Universidad
de La Laguna
Máster Universitario
en
Estudios Norteamericanos
rev. 26/04/2013
La Escuela de Vancouver: El post-conceptualismo canadiense / Néstor Delgado Morales; bajo la dirección del doctor Carmelo Vega de la Rosa. Febrero 2012.
Acercamiento a las tendencias post-conceptuales surgidas en Vancouver a finales de los setenta y a sus figuras más representativas. El análisis se centra en la obra de una selección de artistas canadienses activos hasta la actualidad: Jeff Wall, Ian Wallace, Rodney Graham, Roy Arden, Vikky Alexander, Ken Lum y Stan Douglas. Con ello, se ha focalizado en una serie de autores cuyo trabajo ha sido reconocido fuera de su ámbito geográfico y han supuesto una referencia indiscutible como representantes de la tendencia post-conceptual. Este movimiento, por su parte, supone la transición del arte conceptual hacía los discursos post-modernos de los ochenta, en los que disciplinas artísticas como la fotografía, la pintura y el ready-made se hilvanan creando nuevas posiciones críticas.
Remembering the Future: Heterotopia and Suburbia in Jeffrey Eugenides's The Virgin Suicides / Ana Laura González Hernández; bajo la dirección de la doctora Isabel González Díaz. Febrero 2012.
Recent work in the interdisciplinary field of suburban studies has focussed on the growing heterogeneity of suburbia as a complex and dynamic terrain, resulting in new creative responses to this phenomenon from a wide range of disciplines. However, the representation of suburbia in fiction and film still tends to be dominated by a two-dimensional notion based on either utopian aspiration or dystopian alarm. In light of this, Michel Foucault's concept of heterotopia invites us to go beyond binaries, as it provides alternative representation to allow for contestation and discussion of ideas. My aim in this paper is to explore the possibilities of suburbia as a hybrid construction of intermingled social, cultural and artistic processes in Jeffrey Eugenides's debut novel The Virgin Suicides (1993). While framed as a captivating meditation on suburban angst and nostalgia in the 1970s, Eugenides's text casts a critical glance back to some central conflicts that still persist in modern suburban America, which concern mainly suburban sprawl and its ecological, social and cultural impact. In an era of rapid urbanization and globalization, it seems worth reflecting on our most recent treatment and representation of space.
In a Time of No Heroes: Traumatic Pasts and Masks in Art Spiegelman's Maus and Alan Moore's Watchmen / Sergio Hernández López; bajo la dirección de la doctora Isabel González Díaz. Enero 2013.
This project aims to analyze the way trauma is represented in the comics medium through two of its most representative master pieces: Art Spiegelman's Maus and Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' Watchmen. In the case of the former, I draw from theorists such as Cathy Caruth, Dominick LaCapra or Marianne Hirsch to study the way Spiegelman deals in graphic form with his father's memories as a Holocaust survivor as well as with his own inherited memories. As for the latter, I analyze the national trauma the conflict the Vietnam War entailed for the American collective consciousness through the re-examination of the superheroic myth and its subsequent fall.
Oliver Stone's Meltdown: A Study of Wall Street (1987) and Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps (2010) / Laura Hernández Valido; bajo la dirección del doctor Juan José Cruz Hernández. Julio 2012.
El origen de la actual crisis económica puede ser analizado a través del polémico director de cine americano, Oliver Stone y sus películas Wall Street (1987) y Wall Street: El dinero nunca duerme (2010). En ambas películas, Oliver Stone expresa el ambiente de Wall Street, el cual ha sido dominado por los mercados financieros y empresariales desde los años ochenta hasta nuestros días.
Con el fin de hacer un estudio de la crisis y de estas películas fue imprescindible analizar el capitalismo de los años sesenta hasta hoy. Una economía, que fue regulada y guiada por el keynesianismo, se transformó en una economía basada en la liberalización y descrita como neoliberalismo.
Las políticas económicas neoliberales empezaron a aplicarse agresivamente en los años ochenta bajo la presidencia de Ronald Reagan en Estados Unidos y Margaret Thatcher en Reino Unido y a extenderse globalmente. El resultado final ha sido la llamada "crisis del neoliberalismo" con la presente realidad económica, que ha causado efectos muy serios en la población mundial.
From Impassioned Analysis to Factual Fiction: On the Ethics and Aesthetics of Writing (against) Femicide / Tobias Alexander Jochum; bajo la dirección de la doctora Isabel González Díaz. Enero 2013.
My thesis examines the critical and cultural discourse around the femicides in Ciudad Juárez, an unprecedented murder series of young women and girls that has been ravaging the Northern Mexican border metropolis since the early 1990s. Most of the several hundred victims come from impoverished and marginalized backgrounds and many were subjected to extreme forms of sexual abuse and prolonged torture before their deaths. My focus lies on the transformative ways in which academics, activists, journalists, and artists have responded to the epistemological, ethical, and aesthetical challenges posed by the need to address these gruesome cases, which continue to this day in a climate of de facto impunity. Starting with a surveying discourse analysis of the increasingly differentiated and sophisticated, as well as highly interdisciplinary and transnational body of scholarship that has been accrued on the topic, I then move on to a critical assessment of selected cultural narratives of femicide in both nonfictional and fictional genres. Informed by the late Susan Sontag's reflections on the ethics and effects of war photography, I interrogate the texts' respective aesthetical means and strategies of representing the violence and the victims of Juárez, and how and to what extent those representations are informed and determined by their ethical responsibilities.
America's Desolation Row: Representations of the 1970's in Joel and Ethan Coen's Blood Simple and No Country for Old Men / Fabián Orán Llarena; bajo la dirección del doctor Juan José Cruz Hernández. Enero 2013.
Joel and Ethan Coen are two of the most celebrated and popular filmmakers of contemporary American cinema. My thesis engages with the ways in which these two directors interpret recent American history, and more precisely, the turbulent decade of the 1970s, as well as the narrative and stylistic repertoire they deploy to characterize such historical revision. I focus on two narratives: their debut film Blood Simple (1984) and the four-Oscar winning No Country for Old Men (2007) as both pieces (re)construct and negotiate tropes and discourses related to the atmosphere of political defeat and mythical re-interrogotation typical of the 1970s and its most significant events (the Watergate Scandal, the withdrawal from Vietnam, or 'The Crisis of Confidence' proclaimed by President Jimmy Carter). Therefore, my research has a double aim. On the one hand, I identify how the films re-invoke certain traditional patterns (genres such as film noir or the Western) so as to-refunctionalize them and articulate the particularly bleak, crisis-ridden, and revisionist ethos of the 1970s as authored by the British and American Schools of Cultural Studies. On the other, I explore the films at the level of form, with a specific interest in elucidating how both films employ highly hybridized narrative and stylistic procedures redolent of the 1970s New Hollywood filmmakers. I resort to the writings of David Bordwell, a key film scholar who have adapted narratological theory for film narration, creating a comprehensible framework for the analysis of film.
La revista Dyn, Wolfgang Paalen y sus colaboradores: Un proyecto intercultural / Lucía Palenzuela Rodríguez; bajo la dirección de la doctora Patricia Pareja Ríos. Enero 2013.
El trabajo se centra en la revista periódica Dyn (1942-1944). Se trata de una publicación que se halla cerca del movimiento cultural de América del Norte, de México, Estados Unidos y Canadá, y que al mismo tiempo está relacionada con las culturas nativas. La revista tiene además un claro horizonte intercultural. A pesar de ser editada en México, se publica en lengua inglesa y francesa. Su director, Wolfgang Paalen, es de origen austriaco y sus colaboradores son franceses, ingleses, norteamericanos y latinoamericanos. Son numerosos los textos en francés que se encuentran traducidos al inglés, lo que revela el deseo de proyectar lo que en sus páginas aparece hacia el público básicamente norteamericano. Dyn es un punto de encuentro intercultural de escritores y artistas contemporáneos. Y es también un espacio de investigación en las culturas amerindias, desde Canadá y la Costa Oeste a las manifestaciones precolombinas de México y Perú. Por otro lado, Dyn es una revista que tiene que ver con el desarrollo del surrealismo en su fase internacional en los años 30 y 40 y muestra la influencia que tuvo el movimiento en la cultura norteamericana, sobre todo en los medios artísticos, en pintores que llegarían a ser los grandes representantes del expresionismo abstracto, presentes en sus páginas: Jackson Pollock, William Baziotes o Robert Motherwell.
Viaje postcolonial al corazón del mito: Apuntes sobre Jamaica Kincaid y otras voces migrantes antillanas / Larisa Pérez Flores; bajo la dirección de la doctora María José Guerra Palmero. Febrero 2012.
Ensayo sobre la autora estadounidense/antiguana Jamaica Kincaid y otras voces fundamentales de la diáspora antillana. Jamaica Kincaid está atravesada por un viaje, una migración, un exilio, de una pequeña isla del Caribe a los Estados Unidos de América, y esta grieta en su pecho, fecunda y dolorosa, es el punto de partida de nuestro viaje personal. Un ensayo que no es un análisis literario de la obra de Jamaica Kincaid, sino un un viaje a caballo entre la teoría poscolonial y la "autoteoría" personal, un viaje que parte de una herida y va directo al corazón del mito.
Entendiendo que el proyecto fundamental de la teoría postcolonial es la deconstrucción de los mitos coloniales, se lleva a cabo un recorrido por diferentes elementos fundamentales de tal mitología a partir de los textos de diferentes voces migrantes antillanas. De este recorrido se extraen los elementos fundamentales para una teoría crítica de lo colonial.
Cuál es el alcance de lo colonial y cuáles son por tanto las posibilidades de descolonización son preguntas de partida y no postulados. Al final del viaje se despliegan las posibles respuestas, contextualizadas en el marco filosófico-económico-político contemporáneo.
Grass and Glass: Nature and the City in Zsuzsi Gartner's Stories / Jennifer Sierra Mesa; bajo la dirección de la doctora Eva Darias Beautell. Febrero 2012.
Traditionally speaking Canada has always been connected to nature. However, in recent years Canadian cities have experienced an almost dizzying urbanization. Consequently, numerous writers and artists have come to question the presence of a strong connection between the productions of the urban versus the natural. Since Michel Foucault introduced the brilliant concept of heterotopias (see Foucault 1967) new critical and theoretical perspectives have appeared in relation to the connection of people with the city. The notions of space and "cityscape" within the fragmented city are in a continuous questioning mode. In my research I considered convenient to analyze what this redefinition of the city and nature means. Regarding city fragmentation I studied the ideas of Edward Soja and Henri Lefebvre, whose publications have served as interesting instruments of urban debate. Thanks to them I approached the actual object of my research, the Canadian contemporary literary texts, more specifically the short stories by Zsuzsi Gartner All the Anxious Girls on Earth (1999), according to the literary representation of what I call "grass and glass," a double trope very useful for the analysis of these stories. I directly faced the question of what "city glass" and "city grass" represent in Canadian culture and how the wilderness myth has been deconstructed.
Cities have intrinsically thought to be separate from nature, but as I finally put forward in this work, recent studies insist on the consideration of both nature and the city as part of the same whole. Though wilderness is still a powerful presence within Canadian culture, this research confirms that a new urban era is coming. In further research I aim to analyze where these new ideas are going and in which other contexts they are applied.