Epicas ordinarias: Espacios de catastrofe y discursos intelectuales en Mexico, Puerto Rico y Chile (1985--2005).

Format:

Book

Thesis/Dissertation

Author/Creator:

Sierra-Rivera, Judith.

Contributor:

University of Pennsylvania. Romance Languages.

Language:

Spanish

Subjects (All):

Mass media.

Journalism.

Caribbean literature.

Latin American literature.

Comparative literature.

Literature, Comparative.

Literature, Latin American.

Literature, Caribbean.

Mass Communications.

0295.

0312.

0360.

0391.

0708.

Local Subjects:

Literature, Comparative.

Literature, Latin American.

Literature, Caribbean.

Journalism.

Mass Communications.

0295.

0312.

0360.

0391.

0708.

Physical Description:

230 pages

Contained In:

Dissertation Abstracts International 74-02A(E).

System Details:

Mode of access: World Wide Web.

text file

Summary:

This dissertation is a comparative study on the relationship between spaces of catastrophe, intellectual discourses, and everyday life within the neoliberal context (1985–2005) in Mexico, Puerto Rico, and Chile. Through an analysis that considers a combined series of literary and cultural materials, such as essays, crónicas urbanas, autobiographies, songs, and architecture, this comparative study demonstrates how the Mexican Carlos Monsiváis, the Chilean Pedro Lemebel, and the Puerto Rican Josean Ramos are three examples of a new kind of mass-mediatic public intellectual who addresses everyday life experiences and popular memories so as to speak and listen to a an affective "we." Each one of these three intellectuals reflects upon a specific space of catastrophe—the 1985 earthquake in Mexico City, the feeble transition to democracy in Chile during the 1990s, and the aggressive U.S. military recruitment of Puerto Rican soldiers post-9/11—as a way to develop an intellectual discourse critical of the material precariousness in everyday life and its limitations to the public sphere within the neoliberal social space. Monsiváis's crónicas in various newspapers and magazines (1985), Lemebel's radio program Cancionero (1994), and Ramos's journalism in the newspaper Diálogo (2000–2002) are intellectual actions, that is, immediate reactions to the crisis. Their urgent narrations of everyday life experiences dealing with the critical context allow these intellectuals to speak and listen to a wider and more heterogeneous public. Years later, these intellectual actions become intellectual thought through their historical reflections on the same critical events published in books years later. In Monsiváis's essays in "No sin nosotros" (2005), Lemebel's crónicas in De perlas y cicatrices (1998), and Ramos's autobiography Antes de la guerra (2005), the intellectual discourses interweaves their voices with the voices and memories behind the everyday life experiences they had narrated years earlier. Through this double intervention—the immediate action and the historical thought—each one of these intellectual discourses proposes an affective "we" which is open and fluid and which challenges rigid national and cultural identities.

Notes:

Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 74-02(E), Section: A.

Adviser: Yolanda Martinez-San Miguel.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Pennsylvania, 2012.

Local Notes:

School code: 0175.

ISBN:

9781267713155

Access Restriction:

Restricted for use by site license.