Mimetic materialities : spatial representation in mid-20th century Latin American regionalist fiction
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- In the past decades, materiality has been a constant topic in media studies, philosophy, and poetry. In this context, how can materiality be mimetically understood in prose fiction? This dissertation investigates precisely what I call mimetic materialities in novelistic writing. In other words, I demonstrate that, in certain novels and to different degrees, aspects such as length and internal subdivisions matter, as well as punctuation, chapter organization, use of footnotes, and rewritings. Materially mimetic novels find ways of representing space, sounds, and bodies not only through actual descriptions in the text, but through their very textual tangibility. In this sense, such novels are akin to models of the spaces they represent, whose presence is mimetic without depending solely on the interpretational operations of their content to emerge. They do keep a constant connection with the novels' plots, settings, themes and descriptions, but work under a particular dynamic. I develop the concept of mimetic materialities through a careful examination of a specific body of works, comprised of Latin American novels published in the 1950s. This corpus comprises novels by the Brazilian João Guimarães Rosa, the Mexican Juan Rulfo, the Cuban Alejo Carpentier, the Peruvian José María Arguedas and the Paraguayan Augusto Roa Bastos. I propose that these works make consistent albeit diverse uses of their textual materialities in order to represent the rural or forested areas where their plots are set. I also show that these texts occupy a significant position in the Latin American literary canon, insofar as they do not belong to the regionalist fiction from the 1920s and 1930s, heavily read through a realist paradigm; nor to the Latin American boom from the 1960s and 1970s, when aesthetic experimentalism would have become one of the defining features of Latin American novel. Besides their constant exploration of material mimesis, their intermediary position between these two paradigmatic moments offers a special vantage point: it prevents this study from falling into the conflict between realism and experimentalism that dominated Latin American literary historiography in the 20th century. Without ignoring such tension, I offer an alternative way of understanding some of the fundamental novelistic moves in 20th-century Latin America.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic; electronic resource; remote |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Publication date | 2015 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Associated with | Saramago Pádua, Victoria |
|---|---|
| Associated with | Stanford University, Department of Iberian and Latin American Cultures. |
| Primary advisor | Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich |
| Primary advisor | Rocha, Marília Librandi |
| Thesis advisor | Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich |
| Thesis advisor | Rocha, Marília Librandi |
| Thesis advisor | Hoyos Ayala, Héctor |
| Thesis advisor | Moreira, Paulo, 1969- |
| Thesis advisor | Ruffinelli, Jorge |
| Advisor | Hoyos Ayala, Héctor |
| Advisor | Moreira, Paulo, 1969- |
| Advisor | Ruffinelli, Jorge |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Victoria Saramago Pádua. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Department of Iberian and Latin American Cultures. |
| Thesis | Thesis (Ph.D.)--Stanford University, 2015. |
| Location | electronic resource |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2015 by Victoria Saramago Padua
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
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