republicana. De igual forma, se recopiló una valiosa información sobre el estado del arte de la literatura infantil latinoamericana y mexicana; se exploraron los textos precursores del haz de escritores fundacionales de la literatura infantil latinoamericana; se delimitó el surgimiento, desarrollo y consolidación de la LI en México y, por último, se compiló una lista de publicaciones sobre historia, consulta y crítica de la literatura infantil y juvenil en Latinoamérica con el propósito de establecer líneas futuras de investigación.
ContributorsRuiz Murrieta, Rosa María (Author) / Murrieta, Rosa Maria R (Thesis advisor) / Volek, Emil (Committee member) / Acereda, Alberto (Committee member) / García-Fernández, Carlos (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012
Description
Dark Tourism explores the grief borne of losing a connection to the past. As detailed in the prologue poem, "Baucis and Philemon," the speaker's stories in Dark Tourism "have been resistant / to [their] drownings" and that refusal to stay buried has "[sent] ripples in every direction." The voices in Dark Tourism track the trajectory of these ripples by animating the past, especially through the formal work in the partial sonnet crown that acts as centerpiece to the manuscript. The sonic and rhythmic repetitions reinforce an idea central to Dark Tourism as a whole: the things we inherit from the past endure, with or without our permissions, and the speakers seek to interpret this haunting in a way that unifies past and present.
ContributorsAndoga, Rachel (Author) / Savard, Jeannine (Thesis advisor) / Dubie, Norman (Committee member) / Hogue, Cynthia (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012