Theses - Spanish and Portuguesehttps://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/2237982024-03-29T14:54:55Z2024-03-29T14:54:55Z211Newspapers in Wartime: Case-studies in Madrid, Valencia, and Barcelona during the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939)Edwards, Samanthahttps://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/3642632024-02-09T01:41:47Zdc.title: Newspapers in Wartime: Case-studies in Madrid, Valencia, and Barcelona during the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939)
dc.contributor.author: Edwards, Samantha
dc.description.abstract: During the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939), Republican newspapers attempted to bridge politically and culturally diverse audiences in defense of an unstable democracy attacked by authoritarian forces. Spain is a complex country home to multiple national identities which claim their own region, language, and way of life, making the theme of Spanish unification tense and conflicting. Using rhetorical framing analysis, with elements of historical discourse analysis and affect theory, this thesis explores the fluid dynamic between political communication and propaganda and the ways both incorporate themes of history, nationalism, and religious faith in Spain. Through analysis of daily coverage in Madrid, Valencia, and Barcelona, the three capitals of the Second Spanish Republic, each chapter focuses on a popular periodical of the city and era. Case-studies include Republican *ABC* (Madrid), *El Pueblo* (Valencia), and *La Vanguardia* (Barcelona) as I investigate framing strategies in wartime journalism, the narratives they produced, and the selective emphasis and omission of events in the quest to accomplish mandated messaging objectives. I argue that the impacts of emotion on lived experience help separate the journalist from the historian. Testimonies demonstrate that in the midst of conflict, editors and reporters are susceptible to the same biases and emotions as the general public, resulting in the construction of frames to guide (or distort) the processing of information. I find that national imaginaries are critical to the practice of communicating armed resistance in wartime, moulding frightening realities to specific cultural contexts and locating them within motivational interpretations of the national past. The history of the press is integral to the human search for knowledge and understanding, and it is my hope that the following case-studies of newspapers in the Spanish Civil War will contribute new insights into the role and function of news media in times of crisis.
Advanced ideas, Anachronistic landscapes: The Contradictions of Science in Machado de AssisCarvalho Da Annunciacao, Vivianehttps://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/3619892023-12-22T14:51:42Zdc.title: Advanced ideas, Anachronistic landscapes: The Contradictions of Science in Machado de Assis
dc.contributor.author: Carvalho Da Annunciacao, Viviane
dc.description.abstract: This thesis explores the theme of science in the short stories of the nineteenth-century Brazilian writer Machado de Assis, with an emphasis on ‘O Alienista’ (1882), ‘A Sereníssima República’ (1882), ‘Idéias de Canário’ (1899), ‘O Segredo do Bonzo’ (1882), ‘Conto Alexandrino’ (1884), ‘Verba Testamentária’ (1882) and ‘O Lapso’ (1884). With a particular interest in the many ways in which Machado deploys scientific theories as literary and sociological devices, this research examines how a broad concept of ‘unreason’ critiques modern state institutions such as hospitals, museums, prisons and government-sponsored medical projects. The critique extends to the self-professed liberal and politically independent scientific discourse in Brazil in the late nineteenth century, when the country was undergoing profound political, economic and social changes, especially those modes of discourse and political intervention promoted by an economically and racially hegemonic and homogenous intelligentsia. While Machado de Assis uses madness and egocentrism to challenge the idealistic view of the putatively reasonable and progressive ‘man of science’, he also denounces social tensions aesthetically through temporal and spatial displacements as well as fantastic elements, such as talking animals or absurd situations, which dialogue with the ancient tradition of the fable. The critical outcome is, thus, an ethically charged poetics of unreason which is a product of an ironic scepticism vis-à-vis Romantic nationalism, literary naturalism and scientific positivism, particularly as they bear on questions of race, gender, class and nationality and as disseminated by scientific institutions.
From the Edge: the Littoral in Visual and Literary Imaginaries of MexicoFoster, Lucyhttps://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/3573862023-12-22T14:13:41Zdc.title: From the Edge: the Littoral in Visual and Literary Imaginaries of Mexico
dc.contributor.author: Foster, Lucy
dc.description.abstract: The word littoral/*litoral* derives from the Latin *litor*, meaning ‘of or pertaining to the shore’ (OED). It entered usage in the mid-seventeenth century and has since accumulated a variety of referents, some cartographically or ecologically specific, others symbolic. The ‘littoral zone’ has most recently been defined as the space between the high and low water marks along a coastline. This thesis considers the Mexican littoral as a topographically bound and metaphorically loaded perspective from which to realign understandings of the country’s cultural and territorial development from the time of the Spanish conquest through to the twentieth century. Bringing decolonial principles and works of Cultural Geography to the analysis of visual and literary materials, and incorporating anthropological and ethnographic stances, the multimedia and interdisciplinary approach adopted here aims to develop modes of ‘thinking littorally’ about Mexican culture. Mobilising an innovative grouping of sources relating to the country’s edgelands – maps, photography, film, poetry, music, fishing logs, travelogues, ethnographic accounts – the thesis decentres dominant territorial imaginaries in pursuit of an understanding of the country that incorporates, rather than obliterates its vital margins, towards a recalibration of existing, principally inland-centric scholarship. Concerned chiefly with the coastal states of Oaxaca, Guerrero, Nayarit and Veracruz as the matrix of Mexico’s global significance as incipient point of the conquest of the Americas, it begins with an examination of cartography as the visual artefact and index for understanding the imaginative consequences of colonial expansion and conquest. It then considers the racial and ethnographic repercussions of the colonial slave trade and lasting cultural and aesthetic implications of Mexico’s position at the heart of trade routes, particularly regarding primarily coastal dwelling Afro-descendant communities. Literature that adopts the littoral as an allegorical imaginary is probed, and the thesis attends to the role that the coastal environment plays in growing critique concerned with the ecological turn in Latin American art. Localised aspects of Mexico’s littoral and its cultural practices and artefacts are assessed to reformulate analytical perspectives and address transferrable questions relating to competing or forgotten histories associated with migration, race, slavery, climate change, and the perceptible intersections between them.
The Heroics of Conquest: Hernán Cortés in the Early Modern Hispanic EpicHagley, Jessicahttps://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/3536582023-12-22T13:10:54Zdc.title: The Heroics of Conquest: Hernán Cortés in the Early Modern Hispanic Epic
dc.contributor.author: Hagley, Jessica
dc.description.abstract: This thesis explores the representation of the Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés in four epic poems spanning the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, investigating how the politico-historical conditions of early modern Spain and Mexico gave rise to varying concepts of heroism. Through an analysis of Gabriel Lobo Lasso de la Vega’s *Mexicana* (1594), Antonio de Saavedra Guzmán’s *El peregrino indiano* (1599), Juan Cortés Osorio’s *Las Cortesiadas* (c. 1665), and Juan de Escoiquiz’s *México conquistada* (1798), this thesis establishes a transatlantic dialogue between poets writing from both the Peninsula and the Americas, exploring what the diversity of heroisms embedded in their epics reveals about the complex economic, cultural, religious, and political matrix of early modern Spanish and colonial society. In my consideration of how the figure of Cortés is used as a tool to explore issues of patronage, creole identity, evangelisation, and nationalism, I question not only how heroic discourse is conditioned by historical context, but also by the poets themselves, who, far from objective recorders of Cortés’ deeds, harbour their own personal motivations and ideological agendas. Through tracing the epic genealogy of Cortés across three centuries, this thesis not only follows the journey of the conquistador, but also that of the epic genre and its intimate relationship with the history of Spanish imperialism.
Material Virtuality: Remaking Rio de Janeiro’s Past and Present through Digital MediaAdams, Victoriahttps://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/3495382023-12-22T13:54:01Zdc.title: Material Virtuality: Remaking Rio de Janeiro’s Past and Present through Digital Media
dc.contributor.author: Adams, Victoria
dc.description.abstract: Since the 1970s, Brazil’s authorities have regarded the country’s past as a source of cultural and economic value (Gonçalves 2007; Collins 2015). In the late 2000s, a boom in Brazil’s consumer economy served to make smartphones and social media ubiquitous across the country (Spyer 2017). This thesis focuses on how these two phenomena intersect in the city and state of Rio de Janeiro. Drawing on material gathered during fieldwork in 2019 and 2020, it examines how a selection of cultural-historical projects use digital media to explore Rio’s past.
This thesis argues that, through their exploration of Rio’s past, each of these projects shapes how people engage with the city and state and reproduces their space (Lefebvre 1991). This analysis of how digital media intervene in the production of Rio’s space contributes to scholarship that explores Rio’s urban and cultural history (Sevcenko 2003; Needell 1987;
Carvalho 2018). In so doing, it adds to literature exploring how the screens of digital media form an integral and constitutive part of the space of contemporary cities (McQuire 2016; Degen and others 2017).
The thesis also contends that the projects it examines all reflect and remake contemporary understandings of how Rio should be in ways that are contingent upon and shaped by the material context(s) from which they emerge, namely, Rio’s enduring history of racialised
urbanism, its authorities’ shifting attitude to the past, and changes in Brazil’s approach to cultural funding following its return to democracy in the late 1980s (Sevcenko 2003; Gonçalves 2007; Rich and Vieira 2020). Through analysis of the impact of these factors and from the perspective of a city in the Global South, this thesis dialogues with a growing literature in media studies that examines how the historicity of different forms of technology shapes their affordances (Hu 2015; Crawford 2021).
The structure of the thesis moves from Rio’s centre towards its suburbs and rural hinterlands to examine the different ways that digital media are used to interrogate the past of these distinct areas. Chapter One focuses on Rio’s centre. It examines how the circulation of early photographs of Rio on an Instagram page called rioantigo transforms them into axes of debate about what kind of city Brazil’s former capital should be. Chapter Two moves from Rio’s centre towards its suburbs. It interrogates how a walking-tour initiative, Rolé Carioca, and a virtual museum, Rio Memórias, use a mixture of digital platforms and in-person events to encourage residents of Rio to reconnect with their city’s public spaces. Chapter Three considers how glitches, uneven provision of infrastructure, and deliberate acts of sabotage inform the shape of Passados Presentes, a project which uses digital media to explore the legacy of slavery across Rio state.
Aristotelian and other auctoritates in the works of Enrique de Villena, and their possible sourcesMutton, Richard Anthony Johnhttps://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/3494332023-12-22T13:14:36Zdc.title: Aristotelian and other auctoritates in the works of Enrique de Villena, and their possible sources
dc.contributor.author: Mutton, Richard Anthony John
dc.description.abstract: My objective has been to examine, selectively, <i>auctoritates</i> which Villena, who was working during the early days of the emergence of ‘vernacular humanism’ in Castile, used in his body of work, and to identify their possible sources. My approach assigns all authoritites used by Villena to seven key groups (e.g., classical, biblical) and eight categories of possible source works (e.g., <i>florilegia</i>, encyclopaedias), for which I determine relationships.
In what I consider the key component, I review the Latin extracts used by Villena in
<i>Consolación</i>, <i>Lepra</i> and <i>Aojamiento</i> in an extensive exercise in which I identify more than 300 possible primary references. I find that approximately one third of these references can be attributed to Vincent de Beauvais’s <i>Specula</i> and his briefer works. This figure can be extended to more than 400 examples when secondary possible sources are taken into account. Other significant possible sources I identify include <i>Auctoritates Aristotelis</i>, popular in the Middle Ages, <i>Compendium moralium notabilium</i> (using the 1505 printed version <i>Epytoma sapientie</i>), Pietro Alighieri’s <i>Commentum</i>, and the <i>Verona florilegium</i> (of 1329). I have also made an assessment of the extent to which <i>Auctoritates Aristotelis</i> might be a possible source throughout Villena’s body of work, not solely for Aristotle, but also for Boethius and Seneca. In a third evaluation, I assess the possible sources of what I identify as a ‘double authority’ in <i>Glosas</i> 35 (Plato/Boethius and Vegetius).
As a result, I have formed the opinion that a conjectural notebook, similar in scope to the Count of Haro’s <i>Vademecum</i>, a collection of excerpts distilled from several other collections of excerpts, including, for example, <i>Auctoritates Aristotelis</i>, could have been compiled for Villena’s use, obviating his need to access more than 20 source works or necessitate his dependence on complete texts of the works to which he makes reference in his writings.
Overall, I judge that my work is significant in the study of Villena insofar as it establishes a substantially enhanced understanding of Villena’s use of authorities and his possible sources that is not dependent on the work of Cotarelo.
(Hi)stories in Displacement: The Poetics and Politics of Errancia in Post-1960s Latin American LiteratureVargas Ortiz, Angelica Tatianahttps://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/3341532023-12-22T13:34:40Zdc.title: (Hi)stories in Displacement: The Poetics and Politics of Errancia in Post-1960s Latin American Literature
dc.contributor.author: Vargas Ortiz, Angelica Tatiana
dc.description.abstract: This thesis engages with errancia as a literary phenomenon within post-1960s Latin American literature. The author analyses errancia in its poetic and political dimensions and takes the work of Reinaldo Arenas, Adelaida Fernández Ochoa, Roberto Bolaño and César Aira as cardinal points in a contemporary mapping out of errancia. Figurations of errancia are analysed in the interplay between autobiographical traits, imaginary biographies of errant subjects and alternative historical discourses. Errancia features mechanisms of transgression that challenge territorial boundaries, contest rooted conceptions of Being, and destabilise the aesthetic, racial, gendered and disciplinary regimes that inform the laws of literary representation. In chapter one, Arenas’ El mundo alucinante (1965) is read as a site of intersecting authorial projections between outlaw biographies from the present and the past and foregrounds errancia’s transgression of orthodox political views and conventional discourses of history. In chapter two, Fernández Ochoa’s Afuera crece un mundo (2015) is read in its engagement with alternative narratives of independence anchored in historical forms of marronage and as a cartography of human survival that ties errancia-as-marronage to radical flight from the bounds of the national. In chapter three, Bolaño’s short stories in Putas asesinas (2001), Llamadas telefónicas (1997) and El gaucho insufrible (2003) are explored in their capacity to open up lines of flight through spatial and identitarian mobilities of errant subjects. In this errant and global cartography of intemperie, origins are revoked and normative paths of being are contested. In the final chapter, core elements of Aira’s poetics, such as geographical and symbolic displacements and procedures of simulacra and miniaturization, are examined in Cómo me hice monja (1993), La mendiga (1994) and El congreso de literatura (1997). In their vertiginous simulations of reality, these elements are tied to his view of novels as errant fictional machines.
Negotiating Gossip in the Spanish Realist NovelFell, Rebeccahttps://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/3319742023-12-22T14:08:07Zdc.title: Negotiating Gossip in the Spanish Realist Novel
dc.contributor.author: Fell, Rebecca
dc.description.abstract: This dissertation focuses on ‘chisme’ or ‘gossip’ as theme, plot device and narrative dynamic in four canonical realist novels of the Spanish Restoration of the 1880s by Emilia Pardo Bazán (Chapter 1), Benito Pérez Galdós
(Chapter 2) and Leopoldo Alas (‘Clarín’) (Chapter 3).
An Introduction presents a theoretical analysis and framework of chisme, beginning with its definition and etymology, and considers the historical moment (the Spanish Restoration). It also draws on the fields of anthropology and psychology (Dunbar and Foster), philosophy (Foucault and Adkins) and sociology (Bourdieu), and literary theory (Bakhtin) to define gossip in terms of its core purpose (information-sharing, segregation and distancing, connection and bonding, or all simultaneously).
This study argues that, when viewed as gossip, these texts are at their most powerful. They dialogue with and bond, confound and distance readers, alerting them to hidden intentions. They point to the epistemological value of gossip as a form of knowledge, and as a metaphor for the Spanish realist text. Their reproduction and troubling of social norms echo the multiple dual-faceted dynamics of gossip: knowledge/power, schism/bonding, differentiation/homogenisation, totalisation/fragmentation,
speculation/substantiation, among others.
Chapter 1 on Emilia Pardo Bazán’s Los Pazos de Ulloa and La madre Naturaleza examines gossip’s role in apportioning blame and stereotyping, and marginalising others. In a form of gender revenge, Pardo Bazán
turns on its head the stereotypical belittling of women and women’s discourse as gossips and gossip, and exposes male anxiety around gossip and status.
In Chapter 2, I posit that in Fortunata y Jacinta Galdós uses an economy of gossip to create bonds between his characters, to bond readers to character groups and to question the patriarchal status quo. Using the theories of Pierre Bourdieu on the bourgeois construction of social distinction through displays of material wealth and other visible ‘signs’ of power and influence, I argue that gossip about Fortunata points to the interdependency of the social and symbolic capital (‘status’) of the bourgeoisie and working classes (‘el pueblo’).
Chapter 3 analyses gossip as a form of tale-telling in Clarín’s La Regenta. I propose that the narrator is the personification of a nasty gossip, whose exposition, privately to readers, of the characters’ shortcomings and vices, duplicity, deception and hypocrisy, serves as a mimetic echo of their tale-telling and backbiting. The narrator’s gossip strategies are emotive, designed to provoke feelings of distaste, disgust and displeasure, sensations and perceptions far more difficult than pleasure to disavow or ignore.
All four texts expose the power relations between narrator and reader. The triangle of desire that exists between narrator, reader, and characters mirrors that of gossiper, interlocutor, and target of gossip.
Between Tradition and Transgression: Education, Culture, and (Inter)national Pedagogies in Spain (1857–1931)Lawson, Andrew Parkerhttps://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/3316762023-12-22T14:00:48Zdc.title: Between Tradition and Transgression: Education, Culture, and (Inter)national Pedagogies in Spain (1857–1931)
dc.contributor.author: Lawson, Andrew Parker
dc.description.abstract: This dissertation examines three prominent educational reform movements in late nineteenth- and early- twentieth century Spain: the Institución Libre de Enseñanza (Free Institute of Teaching), the Escuela Moderna (Modern School), and the Escola Nova Catalana (New Catalan School). Studying these movements syncretically, analyzing both similarities and differences, the thesis contends that efforts at educational reform throughout Spain were vibrant, heterogeneous, and far-reaching. Although bound together by history, politics, culture, and more, the thesis studies how each movement conceived differently the relationship between the individual and the collective, or the particular and the universal: the Institución Libre de Enseñanza pursued a liberal Spanish “cultural nationalism,” while the Escuela Moderna eschewed nationalist formulations in favor of international collectivism, and the Escola Nova Catalana sought to increase Catalonia’s political and economic influence both domestically and internationally by championing study of Catalan history and language.
By privileging child-centered pedagogical theories that focused on rationalism, autonomy, hygiene, and wellness, and by taking steps to widen educational access to girls and working-class children, the three movements contributed to the constellation of reform that advanced Spain’s often fractured process of modernization. Spanish and Catalan educationalists were also active in global circuits of intellectual exchange. Accordingly, the thesis deploys a cultural and historical archive to illustrate the international characteristics and contributions of educational reform movements in modern Spain. In their attempts to “modernize” pedagogical methods and curricular offerings and to “emancipate” students from the strictures of State-sponsored Catholic hegemony, Spanish and Catalan educationalists occasionally employed rhetoric and embraced methods that mirrored the practices they critiqued. Thus, the dissertation considers the ties and tensions between tradition and transgression in an array of areas that range from religion, economics, and governance to gender, class, and national identity to the prospects and/or specters of revolution. Ultimately, the dissertation explores the interconnected relationships between pedagogy, politics, and power to offer fresh perspectives that will enrich the cultural and intellectual histories of modern Spain and its relations to the wider world.
Refracted Communications: Multilingualism and (Im)Purity in the Works of Maria-Mercè Marçal and Julia FiedorczukGoclawska, Aleksandrahttps://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/3302702023-12-22T14:08:04Zdc.title: Refracted Communications: Multilingualism and (Im)Purity in the Works of Maria-Mercè Marçal and Julia Fiedorczuk
dc.contributor.author: Goclawska, Aleksandra
dc.description.abstract: This dissertation explores the multilingual poetics of hospitality in the works of Maria-Mercè Marçal (1952-1958), who wrote in Catalan, and Julia Fiedorczuk (born in 1975), who writes in Polish. Multilingualism, for Marçal and Fiedorczuk, will not only refer to the presence of multiple languages in a literary text, but also to translation; it also means a mixing of dialects and argots with the normative versions of Polish and Catalan and includes the mixing of different symbolic structures that regulate communication, such as the expression of gender, skin color or class belonging. Chapter One provides an outline of the ties between the nation, national language, and family in Polish and Catalan contexts; it also engages with texts by Marçal and Fiedorczuk that inform and potentially destabilize the traditionally gendered roles within the national community, metaphorized as family. I point to the historical perilousness of the patriarchal understanding of the nation as ‘the country of men,’ and of the romanticized Nature as woman (the latter, I argue, acquires an especially dangerous dimension given the on-going, global environmental crisis). In Chapter Three, I explore some alternative versions of nationalism or patriotism in alignment with the ecofeminist and transnational writing practice of both authors. Marçal complicates the links between motherhood and language; she also reworks the myth of the dragon and Sant Jordi, pointing to the ties between patriarchy and anthropocentrism. For Fiedorczuk, the links between poetry and spirituality give rise to an abstract notion of Fatherland, which needs to be replaced with the care for the cleanliness of the air, seas, and rivers, leading to an understanding of community founded upon inter-species solidarity. In Chapter Three, Marçal and Fiedorczuk appear in their role as translators. In the chapter, rather than offering a critique of Marçal’s and Fiedorczuk’s translations, I sketch the visions of the translator’s task that shine through Fiedorczuk’s and Marçal’s translation strategies. Fiedorczuk analyzes translations in the context of representation of the non-human world and sees translation and writing as part and parcel of the same process: ecopoetic interbeing, by which she understands the making of a home through language. Marçal’s focus is on musicality, sound, and dialogue, which remain linked to her understanding of writing and translating as passion. In Chapter Four I look at the importance of translation as metaphor in Marçal’s and Fiedorczuk’s writing. Chapter Five contains close readings of fragments of Fiedorczuk’s and Marçal’s prose, focusing on language mixing, the definition of language border and linguistic and cultural ‘outsiders.’ For Marçal, boundary-crossing is a metaphor for inter-human and inter-textual, passionate relationships, which are often germane to translation. For her part, Fiedorczuk understands writing as an ecopoetic issue, as the creation of a home in which both the human ‘outsiders’ and the non-humans will thrive.