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Of Animals, Monsters, and Cyborgs. Alternative Bodies in Latin American Fiction (1961-2012)

dc.contributor.authorColanzi, Liliana
dc.contributor.chairCastillo, Debra Ann
dc.contributor.committeeMemberErber, Pedro Rabelo
dc.contributor.committeeMemberMonroe, Jonathan Beck
dc.date.accessioned2017-04-04T20:27:15Z
dc.date.available2017-04-04T20:27:15Z
dc.date.issued2017-01-30
dc.description.abstractThis work draws from animal studies, biopolitics, and posthumanism to explore the ways in which the body is simultaneously inscribed and erased in seven Latin American texts from the last fifty years: from João Guimarães Rosa’s “Meu tio o Iauaretê” (1961) to Martín Felipe Castagnet’s Los cuerpos del verano (2012), and including Sara Gallardo’s Eisejuaz (1971), Jorge Baron Biza’s El desierto y su semilla (1998), Mario Bellatin’s Flores (2000), Miguel Esquirol’s “El Cementerio de Elefantes” (2008), and Rafael Pinedo’s Subte (2012). In these novels and short stories the body is the place where issues of race, sexuality, and ethnicity are negociated and contested: I focus on the figures of the animal, the monster, and the cyborg as bodies that escape the confining limits of a white, rational, and heterosexual normativity modeled after modern and contemporary Western ideals. In all these narratives, the marginalized body helps to destabilize binary concepts such as nature/culture, human/animal, normal/abnormal, civilization/barbarism, and is the springboard from which biological life —instead of the usually dominant logos– is able to generate a field of affect, estrangement, or resistance which can be influential in the creation of alternative communities. In the aforementioned cases, the animal sign is instrumental in thinking on those bodies —whether they are sick, disabled, queer, poor, marginalized, female, indigenous, minority— that do not conform to an hegemonic image of Man.
dc.identifier.doihttps://doi.org/10.7298/X4765C8J
dc.identifier.otherColanzi_cornellgrad_0058F_10095
dc.identifier.otherhttp://dissertations.umi.com/cornellgrad:10095
dc.identifier.otherbibid: 9906004
dc.identifier.urihttps://hdl.handle.net/1813/47757
dc.language.isoen_US
dc.subjectLatin American Literature
dc.subjectanimal studies
dc.subjectArgentina
dc.subjectbiopolitics
dc.subjectcontemporary Latin American literature
dc.subjectposthumanism
dc.subjectscience fiction
dc.titleOf Animals, Monsters, and Cyborgs. Alternative Bodies in Latin American Fiction (1961-2012)
dc.typedissertation or thesis
dcterms.licensehttps://hdl.handle.net/1813/59810
thesis.degree.disciplineComparative Literature
thesis.degree.grantorCornell University
thesis.degree.levelDoctor of Philosophy
thesis.degree.namePh. D., Comparative Literature

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