Literary Cosmoecologies: Biodiverse Identification in Fictions From Peru, Brazil, and Colombia / Juan Pablo Cardenas.

Format:

Book

Thesis/Dissertation

Author/Creator:

Cárdenas Mejía, Juan Pablo, author.

Contributor:

University of Pennsylvania. Spanish and Portuguese Studies, degree granting institution.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Latin American studies.

Latin American literature.

Philosophy.

Spanish and Portuguese Studies--Penn dissertations.

Penn dissertations--Spanish and Portuguese Studies.

Local Subjects:

Latin American studies.

Latin American literature.

Philosophy.

Spanish and Portuguese Studies--Penn dissertations.

Penn dissertations--Spanish and Portuguese Studies.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (231 pages)

Distribution:

Ann Arbor : ProQuest Dissertations & Theses, 2023

Contained In:

Dissertations Abstracts International 85-08A.

Place of Publication:

[Philadelphia, Pennsylvania] : University of Pennsylvania, 2022.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

What does it mean to do literary criticism in the era of environmental breakdown? As we are witnessing the mass extinction of species, my work turns to other-than-human lifeforms that have been rendered by three particular writers of twentieth-century South America in an attempt to chart the way these artists conjured fauna, flora, and natural phenomena in their texts in ways that exceeded the perceived notion of other lifeforms as not-human by hegemonic Western perspectives. Colombian naturalist Joaquin Antonio Uribe Villegas (1858-1935), Brazilian writer and diplomat Joao Guimaraes Rosa (1908-1967), and Peruvian writer and anthropologist Jose Maria Arguedas (1911-1969) were all educated in Western science. However, they rendered the lifeforms of their regions as other-than-human persons, subverting the strict parameters of qualitative and quantitative inquiry of Western science, creating texts that preceded the study of ecology but presented ecological thought. I deploy Ecofeminist, Ecocritical, and Posthumanist theory hand-in-hand with Andean and Amazonian Indigenous knowledge to reveal the porous affections of these writers to the lives of other-than-human lifeforms by what I term Biodiverse Identification. This meta-representational operation allows us to inhabit the literary biomes created by the authors by rendering lifeforms in ways that exceed both the nature/culture divide and that of the human/other-than-human one. Analyzing how poetic prose elicits interspecies affects, I argue that these authors' texts allow us to mind the lives of animals, plants, and other natural phenomena as integrated into a web of life, generating a cosmoecological perspective, where reality is understood through ecological processes and relationships, a perspective that we urgently need to practice in all aspects of critical scholarship. I believe that by doing so, we can recalibrate how the literature of Latin America has been read and find within it the aspects of Western frames of reference that can become open to alternative ways of relating to nature.

Notes:

Source: Dissertations Abstracts International, Volume: 85-08, Section: A.

Advisors: Brock, Ashley; Committee members: Tellez, Jorge; Fornoff, Carolyn.

Department: Spanish and Portuguese Studies.

Ph.D. University of Pennsylvania 2023.

Local Notes:

School code: 0175

ISBN:

9798381509991

Access Restriction:

Restricted for use by site license.