La Malinche is one of the most controversial figures in Mexican and Chicano literature. The historical facts about her life before and after the Spanish Conquest are largely speculative. What is reliably known is that she had a significant role as translator, which developed into something of mythic proportions. The ideological appropriation of her image by three authors, Octavio Paz, Laura Esquivel and Cherríe Moraga, are explored in this thesis. The full extent of the proposed rendition of La Malinche by Octavio Paz is the basis of the second chapter. The conclusion drawn by Paz, in The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950) is that La Malinche is what he calls la chingada [the raped/violated one] and proposes that all women are always open to conquest, sexually and otherwise. Laura Esquivel's novel Malinche (2006) is a re-interpretation that focuses on the tongue as the source of power and language as the ultimate source of autonomy for La Malinche. This aspect of La Malinche and the contrast of Paz's understanding are the basis of the third chapter of this thesis. Cherríe Moraga, in Loving in the War Years (1983), proposes that if women are to be traitors, it is not each other that …

This study examines the theatrical representation of the stealing of children during the last dictatorships in Spain and in Argentina in Laila Ripoll's Los niños perdidos and Patricia Suárez's Astianacte: una máscara del amor under the lenses of the concepts of trauma, myth and memory. Following the theories suggested by Freud, Adorno, Whitehead, Reyes Mate and others, the first chapter discusses the representation of the psychological traumas left by the dictatorial practices left not only on the minds of individuals but also on both nations as whole entities. While Ripoll invites her audience to reflect upon the consequences of the Spanish Civil War and franquism, Patricia Suárez urges her spectators to doubt about their own identity if they were born during the last dictatorship in Argentina. In chapter two, the concepts advanced by Barthes, Reig Tapia and Moreno-Nuño help explore the ways in which the playwrights condemn the legitimizing myths that gave birth to these dictatorial regimes. Both authors subvert these fictional stories, mainly by the use of sarcasm and humor. By means of the concepts of memory supported by Benjamin, Todorov, Nora and Juliá, the third chapter examines the need to let the traditionally silenced voices tell their version …

The present research is centered on Miguel de Unamuno's Songbook which is studied through the prism of the theory of dialogism elaborated by Mikhail Bakhtin. This study overcomes the limitation of Bakhtin's theory which extends solely to narrative genres, and argues that dialogism can also be applied to poetry. In this thesis I seek to rectify the critical oversight of this significant and original work of Unamuno and show that Songbook has panoply of innovative techniques aimed at creating the multiple poetic voices and dialogical interaction. Strong links are established between Bakhtin's theory, Unamuno's aesthetics and the postmodernist episteme of "the death of the author" which heralds the new era of fiction writing. I give a detailed analysis of Songbook's poetry based on Bakhtin's theory and incorporate the pragmalinguistic view of poetic discourse as a communicative act that involves a constant interaction between the addresser and the addressees. I find different types of dialogical expression in accordance with the number and the nature of different addressees at which the poet aims his discourse. This study shows that poetic tools forged by Unamuno are born of the need to express a conflictive inner world that is opposed to any type of …

This study focuses on the Spanish poet of the Generation of '27 Manuel Altolaguirre. The purpose of this thesis is to show how the poetry of Manuel Altolaguirre evolves in relation to specific issues. Specifically, I study the changes in his work in regard to the themes of death and solitude, resulting from exile in 1939, to be enriched by new experiences, many of them dramatic, taking more personal ways, while offering them a more profound and complex and even in regard to the subject of the poet's death comes to contemplate a more positive way. The thesis is divided into five chapters. Following the introduction, the second chapter focuses on Altolaguirre's biography and the Generation in 1927 while the third focuses and analyzes his poetry before his exile in 1939. The fourth chapter examines his poetry after exile until his death in 1959, while the fifth and last chapter concludes this study.

The subaltern is a recurrent literary figure in Mexican narrative. The objective of this thesis is to investigate three ethnic groups – indeed, subalterns – in Mexico which include: Afro-Mexicans, indigenous groups, and Filipino colonial subjects from the perspectives of the Mexican Revolution, post-revolutionary Mexico, and the conquest of the Philippines in the sixteenth century. The principal characters play crucial roles in events shaping the history and culture of Mexico and thus demonstrate their importance to the country's development while also revealing the reality of subalterns. The literary research shows that trying circumstances or a lack of self-identity were the main causes for a character to be or become a subaltern in addition to their inherent ethnic disadvantages. However, the characters who overcame their subaltern state often changed personality traits or adapted to their surroundings in order to be assimilated into the majority culture.