THE CONSTRUCTION AND DEVELOPMENT OF CHARACTERS IN CONTEMPORARY SPANISH AMERICAN SHORT STORIES
Open Access
- Author:
- Nardone, Maria Chiara
- Graduate Program:
- Spanish
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- March 06, 2009
- Committee Members:
- Julia Cuervo Hewitt, Dissertation Advisor/Co-Advisor
Julia Cuervo Hewitt, Committee Member
Laurence E Prescott, Committee Member
Mary Elizabeth Barnard, Committee Member
Thomas Oliver Beebee, Committee Member - Keywords:
- short stories
latin american
characters - Abstract:
- ABSTRACT This thesis examines the construction and development of characters in contemporary Spanish American short stories. The writers considered for this study include the Argentine Jorge Luis Borges and Julio Cortázar, the Mexican Carlos Fuentes, and the Puerto Rican Rosario Ferré. In the short stories chosen for this dissertation, these writers establish characters whose objective is to explore, through fiction, an itinerary of knowledge. In these stories, the authors establish a path that the literary character and the reader will travel together and each story will give them a chance to reflect on their personal and universal history. The chosen short stories present a unique complexity, which allows their protagonists to discover or deepen their knowledge of their own existence with details that were unknown to them at the beginning. This discovery brings humanity to the protagonists and allows them to build a reality in the narrative with which the reader will become close. In this journey, the reader will eventually identify himself as a mirror image or a double of the character. Therefore, the characters will develop throughout two separate but parallel paths: the first, as a character fiction, the second through the illusion of fiction as a mirror of the reader and of his/her existential doubts.