Romance Languages Theses and Dissertations

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A Mad Certainty: Narrative Instability, Insanity, and the Search for Answers in Late Nineteenth Century French Fiction
(University of Oregon, 2020-02-27) Cogan, Elizabeth; Gould, Evyln
Writers of every period articulate a sense that the world is changing; in modernity, that constant change is intensified by an accelerating pace and comprehensive upheaval. Our reaction to change (personal, social, or technological) and its concurrent disequilibration defines us. Some adapt to new circumstances and struggle through the uncertainty while others turn instead to delusion or constructed realities that provide the illusion of certainty. In the latter reaction late19th-century French psychologists recognized the possibility of insanity: religious mania, megalomania, spiritualism, and use of hallucinogens were all possible pathologies related to this dynamic. Fin-de-siècle French novelists were very aware of contemporary psychological theories and models, as some demonstrate in their texts. Gustave Flaubert, Guy de Maupassant, Isidore Ducasse, Auguste Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, Joris-Karl Huysmans, and Jean Lorrain explore the danger in constructing selective realities and sketch the failure and madness inherent in these strategies. All manipulate the tropes and typical construction of fiction to highlight their depictions of madness; the authors variously reshape the narrative arc, introduce comedy to undercut narrative reliability, and create temporal inconsistencies and ambiguities. Using thematic analysis via late 19th-century psychological theories and the “New Rhetoric” as well as narratological examination of plot and structure, I have charted the spectrum of the insane reactions these authors portray. These works combine the madness of the protagonists with unsettling narrative techniques to portray the dangers and depths of untenable reactions to the wrenching changes of their time.
Open Access
Beyond the comfort zone: Monolingual ideologies, bilingual U.S. Latino texts
(University of Oregon, 2010-06) Burrows, Sonja S., 1973-
This project examines reader reception of U.S. Latino-authored narratives that engage in varying degrees of textual code switching and bicultural belonging. The analysis builds on the argument that these narratives, as part of a larger body of minor literatures, play a role in revolutionizing traditional Anglo-American discourses of knowledge by marginalizing the monolingual and monocultural reader historically positioned as the prototype of cultural literacy in the United States. This project further proposes that marginalization is achieved by a textual appropriation and structural weakening of the dominant language and culture via the creation of a narrative space that privileges code switching to articulate bicultural identities. U.S. Latino texts that alternate between English and Spanish mirror the misunderstandings and failures of intelligibility in the multicultural situations they depict, thereby requiring the monolingual and monocultural reader to experience this unintelligibility first-hand. In order to tackle broader questions about how these literary texts and their reception reflect what is at stake politically, nationally, and culturally for Latinos in the United States today, this interdisciplinary project draws upon a diversity of perspectives originating from linguistics, literary analysis, sociology, and history to identify how literary texts mirror bicultural identity for Latinos. As a part of this analysis, the project examines the history of Spanish language use in the United States, Latino immigration history, the standard language ideology privileging English monolingualism, the persistence of bilingualism, oral and written code switching, the publishing industry, and analyses of reader responses to bilingual texts based on survey data. In situating these histories within discussions about the bilingual, bicultural nature and reception of the U.S. Latino narrative, this project shows how the linguistic makeup and the subsequent receptivity of these texts minor the bicultural identity and changing social positioning of the Latino population in the United States.
Open Access
BROKEN BOUNDARIES: ALTERNATIVE FUTURES IN WOMEN’S LITERATURE OF THE GLOBAL SOUTH (1984-2006)
(University of Oregon, 2024-08-07) Clementi, Jordan; Millar, Lanie
DISSERTATION ABSTRACTTitle: Broken Boundaries: Alternative Futures in Women’s Literature of the Global South (1984-2006) How do Black women in the Global South envision alternative futures which subvert the prescribed patriarchal futures that dominate discourse? My dissertation examines the works of three Black authors from the Global South, specifically from Cameroon, Mozambique and Puerto Rico—Werewere Liking, Paulina Chiziane, and Mayra Santos-Febres, respectively—who write new futures in their works by redressing ways in which women are removed from narratives of the present and the past in order to build power to change the future. This dissertation seeks to join their works together through a deterritorialized understanding of the Global South, an economically marginalized space which exists in the unevenness of development across the globe. These writers explore ways in which they can challenge and subvert patriarchal boundaries placed on them to break them and redraw them as they see fit. Patriarchal systems oppress women and alternative solutions to social issues in various ways to maintain dominance. The works by these authors explicitly challenge that suppression; they succeed in breaking away by subverting language and expectations to find ways to sabotage dominant discourses. Each author intentionally reads genre, language, or cultural practice in a way which subverts dominant discourse and instead reads it in a way that benefits their needs. The primary outcome of this is that it redresses ways in which women are erased from narratives of the past and present, negating their creative solutions to present issues which not only affect them but everyone in the broader society. On top of that, these narratives then allow women to envision alternative futures which do not conform to the often grim and violent predictions of patriarchal discourse about the future. Their texts essentially demonstrate pathways which can be used to unwind the present and follow alternative routes into the future. My project attempts to demonstrate the diverse demonstrations of ingenuity which go into the vision of alternative futures and the ways that specific contexts can arrive at those futures through subversions of established genres, language, and cultural practices.
Open Access
Centauros latinoamericanos: El bandido como símbolo cultural en el espacio fronterizo de América Latina
(University of Oregon, 2012) Henriquez, Paulo; Henriquez, Paulo; García-Caro, Pedro
This is a multidisciplinary and comparative study of the recurrent representations of bandits in Latin American literature from the second half of the 19th Century to the early 20th Century. After the wars of independence in the Americas, the founding of postcolonial nation-states or Creole Republics (Repúblicas Criollas) marginalized entire rural populations, composed of indigenous people but also of multiracial, mixed populations such as the gauchos, llaneros, and other people who were branded as “bandits” as they were not part of the idealized westernized nation. This complex conflict can also be read as a last struggle between two competing colonizing models in the Americas: the receding Hispanic Catholic rural/feudal model and the liberal “free-trade” capitalist model emerging from the Industrial Revolution and the Enlightenment, represented by the United States in the hemisphere. Both socio-cultural models generated new mappings and diverse political narratives throughout the Americas: Hispanic and Hispanicized bandits created postcolonial cultural symbols of resistance to modernity capable of crossing borders. Joaquín Murrieta and Billy the Kid are extraordinary examples of the complex processes by which mythified and vilified bandits become multicultural transnational symbols. These phenomena are thoroughly studied here through the textual and contextual analysis of Facundo: Civilization and Barbarism (1845); El Zarco (1869); Martín Fierro (1872); Doña Bárbara (1929); The Life and Adventures of Joaquín Murieta, the Celebrated California Bandit (1854); Vida y aventuras del más célebre bandido sonorense Joaquín Murrieta: sus grandes proezas en California (1904); Fulgor y muerte de Joaquín Murieta (1967); The Authentic Life of Billy, the Kid (1882) and El bandido adolescente (1965). The peripheral individuals inhabiting these cultural and political borderlines raise important issues of nation, race, state and social identities and allow us to interrogate better the complex processes of Latin American and US national formation. This incursion into the cultural histories of these heterogeneous social conflicts in the Americas during a period of national expansion and construction also seeks to put in conversation diverse intellectual perspectives from the Global North and South.
Open Access
Combatientes fascistas de España: La División Azul a través de los estudios culturales
(University of Oregon, 2021-09-13) Tejada Lopez, Macarena; Herrmann, Gina
Gradually in Spain, the Blue Division—a volunteer corps of 47,000 sent by the Spanish fascist government to fight alongside Hitler in the Wehrmacht on the Eastern Front (Novgorod-Leningrad area) between October 1941 and October 1943—has been acquiring increasing visibility in popular literature. This mini-boom is better understood within a broader context that spans back to the "memory boom" of the 2000s, which in Spain counted with the support of the socialist government of Prime Minister Rodríguez Zapatero (2004-2011). His efforts to recuperate the historical memory and the unearthing of crimes during Francoism also drove the ex-Divisioners to share their experiences in the Russian campaign, since, ultimately, their stories also belong within the complex historical memory of World War II Spain and Europe. Combatientes Fascistas de España examines the memoirs and war diaries that three key Divisioners, Dionisio Ridruejo, José Martínez Esparza, and José Luis Gómez Tello, penned in the 1940s and 1950s, to address how their racial and ideological positions inform their observations of the confrontation between the Other (the Russians, the East) versus Us (the Spaniards, the West); and to explore questions of gender identity related to the soldier as the model of masculinity under fascism. This project additionally deconstructs the only two feature films directed by exdivisioners Pedro Lazaga (1954) and Falangist José María Forqué (1956) from the standpoint of the political economy of cinema, an approach that understands films as a marketable product. The cinematic sections of this project address how the Francoist State financed cinema to elevate the anti-Communist discourse during the Cold War. My study of imaginative filmic and autobiographical works about the Blue Division contributes to a piece of European history that illuminates—beyond historiography—the Hispano-Nazi collaboration and the performance of Spanish fascist masculinities in World War II. Moreover, it contributes to the cultural production of the Cold War period by studying how Francoism borrowed from the social capital inherent to the novels, memoirs, and films of the Blue Division in order to shore up the anti-Communist ideological foundation that fueled and permitted the protraction of the Franco regime: the longest-lived dictatorship in 20th century Europe. This dissertation builds on previously published material.
Open Access
Crime Fiction of Crisis: New Neo-Realism in the Age of Berlusconi from 1990 to 2010
(University of Oregon, 2015-01-14) Antonelli, Antonella; Lollini, Massimo
This dissertation focuses on selected crime novels by Grazia Verasani, Elisabetta Bucciarelli, Carlo Lucarelli, Luciano Marrocu, Massimo Carlotto and Giancarlo De Cataldo written between 1990 and 2010, the years known as the era of former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, an age that is symbolic, among other things, of disrespect and affront to democracy, of reinforcement of sexism, control of the media, controversial legitimizing views of Fascism, impudent corruption, attempts to change and create laws for personal advantage, and collusion with Mafia. My work shows that these novels are romanzi sociali that continue the tradition of social commitment of Italian crime fiction began with Augusto De Angelis in the 1930s and then developed by Giorgio Scerbanenco, Loriano Macchiavelli and Leonardo Sciascia. The novels I analyze are a commentary on the country's current crises, such as the status of women, the objectification of the female body and the increase of violence against women (Verasani and Bucciarelli). My study also explores how historical crime fiction brings attention to the issue of historical revisionism that characterized the rise to power in 1994 of Berlusconi's Forza Italia and exposes the mythology of the innocent Fascist and the good-hearted Italian regarding the responsibilities of Italian colonialism (Lucarelli and Marrocu). Finally, in an era characterized by the lack of freedom of the press, some of these novels act as a counter-information tool on hot issues such as the collusion with the institutions and organized crime and the web of powers that shaped postwar Italy, and they demythologize the image of northeastern Italy, described as the engine of Italian economy, by exposing its corruption and illegal business with organized crime (De Cataldo and Carlotto). Ultimately, this dissertation shows the potential of crime writing as a genre suitable to perform social criticism and to involve a more socially and politically conscious readership.
Open Access
Curiosidad Barroca: La Colección en la Cultura Literaria Hispanoamericana Virreinal y Contemporánea
(University of Oregon, 2013-07-11) Portugal, Luis; García-Pabón, Leonardo
My main thesis is that Baroque can be considered not only as an aesthetic or historical period in the seventeenth century; it is also a way of producing knowledge that puts into dynamic interaction diverse genres, disciplines and historical contexts. I visualize my project under the rubric of a cabinet of curiosities, and I reframe the continued juxtaposition of objects, machines, instruments and artwork that characterize the baroque cabinet to offer an explanatory construct of the early modern Hispanic world and modern Latin American literature and culture. In the first chapter of the dissertation, I contextualize the extensive theoretical discussion on Baroque and Neo-baroque within the studies of collection and curiosity. My main goal with this approach is to create a specific bibliography and understanding of Baroque as a complex process of collecting and displaying different kinds of knowledge through emotions such as wonder and marvel. In the second chapter I examine the impact of the New World on the stable "tower of knowledge" of humanists at the end of the fifteenth and the beginning of the sixteenth centuries. One definitive consequence of this impact was the questioning of the liabilities of ancient text and the need to arrange the new information, which was coming from different resources, into collections of distant and peculiar objects. Expanding this historical frame, I analyze how letrados in the seventeenth century, such as Favián, Sigüenza y Góngora, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Espinoza Medrano, and Arzans Orsúa, were displaying the New World as the biggest collection of curiosities as a way of constructing an emergent criollo subjectivity. After grounding the project in the theoretical and colonial Baroque, my study turns, in the third chapter, to the modern Neo-baroque. I argue that modernity in Latin America is generated by the assimilation of the Enlightenment into a Baroque system. Therefore, Baroque in Latin America represents more than a simple or "erroneous" copy; it is rather a process of "cannibalization" and counterconquest, as José Lezama Lima proclaimed in his literary essay "Baroque Curiosity" (1957). This dissertation is written in Spanish.
Open Access
Curses and laughter: The ethics of political invective in the comic poetry of high and late medieval Italy
(University of Oregon, 2010-06) Applauso, Nicolino
My dissertation examines the ethical engagement of political invective poetry in thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Italy. Modern criticism tends to treat medieval invective as a playfully subversive but marginal poetic game with minimal ethical weight. Instead, I aim to restore these poetic productions to their original context: the history, law, and custom of Tuscan cities. This contexts allows me to explore how humor and fury, in the denunciation of political enemies, interact to establish not a game but an ethics of invective. I treat ethics as both theoretical and practical, referring to Aristotle, Cicero, and Brunetto Latini, and define ethics as the pursuit of the common good in a defined community. Chapter I introduces the corpus, its historical and cultural background, its critical reception, and my approach. Chapter II discusses medieval invective in Tuscany and surveys the cultural practice of invective writing. Chapter III approaches invectives written by Rustico Filippi during the Guelph and Ghibelline wars. Chapter IV explores invectives by Cecco Angiolieri set in Siena, which polemicize with the Sienese government and citizenry. Chapter V examines invectives in Dante's Commedia (Inf. 19, Purg. 6, and Par. 27), focusing on his unexpected humor and his critique of the papacy, the empire, and Italian city governments. My conclusion examines the ethical function of slanderous wit in wartime invective. These poems balance verbal aggression with humor, claiming a role for laughter in creating dialogue within conflict. Far from a stylistic or ludic exercise, each invective shows the poet's activism and ethical engagement. This dissertation includes previously published material.
Open Access
Diálogos Transoceánicos Coloniales: Poética Criolla en Negociación
(University of Oregon, 2017-09-06) Del Barco, Valeria; Powell, Amanda
My dissertation focuses on the poetic production of three criollas —the offspring of Spaniards in the Americas— in dialogic relation with prominent male writers across the Atlantic. The works studied, Clarinda’s Discurso en loor de la Poesía (1608); Epístola a Belardo (1621) by Amarilis; and Sor Juana’s Primero sueño (1692) and La Respuesta (1691), span the entirety of the 17th century, in both the Viceroyalty of Perú and New Spain. Important interventions in Latin American colonial culture have noted criollos’ ambivalence towards the culture inherited from Spain as well as the need to assert their cultural agency through writing. The poets at the center of my study participate in this preoccupation with the added complication of being women, whose works are habitually read in isolation, as exceptions. My dissertation defines a feminine criolla poetics dialogically negotiated with western tradition, be it Spanish gongorismo or Italian humanism, while highlighting the tension between inserting themselves in the canon and critiquing it. In place of readings that emphasize the transfer of discourse and knowledge from the center to the periphery, from the metropole to the colonies, I demonstrate that the writings of these women challenge, or even reverse, this logic. My study analyzes rhetorical and intertextual strategies by which criollas, twice removed from power due to their birthplace and gender, negotiated a space in the canon. My analysis reveals the acute consciousness of gender that informs each woman’s writing; however, I also participate in recent movements in criticism and theory that interrogate conventional notions of power, space and the directionality of colonial exchange. This dissertation examines the processes of cultural appropriation as it defines a feminine criolla poetics dialogically negotiated with western tradition, one that also opens up a space to critique this tradition through parody, irony and textual transformation. This dissertation is written in Spanish.
Open Access
Duelos disidentes: voces de mujeres españolas y vascas exiliadas en Latinoamérica
(University of Oregon, 2019-09-18) Sedano Naviera, Nagore; Enjuto Rangel, Cecilia
Since the 1980s, Spain has attempted to recuperate the intellectual legacy of the republican exiles who fled the country after losing the Civil War (1936-1939). However, in doing so, it has produced the recuperation-integration paradigm that governs contemporary memory politics. The problem with this model is that it naturalizes an illusory, teleological line of continuity between the democratic principles of post-Francoist Spain and the Second Republic. Duelos disidentes contributes to the critique of this recuperation-integration paradigm by examining the political projects delineated in the memoirs of Spanish, Basque republican, and Basque nationalist women-in-exile. Published between 1970 and 2011, what unites the memoirs of these three women—María Teresa León (1903-1988), Aurora Arnáiz (1913-2009), and Arantza Cazalis (1929)—is the defense of the Second Republic (1931-1936) as an alternative to the capitalist liberalism that started to develop under Franco’s dictatorship (1939-1975). I argue that the autobiographical works of León, Arnáiz, and Cazalis politicize emotion to articulate an aesthetics of female mourning that disrupts the continuity between the Second Republic and post-Francoist, neoliberal Spain. This aesthetics advances a double critique: on the one hand, it condemns the exclusion of women from the official history of the Spanish Civil War; on the other, it formulates an alternative to the temporality of the patriarchal capitalist nation (León, chapter 2), the legal person of the liberal political tradition (Arnáiz, chapter 3), and the elitism and colonial imaginary of the literary canon of the exile of 1939 (Cazalis, chapter 4). But as I defend in Duelos disidentes, the misencounter of these women-in-exile with Latin America reveals the limits that arise from the nationalist ideologies camouflaged in their (anti)colonial transatlantic rhetoric. This study elucidates how an aesthetics of mourning can serve as an alternative paradigm of historical memory that does not neutralize its political component. In the process, it sheds light on the colonial imaginary that troubled the relationship of progressive, European exiles with Latin America, contributing to current debates about the memory of colonialism, anti-capitalist struggles, and women in politics. This dissertation builds on previously published material.
Open Access
Écriture Artiste and the Idea of Painterly Writing in Nineteenth-Century France
(University of Oregon, 2018-04-10) Slave, Alexandra; Gould, Evlyn
My interdisciplinary dissertation, Écriture Artiste and the Idea of Painterly Writing in Nineteenth-Century France, studies the notion of écriture artiste as an ideologically charged aesthetic doctrine that provides a better understanding of the rapports between art and the socio-historical context of mid nineteenth-century France. Specifically, using a case study approach, I examined four encounters between writers and painters, including Gustave Flaubert, Gustave Moreau, the Goncourt brothers, Eugène Delacroix, Émile Zola, Édouard Manet, J.-K. Huysmans and Odilon Redon. I analyzed how these pairings, each illustrative of a different facet of écriture artiste, highlight extratextual realities of the time through aesthetic embellishments. Findings show that some of these artists refashion the existing hierarchy of academically legislated rules on style by purposefully obscuring legibility in order to valorize artistic productions as alternatives to, not copies of, nature. Moreover, they reshape cultural views by staging the coexistence of lyrical and positivist elements, thus encouraging an array of subjective interpretations. I conclude that écriture artiste provides a valid framework for analyzing a self-conscious type of art that uses symbolic power to shape public taste. In turn this provides alternatives to a monolithic model upheld by legitimate culture. The central contribution of my project is its analysis of écriture artiste as a concept that does not fit neatly specific categories of genre or literary movements. My work intervenes in extant debates on literature and the visual arts in the latter half of the nineteenth century by challenging the critical tradition that considers écriture artiste as a pedantic descriptive style. My dissertation broadens the scope of écriture artiste beyond the work of the Goncourt brothers. This expansion of the field also reveals that this type of art theory is developed with an acute consciousness about the power of art and the artist to reach a changing readership, prompted by the shifting ideological climate of the time.
Open Access
En Clave de Mujer:La construcción de la Subjetividad femenina en el Caribe
(University of Oregon, 2019-09-18) Pérez Ibáñez, Doralba; Enjuto Rangel, Cecilia
This dissertation proposes a study of female Caribbean subjectivity based on corporeality. By establishing relationships that break racial, geopolitical, linguistic and cultural barriers that have historically separated the subjects from the region, this methodology allows for the construction of the subject from a less limiting spectrum. This study explores the construction of female subjectivity—and the mechanisms women use to subvert structures of power—through the analysis of the images and voices of girls and women represented in five novels and a short story written by six Caribbean female authors. My dissertation takes as its point of departure the hypothesis that female subjectivity emerges from the tension between the “lived body” and the “objectified body,” which is produced socially by the inscription of its materiality through relationships of power. For this reason, I analyze the place of bodies in society and the inscription of what is social in them, since bodies are a vehicle for social discipline par excellence. At the same time, they are the locus where the reinvention of identities becomes possible. What more, bodies are spaces or places where society can see its starkest reflection. In other words, bodies constitute social canvasses with agency for change. This dissertation argues that the symbolic appropriation of bodies by means of religious, political, legal, and medical discourses is the thread that holds together the patchwork quilt that constitutes the Caribbean region. Female authors such as Maryse Condé and Mayra Santos Febres are important for this study because of their approach to history, their re-writing of the black body in official history, and their attention to the racialization of the Caribbean woman. Rosario Ferré and Marvel Moreno exemplify in their fictional worlds the ways in which the female body is harmed through medical and religious discourses, and Rita Indiana Hernández and Zoé Valdés illustrate the ravages that ideologies and political discourses infringe on the bodies and the capital cities of the Dominican Republic and Cuba.
Open Access
Esthetique et ethique de l'agentivite dans le roman antillais
(University of Oregon, 2009-06) Fonkoue, Ramon Abelin
This dissertation examines the intersection between aesthetics and politics in the French Caribbean novel. The major argument of this work is that French Caribbean novels pursue a political agenda. I contend that in this literature, unlike in that of any other part of the contemporary world, theoretical considerations take precedence over aesthetic concerns in writers' works. I call this an "aesthetics of rupture." Considering works by authors such as Aimé Césaire, Léon-Gontran Damas, Maryse Condé, Edouard Glissant, Patrick Chamoiseau, Daniel Maximin and Gisèle Pineau, I argue that only by looking beyond aesthetic innovations in these authors' texts, can we fully ascertain the significance of this politically committed literature. The first chapter discusses the relevance of the theoretical approach and the contribution this work brings to the field. The second chapter examines how West Indian writers use theoretical approaches to regain control over the metadiscourses applied to their works. The third chapter looks at Caribbean aesthetics as the product of writers' collective effort and of the dialogic nature of their texts. The fourth chapter analyses the question of the hero in the Caribbean novel and the fifth chapter discusses the crossing of politics and ethics in Caribbean writing. The last chapter addresses the post-Césaire era and the future of literary production in the French Caribbean. I contend that, preoccupied about the power of their writing to effect any real world change, Caribbean writers seem haunted by Fanon's call to engage in political action. The issue of ethics thus arises as a result of a dilemma born from the conflict between the subject's political agenda and his/her human values. The ethical question in this literature concerns the crossing of an ethical subjectivity with a political agenda. The first response to this quandary is a redefinition of the notion of the hero that departs from Western "vertical" heroism and promotes a "horizontal" heroism. In addition, through their novels, Caribbean writers distance themselves from a universal humanism to advocate for an "ethics of action" which locates its legitimacy in the urgency of political agency for their people.
Open Access
From the Fields to the Streets to the Stage: Chicana Agency and Identity Within the Movimiento
(University of Oregon, 2016-02-23) Moberg, Erin; Taylor, Analisa
The unionization of the United Farm Workers in 1962 precipitated the longest labor movement in US history, which in turn inspired all sectors of Chicana/o activism and artistic production. As the Movimiento gained support and recognition throughout the 1960s, grassroots and activist theater and performance played fundamental roles in representing its causes and goals. By the 1980s, however, the Movimiento was frequently represented and understood as a reclaiming of Chicano identity through an assertion of Chicano masculinity, a reality which rendered the participation and cultural production of Chicanas even less visible within an already marginalized cultural and historical legacy. In this dissertation, I seek to develop historically grounded answers to questions around issues of male visibility and female and lesbian/gay/bisexual/queer invisibility within the Movimiento and dominant Anglo culture. I work to bridge this critical gap in the treatment of plays by Chicana/o dramatists in two ways: (1) by examining plays by Chicanas without attributing or reducing their impact to their identities as women, lesbians, and/or feminists but rather by considering the performative characteristics of their works and (2) by engaging issues of gender and sexual biases and hierarchies across several decades of Chicana/o cultural production. A primary goal of this project is to shift and expand the critical focus of scholarship and discourse on Chicana/o theater and performance in order to consider the lived experiences and creative contributions of the many participants in the Movimiento, many of whom are not represented through the perspective, experience, and voice of the heteropatriarchal Chicano subject. I maintain that we must take into account multiple and often conflicting representations of the Movimiento and of Chicana/o identity in order to more fully understand the history of Chicana/os in the US and to better confront the mechanisms of exclusion toward Chicana/os that have continued into our present moment. At stake is the equal treatment and inclusion of the contributions of Chicana and lesbian/gay/bisexual/queer Chicana/o dramatists as well as a more profound and nuanced understanding of the fight for the liberation of multiple and diverse Chicana/o subjects that has continued into our present moment.
Open Access
Generating Geographies and Genealogies: Jewish Women Writing the Twentieth Century in French
(University of Oregon, 2019-09-18) Brenner, Natalie; Gould, Evlyn
This dissertation offers an alternative account of Jewish history and experience from within the post-Holocaust and postcolonial Francophone world through the study of six autobiographically-inclined texts written by three generations of Francophone Jewish women of diverse geographical origins. While France was the first European nation-state to grant citizenship to Jews in 1791 and the French Republic has since branded itself as a beacon of tolerance, this tolerance has been contingent upon a strict politics of assimilation and has been challenged by French colonization and participation in the Holocaust. Simultaneously, the evolution of French memory politics and official historical narratives throughout the second half of the twentieth century has reflected a slow coming to terms with and official recognition of French participation in the Holocaust at the expense of acknowledging the traumas of de/colonization also inflicted by the French State. As a result, Jews and postcolonial populations – all marginalized groups affected by these traumatic episodes of modern French history – have been placed in separate categories. This separation has on the one hand reinforced identity politics and narratives of competing victimhood, occluding the interconnections between antisemitism, racism and Islamophobia, and on the other hand excluded Jews from debates concerning multiculturalism and inclusive citizenship. This dissertation demonstrates that these histories of assimilation, exclusion and marginalization are interconnected rather than separate. With an intentional focus on Jewish women and their writing as a means of demonstrating these false separations, I posit and trace the development of “écriture juive féminine” (“Jewish feminine writing”) across the three generations of writers, a textuality characterized and driven by five principles: an ethics of openness to the true, untheorizable and irreducible alterity of others achieved through listening, extreme and perpetual liminality that calls readers into the discomfort of uncertainty, an imperative to mourn and remember losses, an endlessly regenerative writing that resists singular interpretation and opens into further questions, and writing with the body against phallologocentrism. This writing addresses politics of assimilation and exclusion, proposing instead a radical universalism that includes the particular without reducing it to essentialist categories.
Open Access
Género y Lengua: Literacidad Crítica en el Aula de Español como Lengua Heredada
(University of Oregon, 2024-01-09) Boyero Agudo, Lara; Holguín Mendoza, Claudia
En este trabajo cualitativo que sigue una metodología de participación de acción, estudio el desarrollo de la conciencia crítica sociolingüística de la lengua y el género en doce hablantes bilingües latines en un curso avanzado dentro del programa de español como lengua de herencia de una universidad predominantemente blanca del noroeste del pacífico en los Estados Unidos. Para ello, sigo el acercamiento crítico de CriSoLL: Literacidad Lingüística Sociocultural Crítica, el cual se centra en paradigmas antirracistas, de historicidad crítica y de variación estilística, así como los estudios sociolingüísticos de tercera ola de lengua y género y las premisas del feminismo chicano. Con este marco crítico, diseño la clase feminidades latinas en los medios: lengua, género y sus interseccionalidades, así como los materiales didácticos y las tareas por las cuales obtengo todos los datos que forman mi análisis. Los resultados demuestran que, a lo largo de las diez semanas que duro el trimestre, les estudiantes sumaron capas de conocimientos sociolingüísticos (lengua, género, raza, clase, sexualidad) problematizando ideologías que se habían dado por sentadas debido al status quo que permea en las escuelas. Aunque la conciencia crítica que mostraron por medio de sus posicionamientos actitudinales no es lineal, al final del curso, se observa cómo argumentan aludiendo a las diferentes variables sociolingüísticas y al vocabulario utilizado en clase en relación a los marcos pedagógicos empleados en la instrucción. Asimismo, trabajar en el aula como una comunidad de práctica, valida y legitima el capital sociocultural que estes estudiantes traen a la clase y les empodera para usar sus experiencias como conocimiento válido en la clase. Usando pedagogías críticas en la clase de español como lengua heredada, no solo nos revelamos y luchamos ante la cultura privilegiada que afecta a los currículos y marginaliza a les estudiantes que se encuentran en grupos subordinados, fortaleciendo los espacios para que ejerzan su agencia.
Open Access
Gubernamentalidad y Construcción de Sentidos de Ciudadanía y Criminalidad en la Narcoliteratura
(University of Oregon, 2016-02-23) Romero Montano, Luz; Taylor, Analisa
In this dissertation, I argue against the idea that literary works that portray drug-trafficking, or “narconovelas,” are mere apologias for drug-trafficking and governing failures unique to Colombia and Mexico. In order to problematize that statement, it is necessary to understand how drug-trafficking and its policies started, changed over time, and came to shape our contemporary practices of citizenship and our sense of justice. Drawing on Foucault’s concept of “governmentality”, I argue that a political reading of narconovelas will help us to rethink categories of governmentality such as governed subjectivities, governed bodies and inhabited spaces. In narconovelas, these categories reveal the construction of a criminal otherness, which is portrayed as antagonistic to an ideal middle-class model of citizen. In other words, readers of “narconovelas” do not learn about “narcoculture” or drug-trafficking but paradoxically about the markers of a middle-class citizen: “well spoken,” educated, able to control his/her own pleasures, conservatively dressed, and responsive to the disciplining of security dispositifs. In the first part of this dissertation, I explain how the opium policies and wars in China during the 19th century as well as the colonialist efforts of the United States established a precedent for the governing of drugs on a global level. Colombian and Mexican governing of drugs is linked not only to that precedent but also to the neoliberal ways of the governing of drugs. The second part of this work contains the literary analysis. I found that feminine subjectivities are constructed by highlighting the differences between a middle-class woman and a subaltern woman, and the body of the criminal is constructed based on distinctions of social class; in addition, the micro-politics for the representation of bodies derive from the colonial assumption that bodies can be owned, abused and disposed. I also found that narconovelas reverse our understanding of the center and the periphery; some novels even depict a transforming sense of citizenship by reimaging the inhabited spaces. With this work, I demonstrate that cultural production and in particular the narconovelas reinforce, challenge or remain ambiguous to the various biases that shape contemporary categories of governmentality such as gender, body and space. This dissertation is written in Spanish.
Open Access
INFRAESTRUCTURAS DE MODERNIDAD: ESTÉTICAS DECADENTISTAS Y DESARROLLO URBANO EN BOLIVIA
(University of Oregon, 2024-01-09) Velasco, Javier; Millar, Lanie
Esta disertación analiza el desarrollo de la estética literaria decadentista en Bolivia en conexión con las infraestructuras de urbanización del espacio a principios del siglo XX. A diferencia del decadentismo europeo, que desarrolló un lenguaje experimental para dar cuenta de un cansancio civilizatorio y para mostrar el lado oscuro de la modernidad, en Latinoamérica el decadentismo fue parte de un proceso político y cultural criollo de integración a la modernidad. Desde el caso de estudio boliviano, mi disertación examina en periódicos, fotografías, documentos administrativos y otros materiales de archivo, junto a varios textos narrativos de la época, la forma en que la expansión de la ciudad, impulsada por nuevas tecnologías e infraestructuras de urbanización del espacio, no sólo reflejó las tensiones sociales entre las elites criollas y grupos subalternos en ascenso (cholos e indios), sino que fue el lugar desde donde las elites imaginaron un espacio material y simbólicamente ordenado con el criollo al centro de la modernidad. En una aproximación inicial, infraestructuras son presencias materiales en el espacio que, además de posibilitar el movimiento de cosas y personas, determinan subjetividades, procesos racionales y formas de imaginación colectiva. Por tanto, mi trabajo plantea que la modernidad criolla fue infraestructuralmente imaginada en la reorganización técnica y espacial de la ciudad, con nuevas tecnologías de transporte, calles ampliadas, nuevas construcciones y novedosos diseños urbanos. Este proceso de urbanización produjo al mismo tiempo la infraestructura literaria de la narrativa de estilo decadentista, que reanimó las tensiones raciales coloniales en un intento por contener el avance de grupos subalternos que amenazaban la hegemonía criolla. En cada uno de los capítulos de mi disertación examino cómo la llegada e implementación de las nuevas infraestructuras se manifestaron en un lenguaje de movilidad y estacionarismo; cómo el desarrollo de un lenguaje de conectividad y cosmopolitismo estuvo relacionado con la emergencia de nuevas construcciones urbanas, hábitos de consumo y fantasías de contacto cultural en las elites; y cómo, en una versión alternativa de la modernidad criolla, una infraestructura de origen rural, como es la chichería, produjo un lenguaje de enamoramiento y feminización de la mercancía para fundar la idea de una modernidad económica de tipo liberal-mestiza. Estos elementos compusieron la aplicación local del decadentismo de principios de siglo, que, siguiendo el modelo europeo presentaba la imagen de personajes criollos enfrentados al orden instituido, sensibilidades pesimistas e individualistas, y reflejaba la urgencia criolla de organizar la modernidad y afirmarse dentro de un espacio social en transformación del cual se sentía desplazado.
Open Access
Interliminal Tongues: Self-Translation in Contemporary Transatlantic Bilingual Poetry
(University of Oregon, 2017-09-06) Rigby, Michael; Enjuto Rangel, Cecilia
In this dissertation, I argue that self-translators embody a borderline sense of hybridity, both linguistically and culturally, and that the act of translation, along with its innate in-betweenness, is the context in which self-translators negotiate their fragmented identities and cultures. I use the poetry of Urayoán Noel, Juan Gelman, and Yolanda Castaño to demonstrate that they each uniquely use the process of self-translation, in conjunction with a bilingual presentation, to articulate their modern, hybrid identities. In addition, I argue that as a result, the act of self-translation establishes an interliminal space of enunciation that not only reflects an intercultural exchange consistent with hybridity, but fosters further cultural and linguistic interaction. As a manifestation of their hybrid sensibilities, each of these three poets employs the process of self-translation as an extension of their poetic themes, including a critique and parody of postmodern globalization, reappropriation of language to combat forces of oppression and deterritorialization, or a socio-linguistic representation of bilingual life in a stateless nation from the perspective of a minority language. Self-translation highlights the interliminality between languages, establishing a “third space” of communication that transcends the incomplete communicative ability of each of the two languages. When presented bilingually, self-translation foregrounds the act of translation; the presence of both languages not only encourages interaction between the two languages, but also draws attention to the act of translation, instead of obscuring it in a layer of transparency. This brings the reader to ponder the act of translation and the relationship between languages, ultimately enabling the reader to more fully appreciate the generative qualities of translation.
Open Access
International Interventions: Rosario Castellanos (1925-1974) and Global Feminist Discourses
(University of Oregon, 2018-09-06) Gallo, Erin; García-Caro, Pedro
This thesis explores the international dimensions of Rosario Castellanos’ writings, which exhibit a constant—and evolving—preoccupation with feminist literature from across the world. The Mexican woman, public intellectual, professor, author, and ambassador dialogued with Simone de Beauvoir, Simone Weil, Betty Friedan, Emily Dickinson, Virginia Woolf, Gabriela Mistral, and Clarice Lispector, among others, while relating their ideas to Mexican women’s lives. Her journalistic production, essays, poetry, and narrative undergo an evolution as Castellanos articulates a unique Mexican feminist project that factors in race, class, and other intersections affecting Mexican women. I access Castellanos—who has been considered the “Simone de Beauvoir of Mexico”—through the lens of global feminism, which considers the varying layers of power and powerlessness when women of disparate regions and cultures seek solidarity. Through a global feminist perspective, we see how Castellanos, rather than blindly importing First World women’s agendas, carefully intervenes in global feminist discouses with what Mexican women need. In her evolution, Castellanos grows closer to a feminist project that, rather than buying into the myth of a global sisterhood, evokes instead a desire for a Latin American sisterhood and for Mexican women’s self-definition.