TY - JOUR TI - En los umbrales de la tardomodernidad: transformaciones discursivas en cinco novelas del Caribe insular. DO - https://doi.org/doi:10.7282/T34M967K PY - 2015 AB - This dissertation explores the discursive transformations in five novels written after 1969 by Hispanic Caribbean writers. Through a focus on language, on the relationship between history and fiction, on collective memory, and on the body, the author aims to show that these twentieth century novels straddle both modernism and postmodernism, exploring new ways of expressing their concerns while remaining rooted in modernist traditions. The first chapter examines the subversive use of proverbs, gossip, and superstition as a means of challenging the phallocentric thinking that relegates women to a position of alterity in La casa de la laguna by Puerto Rican writer Rosario Ferré and in En el tiempo de las mariposas by Dominican writer Julia Álvarez. The second chapter analyzes how Canción de Rachel, a testimonial novel written by Cuban writer Miguel Barnet, employs strategies generally associated with postmodernism in order to reevaluate the past and break free from its racist and dogmatic legacy. Rachel’s testimonial voice shares the narrative space with a plethora of other voices including the author/ethnographer’s. Their versions of the past are individual, fragmented and incomplete. The third chapter focuses on the fictionalization of history in La llegada by Puerto Rican writer José Luis González. The author analyzes the dialogue that the novel undertakes with the visual intertext, images taken from Our Islands and Their People as Seen with Camera and Pencil (1899), in order to show that historical writing as well as the photographic image are neither objective nor complete truths. In the final chapter, the author examines the strategies of transgression that are articulated from the lens of the sick body. The playful use of parody, intertextuality, ambiguity, and dispersion that distinguish Severo Sarduy’s previous works are still detectable in his last novel although they are intermixed with a desperate search for order and meaning. Sarduy opens a new discursive space for the abject body, in this case, the ill and dying body, and calls for a reinterpretation of illness that does not treat body and person as separate entities. KW - Spanish KW - Caribbean literature (Spanish) -- History and criticism LA - eng ER -