Estetica insular y poetica de la identidad en el Caribe [electronic resource] : "Paradiso," "L'isole soleil" y "Omeros".

1996

1 online resource (213 p.)

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This dissertation examines the figure of the island as a trope in the writing of contemporary literature from the Caribbean. Encompassing the Spanish, French and English speaking areas of the region, this study challenges the traditional linguistic and national boundaries that segment literary criticism of the Caribbean. While taking into account particularities that underscore important differences, this approach attempts to elucidate discursive continuities and analogies that coalesce in a poetics of identity specific to the island experience in the Caribbean. Insularity is an important theme in the discourse of national identity in the Hispanic Caribbean, having been articulated as a problematic foundational issue by Antonio S. Pedreira's essay Insularismo (1934). In the French and the English speaking Caribbean, the issue of insularity constitutes a foundational myth of literary discourse that is informed by the realities of exile and migration of many writers. The dissertation focuses on Jose Lezama Lima's Paradiso (1966), Daniel Maximin's L'isole soleil (1981) and Derek Walcott's Omeros (1990) as texts that articulate an island aesthetics that transcends the traditional concept of insularity as a sociological issue. Through a recasting of Lezama Lima's concept of the "eras imaginarias," I propose a poetics of literature as a means to read these texts across temporal and canonical boundaries. As such, I posit the figure of the island as a unifying, albeit not binding, literary trope in Caribbean literature. The main texts in this study serve as critical tools for a historical consideration of the figure of the island throughout literary history because they perform a critical rereading of both the local and the Western literary traditions. I demonstrate how these texts articulate the concept of insularity not as a matter of geographic deteminism but as an epistemological category that informs the discourse on identity--it is, therefore, a linguistic rather than an ontological issue.

Books / Online / Dissertations & Theses

Spanish

July 12, 2011

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Yale University, 1996.

Yale University.