Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Studies - Doctoral Theses

Permanent URI for this collection

https://hdl.handle.net/10468/1958

Browse

Now showing 1 - 19 of 19

Aesthetic campaigns and counter-campaigns. Jorge Luis Borges and a century of the Argentine detective story (1877-1977)
(University College Cork, 2013) Barrett, Eoin George; Finnegan, Nuala
This cultural history of Argentine crime fiction involves a comprehensive analysis of the literary and critical traditions within the genre, paying particular attention to the series of ‘aesthetic campaigns’ waged by Jorge Luis Borges and others during the period between 1933 and 1977. The methodological approach described in the introductory chapter builds upon the critical insight that in Argentina, generic discourse has consistently been the domain, not only of literary critics in the traditional mould, but also of prominent writers of fiction and specialists from other disciplines, effectively transcending the traditional tripartite ‘division of labour’ between writers, critics and readers. Chapter One charts the early development of crime fiction, and contextualises the evolution of the classical and hardboiled variants that were to provide a durable conceptual framework for discourse in the Argentine context. Chapter Two examines a number of pioneering early works by Argentine authors, before analysing Borges’ multi-faceted aesthetic campaign on behalf of the ‘classical’ detective story. Chapter Three examines a transitional period for the Argentine crime genre, book-ended by the three Vea y Lea magazine-sponsored detective story competitions that acted as a vital stimulus to innovation among Argentine writers. It includes a substantial treatment of the work of Rodolfo Walsh, documenting his transition from crime writer and anthologist to pioneer of the non-fiction novel and investigative journalism traditions. Chapter Four examines the period in which the novela negra came to achieve dominance in Argentina, in particular the aesthetic counter-campaigns conducted by Ricardo Piglia and others on behalf of the hard-boiled variant. The study concludes with a detailed analysis of Pablo Leonardo’s La mala guita (1976), which is considered as a paradigmatic example of crime fiction in Argentina in this period. The final chapter presents conclusions and a summary of the dissertation, and recommendations for further research.
“Fiction makes a better job of the truth”: dialogism, oppositional consciousness and re-membering in the novels of Helena María Viramontes
(University College Cork, 2014) McNamara, Niamh; Finnegan, Nuala
This thesis comprises close textual analyses of Chicana author Helena María Viramontes' two published novels, Under the Feet of Jesus (1995) and Their Dogs Came With Them (2007). These analyses fall under three broad frameworks: space, time and body. Chapter One engages with the first of these frameworks, space, and explores concepts of cognitive mapping and heteroptopias. Chapter Two, which looks at time, employs theories of intertextuality and the palimpsest, while Chapter Three looks at the interrrelationship between mythology and images of the body in the texts. This study emerges five years after the publication of Viramontes' last novel, Their Dogs Came With Them, but offers fresh insight into the contribution of the author to both the Chicano literary tradition and also the U.S. canon through her critique of hegemonic power structures that suppress not only the voices of lower class ethnic citizens but also of ethnic writers. In particular, her work chastises the paucity of attention given to ethnic women writers in the U.S. This thesis reaffirms Viramontes' position as one of the most important writers living and writing in the U.S. today. It corroborates her work as a contestation against ethnic and gender suppression, and applauds the craftsmanship of her narrative style that delicately but decisively exposes the socio-political wrongs that occur in ocntemporary U.S. society.
A corpus-driven error analysis of the oral and written production of Leaving Certificate Spanish learners
(University College Cork, 2015) Costello, Kerrill; Buffery, Helena; University College Cork
The Leaving Certificate (LC) is the national, standardised state examination in Ireland necessary for entry to third level education – this presents a massive, raw corpus of data with the potential to yield invaluable insight into the phenomena of learner interlanguage. With samples of official LC Spanish examination data, this project has compiled a digitised corpus of learner Spanish comprised of the written and oral production of 100 candidates. This corpus was then analysed using a specific investigative corpus technique, Computer-aided Error Analysis (CEA, Dagneaux et al, 1998). CEA is a powerful apparatus in that it greatly facilitates the quantification and analysis of a large learner corpus in digital format. The corpus was both compiled and analysed with the use of UAM Corpus Tool (O’Donnell 2013). This Tool allows for the recording of candidate-specific variables such as grade, examination level, task type and gender, therefore allowing for critical analysis of the corpus as one unit, as separate written and oral sub corpora and also of performance per task, level and gender. This is an interdisciplinary work combining aspects of Applied Linguistics, Learner Corpus Research and Foreign Language (FL) Learning. Beginning with a review of the context of FL learning in Ireland and Europe, I go on to discuss the disciplinary context and theoretical framework for this work and outline the methodology applied. I then perform detailed quantitative and qualitative analyses before going on to combine all research findings outlining principal conclusions. This investigation does not make a priori assumptions about the data set, the LC Spanish examination, the context of FLs or of any aspect of learner competence. It undertakes to provide the linguistic research community and the domain of Spanish language learning and pedagogy in Ireland with an empirical, descriptive profile of real learner performance, characterising learner difficulty.
'Muchos Méxicos': widening the lens in Rulfo's cinematic texts
(University College Cork, 2015) Brennan, Dylan Joseph; Finnegan, Nuala; Federal Government of Mexico; Society for Irish Latin American Studies
It is difficult to overstate the importance of Juan Rulfo’s two major pieces of fictional narrative work—his haunting, enigmatic novel Pedro Páramo (1955) and his unrelenting depictions of the failures of post-revolutionary Mexico in his short story collection El Llano en llamas (1953). In her foreword to the Margaret Sayers Peden English translation, Susan Sontag hails Pedro Páramo as ‘not only one of the masterpieces of 20th Century world literature, but one of the most influential of the century’s books’. García Márquez has compared the influence of Rulfo on 20th Century world literature to that of Sophocles: ‘No son más de 300 páginas, pero son casi tantas y creo tan perdurables como las que conocemos de Sófocles’ and, completing this oftrepeated triumvirate of recommendations, Jorge Luis Borges has referred to Pedro Páramo as: ‘una de las mejores novelas de las literaturas de lengua hispánica, y aun de la literatura.’ Despite the praise heaped upon Rulfo’s two most famous books, when his third book of fiction, El gallo de oro y otros textos para cine, was finally published in 1980, just six years before his death, it was greeted with almost critical silence. It is precisely this publication that provides the focus of this investigation. The collection contains three texts—El despojo, La fórmula secreta and El gallo de oro. Constituting a third of the fictional work he published in his lifetime, expanding upon themes present in El Llano en llamas and Pedro Páramo while, at the same time, examining new ground, no thematic discussion of Rulfo’s written output is complete without including these texts. Yet they are frequently dismissed. In this way this investigation attempts to go some way towards filling this critical gap in the work of one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century
Performing Irishness: translations of Irish drama for the Galician stage (1921-2011)
(University College Cork, 2015) Serra Porteiro, Elisa; Buffery, Helena; Irish Research Council; University College Cork
This PhD thesis provides a detailed analysis of the role and significance of Irish drama in the Galician cultural context, from the early twentieth century onwards, through scrutiny of key works translated, adapted and mediated for the Galician stage. Drawing primarily on the theoretical framework of Descriptive Translation Studies, informed by Polysystems theory (Toury), Post-colonial Translation, research on processes of cultural translation (Bassnett, Lefevere, Venuti, Aaltonen), as well as careful comparative attention to the specificities of literary, theatrical and cultural context, I examine the factors governing the incorporation, reshaping and reception of twentieth century Irish plays in Galicia in order to produce a cultural history of the representation of Ireland on the Galician stage. Focusing on the five key periods I have identified in the translation/reception of Irish drama in Galicia, as represented in specific versions of plays by Yeats, Synge, O’Casey and McDonagh, my thesis examines in detail the particular linguistic, sociopolitical, theatrical and cultural dimensions of each rewriting and/or restaging in order to uncover the ways in which Irish identity is perceived, constructed and performed in a Galician context. Moving beyond the literary, historical and philological focus of existing studies of the reception of Irish literature and foreign dramatic texts in the Galician system, my own approach draws on Theatre and Performance Studies to attend also to the performative dimension of these processes of cultural adaptation and reception, giving full account of the different agents involved in theatre translation as a rich and complex process of multivalent cultural mediation.
Echoes of existentialism in the works of Carlos Fuentes
(University College Cork, 2015) Aylward, Patrick; Finnegan, Nuala
In this thesis I have set out to trace the echoes of existentialism in the work of the Mexican novelist, Carlos Fuentes scrutinizing, in particular, La región más transparente, La muerte de Artemio Cruz and Cambio de piel. In the opening segment of the thesis I outline the essential tenets of existentialist thought and how it became the predominant philosophical and literary movement of the early part of the twentieth-century. Stemming from the work of Sören Kierkegaard in Denmark towards the end of the nineteenth-century, it challenged the arid philosophies of previous generations and provided a new way of looking at man and the human condition. In this opening chapter, I study the works of the more important philosophers in this regard such as Heidegger, Sartre, Jaspers, Marcel, Unamuno, and Ortega y Gasset and show how each in his own way contributed to the further development of the new philosophy. Chapter 2 is concerned with the spread of existentialism to the Latin American continent. In the early part of the twentieth-century, Mexico was emerging from a turbulent revolutionary period and seeking a solution to the fractured nature of its society. The Spanish philosopher, Ortega y Gasset, and the many Spanish intellectuals who sought refuge from Franco’s dictatorship in Mexico, helped to popularise the new philosophy and these lively debates about existentialism served to underpin ideas around mexicanidad or Mexican national identity. Carlos Fuentes was deeply immersed in the debate of his time, positioned as he was as a prominent public intellectual. In La muerte de Artemio Cruz he shows us how great wealth and power are a poor recompense for the loss of love and compassion and lead only to alienation and selfishness. In his other best known novel, La región más transparente, he explores the rise of modern Mexico and its society – an inauthentic society that is corrupted by a scramble for wealth and self-aggrandizement. The final chapter is devoted to the study of Cambio de piel which is concerned with violence and alienation as central pillars of existence. The violence depicted here precipitates a crisis in the human condition and an accompanying sense of alienation. The thesis seeks to establish that existentialism is central not only to Fuentes’s literary concerns but also forms a part of his ethics as an artist.
Chicana poetics: genre and style in Gloria Anzaldúa and Lorna Dee Cervantes
(University College Cork, 2015) Alexander, Donna Maria; Jenkins, Lee; Finnegan, Nuala; Irish Research Council; College of Arts, Celtic Studies and Social Sciences, University College Cork
This thesis conducts a formal study of the poetry of Gloria Anzaldúa and Lorna Dee Cervantes, placing their work in dialogue with genre and style. These two Chicana poets are exemplary of politicised experimentation with poetics, underpinned by a keen awareness of the rich history of form, genre and style. In the work of each poet, two poetic modes are examined: one traditional, and one experimental. Anzaldúa’s uses of the dramatic monologue as a border genre, and her construction of [auto]poetics, stemming from her multi-genre, autobiographical approach to writing, are considered. Cervantes’s complex approach to the construction of docupoetics that achieves a depth of field in terms of merging a multidimensional approach to aesthetics with highly politicised transnational content, as well as her engagement with the longstanding poetic of elegy via various formal points of entry, is investigated. These poetic modes are primarily explored via close readings, supported by a multidisciplinary framework that includes Anzaldúa’s feminist theories of identity and writing, abjection theory, postcolonialism, and transnationalism. Overall, these four key areas demonstrate the ways in which aesthetics is a crucial consideration in the exploration of the broader issues of content and context in Chicana poetry.
Geografia emocional d'un exode: La retirada republicana de 1939
(University College Cork, 2016) Jaime Moreno, Rafael; Buffery, Helena; Irish Research Council
This thesis proposes to trace and explore an emotional geography and cartography of the republican withdrawal at the end of the Spanish Civil War in Catalonia during the months of January and February 1939. Thus, it complements existing historiographical scholarship on the Spanish Civil War and Spanish Republican Exile, especially with regard to what was experienced in Catalan territory. However, its main purpose is not that of the historian, to reveal and explain unexplored stories, but to locate existing narratives, memoirs, journals and testimonies carefully in the landscape in which they took place, exposing their emotional bonds with the places and spaces of the withdrawal of the protagonists of the Republican exodus of 1939. Whilst there has been significant work in recent years to “recover” spaces associated with violent of traumatic memories of conflict and displacement, including the creation of a network of “Democratic Memory” places in Catalonia, the spaces explored in this thesis have not so far been construed as places of memory. In part, this is because of the diversity of emotions and affective responses they provoked and continue to evoke, but also because the geography of the Retirada is characterized by mobility and multiplicity. So instead of an historical approach, despite being influenced by Walter Benjamin's concept of history, this thesis draws on existing methods and approaches related to cultural geography, in particular, the emerging interdisciplinary field known as emotional geographies. In order to create a vision of La Retirada that is sensitive to its mobility and multiplicity, the primary methodology used has been that of interdisciplinary assemblage, juxtaposing images, documents and stories of past and present, in a process redolent of that which Marianne Hirsch calls "post-memory".
In His Majesty’s Service: the career of Captain Francisco de Cuéllar in the armed forces of the Spanish Monarchy (1578-1606)
(University College Cork, 2017) Kelly, Francis; Morgan, Hiram; Boyd, Stephen; National University of Ireland
Captain Francisco de Cuéllar was a military officer who served in the armed forces of the Spanish Monarchy during the late sixteenth century. He is known to Irish history through a remarkable account (Carta) that he composed about his experiences in Ireland and Scotland following shipwreck on the Sligo coast in September 1588. While Cuéllar and his Carta became synonymous with the story of the Spanish Armada in Ireland, virtually nothing else was known about him. This thesis has two objectives: to present the first comprehensive study of Captain Cuéllar’s career, which spanned the years 1578-1606, and to assess his military service within the broader context of soldierly life of the period. Using a rich haul of previously undiscovered documentation from Spanish and Belgian archives, the progression of Captain Cuéllar’s military service has been retraced. Divided into two sections, Part I comprises three chapters that retell the story of his career. The aim of the section is not just to document Cuéllar’s activities, but also to reflect on the strategic designs of the Spanish Monarchy that shaped the context in which Cuéllar’s military service was played out. Part II also consists of three chapters. In this section the discussion will focus on analysis of his military service. Cuéllar served as an officer for most of his career. As a captain he was a member of a cohort of officials whose responsibility it was to recruit, maintain, and lead the troops with the task of ensuring that the policies formulated by the Spanish Monarchy, in the international sphere, would succeed. Through additional topics: promotion, remuneration, discipline etc., Cuéllar’s experiences and activities are evaluated in relation to established assumptions about military life. Thereby, the study seeks to garner new insights about the livelihood of the average military officer of the time.
Reimagining Catalonia from Havana: transcultural identities and narratives of nationalism in the literature of the Catalanists of Cuba (1908–1959)
(University College Cork, 2018) Jerez Columbié, Yairen; Buffery, Helena; Finnegan, Nuala; University College Cork
This thesis studies documentary traces of the activism of the Catalanist community associated with the Centre Català of Havana, concentrated mainly around the journal La Nova Catalunya (1908–1959), in order to explore what they reveal about the construction of diasporic identities and of Americanist ideas of nationalism during the first half of the twentieth century. My research proposes a contrapuntal reading of a neglected literature from a perspective that draws primarily on decolonising theories by Fernando Ortiz, in order to highlight the importance of reactivating the studied material to show the ties and tensions between narratives of nationhood and Ortiz’s concept of transculturation, thus contributing to non-Eurocentric accounts of the exchanges between Europe and the Americas. Ortiz himself, who will be shown to be a key player in this twentieth-century Catalan-Cuban milieu, will be read alongside the journal’s leading figure, Josep Conangla i Fontanilles. The research mainly draws on primary sources including an almost complete collection of La Nova Catalunya, books, and written versions of speeches. The approach relies on a theoretical and methodological corpus drawn from Cultural Studies and in dialogue with work in Catalan, Hemispheric American, Latin American and Caribbean studies.
No place like home: trauma and the moral subject in contemporary Argentine cinema
(University College Cork, 2018) Clancy, Fiona; Levey, Cara; Irish Research Council
Over the past two decades, cinematic production from Argentina has been enjoying increased commercial success and critical acclaim on both the national and international film scenes. This thesis investigates the representation of trauma in six films produced during this new wave of Argentine cinema by three Argentine directors – Albertina Carri, Lucrecia Martel and Pablo Trapero – who are among the most iconic filmmakers to be associated with the so-called New Argentine Cinema. This thesis contends that it is both timely and appropriate to examine these films beyond the temporal and thematic confines of the critical category of ‘New Argentine Cinema’, thus opening up the work of these directors to a wider field of analysis. I argue that Argentina’s filmic representations of trauma go beyond the political to the very heart of the human condition, occupying the opaque, ambiguous spaces between the private and political, the individual and collective, and the national and global. Placing six films in comparative perspective, the thesis establishes an original framework for exploring trauma, offering a nuanced approach to the myriad ways in which it is presented in cinematic production. Each of these films powerfully captures, in different ways, the complex dynamics of physical and psychological trauma, and demonstrates that trauma is more than a psychic phenomenon or a physical wound – it is also a social construct. The thesis considers three key facets of trauma: the bodily, the psychological and the social. The former addresses the cinematic representation of bodies, and the way in which trauma is transmitted in and by the body, in order to scrutinize the link between trauma and corporality. The latter two examine the psychological dimensions of trauma, and explore how the aftermath and ongoing fallout of traumatic experiences are represented in films by engaging with a structural theory of trauma and a phenomenological approach to the human person. Drawing on the Edith Stein’s underexplored phenomenology (1989, 2000) as a means of negotiating the physical, psychological and social spheres, I assert that the way in which these three dimensions of trauma are interconnected elucidates the variety of ways in which violence remains present in society and continues to proliferate in subtle forms. By interrogating the ambiguous spaces between the physical and psychological, the individual and collective, and the private and political, I argue that these films offer original insights into the relationship between physical and psychological trauma and thus elucidate the subtle ways in which violence permeates the globalized world. In so doing, the thesis highlights Argentina’s exceptional contribution to contemporary cinema as a creative didactic force within a precarious national and global culture.
Mapping the works of Manuel de Pedrolo in relation to the post-civil war Catalan landscape
(University College Cork, 2019) Nilsson-Fernàndez, Pedro; Buffery, Helena; Murphy, Orla; Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences
Polygraph author Manuel de Pedrolo stands as one of the most prolific Catalan writers in the twentieth century. Furthermore, he is a figure unquestionably associated with Catalan identity and the region’s struggle for self-determination. His corpus comprises over one hundred and twenty titles – poetry, drama, short stories and novels, as well as a number of political articles, mostly written for Catalan newspapers during the 1980s, and later collected in volumes. In spite of the recent revival of interest in his figure and his work, coinciding with the commemoration in Catalonia of the centenary of his birth, there has still not been an attempt to systematically measure his impact, nor even the kind of diachronic mapping of his legacy I propose here. This study will address a representative selection of thirteen short stories and twenty-one novels written by the author between 1938 and 1976 – in the genres of Sci-Fi and fantasy, crime fiction and realism – from a spatial point of view. Through a painstaking charting of the spaces represented by the author in his texts, this thesis maps Pedrolo’s contribution to the (re)construction of the twentieth-century Catalan literary landscape and visualises the scope of his overarching literary project. In order to aid in the deciphering of such a wide and heterogeneous corpus as that of Pedrolo, this study combines a critical approach that draws on a cultural studies toolkit (cultural geography, urban studies, postcolonial approaches) with distant-readings provided by the use of GIS and a text-mining script, benaura.py, specifically created for this project.
Through the looking-glass: the interartistic practice of Remedios Varo
(University College Cork, 2019) Albaladejo Garcia, Nadia; Finnegan, Nuala; Buffery, Helena; Irish Research Council
This thesis sets out to map and explore the interartistic practice and relations developed in the creative production of twentieth-century woman artist and writer, Remedios Varo i Uranga (Anglès, Girona 1908 - Mexico City, 1963), who achieved significant international recognition for one aspect of her work: her paintings. I explore and analyse key examples of her interartistic practice throughout her career. These include: Varo’s literary experiments, co-creating the surrealist play El santo cuerpo grasoso with Leonora Carrington; the commercial commissions she carried out for Bayer which is here read in relation to their context of publication; her best-known sculptural work, Homo rodans, examined in relation to the hybrid text which accompanied it and the various traces of its performative composition; and her most famous ‘treatise’ on interartistic practice, the painting La creación de las aves, which is read alongside a selection of her dream narratives. These works are primarily analysed using an interdisciplinary framework that includes cultural and literary studies, theatre and performance studies as well as anthropology and philosophy. Overall, the analysis demonstrates that the extant critical insistence on translating her into a single dominant frame or worldview, even while recognising the importance of her diasporic mobility, ultimately reduces the liminal, performative and often playful nature of her work and downplays her capacity to negotiate and move between different languages, cultures, media and disciplines.
Otras miradas: representations of gender violence in contemporary Mexican visual culture (2001-2011)
(University College Cork, 2019) Clifford, Emer; Finnegan, Nuala; Irish Association for Mexican Studies; Mexican Government
This doctoral thesis presents a critical analysis of visual responses to gender-based violence in contemporary Mexican culture, with the aim of identifying how new forms of narrative can engender ‘ethical visibilización’ of gender-based violence, through instigating ‘otras miradas’, or other ways and modes of spectating and witnessing violence. Central to this investigation are three individual artworks by three Mexican artists, created at different intervals over a particularly violent ten year period (2001-2011). They are as follows: Maryse Sistach’s neorealist auteur film, Perfume de violetas: nadie te ve (2001); Rodrigo Cruz’s multimedia project, Violencia en contra de las mujeres (2006); and Yamina del Real’s tableau photography exhibition, “El cuerpo deshabitado... o En busca del cuerpo perdido” (2011). This thesis subsequently examines how the visual narratives created by these contemporary artists, counter dominant sensationalistic and hyper-violent representations of gender violence, which otherwise exploit victims and commodify violence. Drawing on Ann E Kaplan’s theory of trauma culture, as well as insights from across a broad range of disciplines, it will be argued how each visual artist independently fashions an active audience through their respective processes of ethical or anti-Othering and incitement of intellectual spectatorship. In so doing, they facilitate a re-imagining, and re-presentation of gender violence in Mexican visual culture, which ultimately forms a wider political narrative of ‘ethical visibilización’ of the processes and consequences of gender violence.
Comparative indigeneities in contemporary Latin America: an analysis of ethnopolitics in Mexico and Bolivia
(University College Cork, 2020) Warfield, Cian; Finnegan, Nuala
This thesis engages in a comparative analysis of two key ethnopolitical case studies drawn from Bolivia and Mexico. The intention is to critically evaluate the politically diverse ways in which Indigenous groups respond to the challenge of coloniality as they seek to restore their ethnic rights. The 2011 TIPNIS conflict between President Evo Morales (2006-2019) and lowland Indigenous communities reveals the difficulties faced by Bolivia’s former Indigenous president who struggled to find equilibrium between ethnic rights and national economic development. While Morales himself claimed to represent the interests of all Bolivian ethnic groups, the TIPNIS conflict showed that a policy of neoextractivism in combination with territorial development intersected with the struggle for ethnoterritoriality to reproduce scenes of chaos, conflict and socio-territorial change which sometimes distorted, at other times, enhanced his image as an Andean-decoloniser. Comparatively, in 2003, the Zapatista social justice movement bypassed Mexican state relations in order to satisfy their search for ethnoterritoriality. While the Zapatistas struggled in the midst of this pursuit against a global capitalist framework, which they claim, masquerades as international free-trade alliances and foreign corporatism, the rebels have become an important ethnopolitical model of resistance in the context of a neoliberal Mexico. Conceptually framed around notions of place and space, this interdisciplinary study uses a broad range of theoretical approaches (decolonial theory, discourse theory, utopia studies) which facilitates an innovative reading of key speeches, declarations, government policy documents, communiqués and locally-sourced journalistic material and relies on a range of scholarship drawn from cultural studies, political science, anthropology and philosophy. Through its comparative design, this thesis not only generates fresh and original perspectives on contemporary ethnopolitical activity between Mexico and Bolivia but also reveals the challenges, opportunities, similarities and differences which shape diverse forms of ethnopolitcal resistance across the region today.
Spain in translation: a study of Spanish fiction in English translation 2000-2015
(University College Cork, 2020-04-01) McWhinney, Edward; Veiga, Martín
In this thesis I look at translation of Spanish fiction from the Iberian Peninsula into English in the twenty-first century (focusing on the years 2000–2015). My aim is to investigate the principal trends in the contemporary translation of Spanish fiction into English, exploring how these interact with previous channels of reception, whilst also examining the role and status of translators in the contemporary book market, and translational stylistics. Having established and analysed the principal trends in my database of texts, authors, translators and publishers, I will focus on issues of reception – how Spanish fiction is received in the UK and Irish literary marketplace, drawing on publishers’ paratexts and critical reviews. Analysing the most active authors between 2000-2015 from Spain in English translation I will triangulate the data shown from these diverse sources with stylistic analysis of a sample from each category, to ascertain which translation norms and strategies are prevalent in each group.
Mediating minority: the translation of Galician narrative into English in the twenty-first century (2000-2018)
(University College Cork, 2021) Linares, Laura; Buffery, Helena; Veiga, Martín; Irish Research Council; University College Cork
This thesis analyses how Galician fiction is articulated for an Anglophone readership in the twenty-first century (2000-2018) in terms of its content and representation of Galician culture. Through the case study of a small, minoritised nation which largely depends on source culture support to produce new translations, this thesis argues that there is often a disconnect between the aims and objectives of these institutions and the circulation of and access to translations of Galician literature in the Anglophone context. Drawing from and building on an introductory application of Arjun Appadurai’s theory of landscapes to Translation Studies as explored by Angela Kershaw and Gabriela Saldanha, this multilayered project illustrates how definitions of translatorial success can be articulated very differently depending on the vantage point from which they are observed. Through an analysis of both the source and target contexts, it ultimately demonstrates that the representation of Galician fiction in the Anglophone world relies on the translations of two authors: Manuel Rivas and Domingo Villar. As a complement to the more general analysis of the corpus, this thesis provides an in-depth study of these two authors, starting with an overview of their representation for the Anglophone readership through paratextual materials and reviews in the press and blogs, followed by an in-depth textual exploration of their source and target texts using the key word method, extracted from corpus stylistics. The analysis reveals that, despite the radical differences in genre and style, fluent translations are prioritised in both case studies, albeit leading to different results in the representation of the Galician cultural background. Ultimately, this thesis contributes a new perspective on translation processes in the twenty-first century that acknowledges the disjunctures between perceptions of translation in the contexts of production and reception. It also examines what Galician literature means to an Anglophone readership, while at the same time introducing and applying an innovative methodology that enables multilayered analysis of texts and their translations.
A comparative, diachronic study of television dubbing in Galicia and Catalonia (1983-2007)
(University College Cork, 2022-09-27) Neville, Craig; Buffery, Helena; Irish Research Council
This thesis is a comparative, diachronic analysis of dubbing for television in Galicia and Catalonia from the mid-1980s to 2007. Drawing on approaches in comparative translation studies, this thesis aims to analyse, compare and triangulate different forms of historical macro-, meso- and micro-level data from two case studies to uncover how contextual factors have affected the dubbing processes and products in each region. Drawing on several theoretical and analytical frameworks from the fields of AVT, media and communication studies and sociolinguistics, this multi-layered, interdisciplinary study explores the role that AVT has played in shaping their respective minority mediascapes and in supporting the dissemination of the Galician and Catalan linguistic standards to their respective populations. It also offers a unique insight into the resultant sociolinguistic identities that are portrayed on screen, reflecting (or not) the linguistic diversity of the Catalan and Galician viewership. Furthermore, this study also contributes to our understanding of the unique interplay between autonomous language policy and planning in Galicia and Catalonia, the views of the agents enacting such policy and the subsequent effects of their actions in these linguistically asymmetric contexts. Ultimately, this research makes key contributions to the field of AVT and Galician and Catalan studies by enhancing not only extant descriptive methodologies through the use of corpora and CAQDAS software but also our understanding of how dubbed language has evolved on Galician and Catalan television against the backdrop of Spain. Moreover, the data contained in this thesis offers a comprehensive baseline for future research possibilities in AVT, media and sociolinguistics.
Resistencia y solidaridad a través de la producción cultural de mujeres zapatistas y mayas: muralismo, teatro y video/web (1994-presente)
(University College Cork, 2023-05-03) Cabrejas Regadera, Eva; Finnegan, Nuala; Serra Porteiro, Elisa Maria; SPLAS
Abstracto El Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (EZLN), que apareció por primera vez en público en Chiapas, la noche de año nuevo de 1994, surgió de una profunda necesidad de cambio en la situación de los pueblos indígenas del país. Los zapatistas demandaron modificaciones estructurales en el sistema político mexicano que afectaron a la situación de los indígenas en cuestiones de tierra y organización política ante todo. Las mujeres participaron de manera muy activa como insurgentes, incluso antes de la revolución, y habían elaborado sus ideas como el rol de la mujer dentro de sus comunidades en la Ley Revolucionaria (1993). Por tanto, desde el principio del movimiento, la mujer ha sido eje central y ha formado parte clave del movimiento y sus visiones. Esta tesis se concentra en cómo ha evolucionado el rol de la mujer, su visión del futuro y su lucha epistémica por reivindicar sus derechos a través de la producción sociocultural y colectiva. Examina esta producción desde una posición teórica informada por las ideas sobre el feminismo des colonial e interseccional de Julieta Paredes (2010) y Francesca Gargallo (2013) entre otras. El primer capítulo se basa en el arte visual muralista comunitario del caracol Oventic como forma de manifestación colectiva y militante de protesta de la comunidad zapatista y que se deriva de mi trabajo de campo en la región en 2018. El segundo capítulo abarca los primeros vídeos de la mujeres zapatistas en internet y tres ejemplos de proyectos web, uno por mujeres mayas en la región y otros por mujeres zapatistas dentro de la Organización Comunitaria ProMedios: Las compañeras tiene grado, Oventic: Construyendo dignidad y EZLN Zapatistas Xulum’Chon Tejedoras de los Altos en Resistencia. El capítulo plantea también una discusión sobre los primeros proyectos web (Zap Women, ¡Ya Basta!, La Neta, Creatividad feminista, plataforma de solidaridad con Chiapas en Madrid y Retos Nodos Chiapas). El tercer capítulo avanza la discusión sobre la evolución de la mujer fuera de las comunidades zapatistas, explorando los trabajos teatrales de Petrona de la Cruz, escritora maya no perteneciente a la comunidad zapatista, pero que demuestra la transformación social de la mujer indígena de Chiapas y la forma de su resistencia colectiva por su derecho desigualdad. La tesis tiene como propósito principal demostrar como la lucha epistémica de las mujeres mayas y zapatistas se filtra y se canaliza a través de esta producción cultural.

Browse

Browsing Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Studies - Doctoral Theses by Issue Date

Results Per Page

Sort Options