Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Date of Degree

2-2014

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Ph.D.

Program

Hispanic & Luso-Brazilian Literatures & Languages

Advisor

Juan C. Mercado

Subject Categories

English Language and Literature | Latin American Literature

Keywords

Mario Vargas Llosa, Milton Hatoum, Regionalism, Transnationalism

Abstract

The present dissertation analyzes the novels The Green House (1966) and The Storyteller (1987), by Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa, and Two Brothers (2000), by Brazilian novelist Milton Hatoum and reinterpret literary regionalism in the Amazon region. I claim that the new variety of regionalist literature represented by both authors challenges hegemonic national representations of Peru and Brazil and conceptualizes Amazonian ecology in the context of global capitalism. In the first chapter, I evaluate the critical apparatus of the older tradition of Latin American regionalism proposing the concept of the "region" as an "invention" (Albuquerque Jr.). My reading reveals how the institutionalized invention of the region as a homogenous community was produced through the erasure of discursive diversity in literature and fostered by the press and the state. In the second chapter, I analyze these images and literary representations of the Amazon region and how Vargas Llosa and Hatoum break from this old tradition by emphasizing hybridity in Latin American society and the relationship between the indigenous groups, past colonizers and new immigrants. In the third chapter, I examine how the choice of setting the stories in the post-rubber era of the Amazon allowed both authors to portray the urban Amazonian areas as colonial ruins destroyed by the forces of capitalism. The authors used the post-rubber era as a springboard to establish a discussion about the role of immigration in the global economy as well as the economics of power in the globally marginal Latin American countries. This new variety of regionalism represented by both authors refuses the hegemonic national representation of Peru and Brazil and conceptualizes the ecological environment within a globalized capitalist world. In their works, Mario Vargas Llosa and Milton Hatoum reveal their theories on hybridity in Latin American society and its relationship between the indigenous groups, past colonizers and new immigrants.

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