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La lectura de Naufragios, de Cabeza de Vaca, tradicionalmente ha sido la de una crónica colonial que muestra no solo las dificultades que enfrentó el explorador español y sus experiencias en el Nuevo Mundo, sino también como un retrato de los paisajes y los habitantes de la región. Este trabajo pretende mostrar los paralelos que existen entre este texto y la Odisea con el propósito de sugerir que no solo es un texto documental, sino también de ficción escrito con el propósito de ganar favor real. Traditionally critics have read Cabeza de Vacas Naufragios as a colonial crónica that, not only portrays the difficulties that the Spanish explorer faced during his journey through this region of the New World, but also as a documentary of the landscape and the native population. This study pretends to show the numerous parallels between this book and the Odyssey. The purpose of it is to show that Naufragios was written as a documental text but also as a work of fiction with the intention to gain royal favors. Fil: Cole, George. Texas Tech University

Some literary scholars focus on the nature of law by using legal and judicial opinions to analyze social conflicts in literature. More generally, many other literary scholars use ideologically driven content by turning to the fields of gender studies, Marxism, and psychoanalysis to raise awareness about a more just society. In contrast, human behaviorists often use cognitive schemes which are responsible for people forming erroneous and unjust judgments about others to identify the power of literature to change human misconceptions. Very few approaches, however, turn to modern philosophical debates around social justice as a tool for literary criticism. This dissertation incorporates philosophical debates by using four leading contemporary conceptions of justice. Putting John Stuart Mills, John Rawls, Martha Nussbaum and Robert Nozick in dialogue helps to reconstruct social conflicts portrayed in literature. In doing so, this approach that turns to issues from modern philosophical debates to shed light on how global problems such as corruption or religious intolerance have different manifestations according to the context in which they take place. Although justice is a constant desire, it is a social construction that changes across individuals, history, and societies. The clashes between different conceptions of justice reveal how human behavior adapts to power structures by identifying the moral dilemmas behind characters’ decisions. In this sense, analyzing literary text through the lens of philosophy effectively captures the multiplicity of layers proper of the postmodern literature and closes a gap in current literary approaches to the theme of justice. The multidisciplinary approach to literary criticism in this dissertation neither imposes an ideological point of view nor conceives literature as a means for a social change. Instead, it facilitates the understanding of social conflicts, eliciting readers to identify with the human experience of those oppressed in a different society. The development of this analytical tool also contributes to enhancing the public debate about possible solutions to common social problems by encouraging readers to think critically about their history and reality. This dissertation addresses justice and social transformations in the literature that set stories in the past and use crime to depict conflicts in societies. Specifically, it explores representations of Spanish Golden Age society as portrayed in twentieth-first century novels written in Spanish. The research focuses on Las aventuras del capitán Alatriste (1996-2011), a series of seven novels written by Arturo Pérez Reverte, La sangre de los crucificados (2007), by Félix G. Modroño, and El ritual de las doncellas (2006), by José Calvo Poyato. The dissertation makes two main contributions to criticism in Hispanic literature. First, the term historical noir is coined to classify a subgenre that is a hybrid between the historical novel and crime fiction. Second, justice is used as a tool for literary analysis that permits scholars to reconstruct the past and relate it to other times and geographies.

Federico Andahazi, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Mario Vargas Llosa present in their texts various manifestations of the erotic experience. Although the works are different when it comes to space, time or style, they still show a certain similarity, the liberation of the body. These three authors are interested in the emancipation and democratization of pleasure by braking with previously held notions. This study proposes a reflection on eroticism, through anthropological observations that explore human reality and its biological and social aspects, through Michael Foucault's theory on power, Theodor Lipps' contributions to humor studies and Roland Barthes perspective on the pleasure of the text. The dissertation is divided in five chapters. The first one provides a historical background of the evolution, the artistic influences and the sociocultural movements that contributed to this genre from its beginnings to the present. The second focuses on the theoretical framework that will be used to conduct the analysis of the corpus selected. The third chapter explores female eroticism by paying attention to how the authors empower their female protagonists through their sexuality. The fourth one analyses the humorous side of the erotic relations in the works of Garcia Marquez and Vargas Llosa. The last chapter studies how Vargas Llosa proposes a new way to read a text and make it a pleasurable experience, particularly when reading erotic fiction; the reader becomes a voyeur and also an active participant in the actions of the characters.

The last two decades have seen an increase in post-apocalyptic cultural products worldwide in the different transmitters of popular culture such as TV shows, movies, video games and books. One of the variants of this type of representation are zombie narratives which focus on infestations that generally depict a small group of humans attempting to survive in a world destroyed by a hoard of the living dead. This rise in production coincides with the crises that have been affecting the US and the rest of the world such as 9-11 and the economic recession. In Spain, during the last ten years, there has been a boom of zombie literature that surpasses that of any other Spanish speaking country. However, other countries such as Mexico, Argentina, Chile and Puerto Rico are slowly catching up. This investigation seeks to analyze the origins of this trend from its inception to the way it has become a hybrid product. It will also focus on how the premises discussed by Jean-Francois Lyotard in his book The Postmodern Condition: A report on knowledge (1979) are reflected in zombie novels from different countries. My aim is to show how writers from different Spanish speaking countries have used the zombie as a metaphor that reflects the struggles faced by the citizens from the war against drug cartels in Mexico to the economic crisis in Spain.

A challenge facing Latin America and the United States is the ever-increasing violence related to the drug trade. Media reports with counting of cruel and premeditated murders controlled by drug cartels. This dissertation explores the narconovela and the literary representations of such violence in Colombia applying interdisciplinary methodology and approach from a historical, social, and cultural perspective to the following works: La Virgen de los Sicarios (1994) by Fernando Vallejo; Rosario Tijeras (1999) by Jorge Franco Ramo; Sin tetas no hay paraíso (2005) by Gustavo Bolívar; Confesiones de una puta cara (2007) by Francisco Celis; and the motion picture, María, llena eres de gracia (2004) by Josh Martson. In this way, my contribution to Latin American studies is to demonstrate the convergence between the notion of a grotesque reality and the Colombian narconovela. Theoretical perspectives developed by intellectuals in the areas of psychology, philosophy and literary theory, such as Victor Hugo, Sigmund Freud, Judith Lewis Herman, Tzevetan Todorov and Mikhail Bakhtin, among others, have helped accomplish the goal of this study.

El objetivo de la disertacion es tratar de observar los rasgos ironicos y fantasticos que hay en los cuentos de Rene Aviles Fabila en virtud de que ha sido un escritor que no ha sido estudiado, salvo escasas ocasiones de una manera sistematica y objetiva a pesar de ser uno de los mas prolificos escritores mexicanos de los ultimos tiempos en las letras mexicanas. Debido a que hay una abundancia tematica en sus obras, se intenta buscar la esencia de su pensamiento de una manera integral, para ver los grandes cambios sociales, originados en los diversos entornos sociales y que han revalorado tambien la situacion personal del individuo. Haciendo un repaso por algunas de las obras del autor, se intentara sopesar la problematica que confronta el ser humano, para de esa forma descubrir las diversas alternativas que el escritor ofrece como solucion. De igual manera se hara un enfasis sobre la estetica que maneja y como es usada para subrayar los aspectos mas importantes de su cuentistica. Ademas de alguna manera se intenta develar algunas caracteristicas tecnicas relevantes encontradas en su cuentistica, si dejar de lado la esencialidad de sus obras. Ademas del enfoque social que hay en la mayoria de sus obras, se tratara de estudiar los distintos campos que Aviles Fabila trabaja, tales como el aspecto amoroso, el renglon fantastico y el perfil politico.