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AESTHETICS OF THE VIRTUAL:
MODERNITY, CONSUMPTION AND ARTIFICE
IN THREE LATIN AMERICAN NOVELS
by
Fiorella Cotrina
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(COMPARATIVE LITERATURE)
December 2009
Copyright 2009 Fiorella Cotrina
Object Description
| Title | Aesthetics of the virtual: modernity, consumption and artifice in three Latin American novels |
| Author | Cotrina, Fiorella |
| Author email | fiorellacotrina@gmail.com; cotrina@usc.edu |
| Degree | Doctor of Philosophy |
| Document type | Dissertation |
| Degree program | Comparative Literature |
| School | College of Letters, Arts and Sciences |
| Date defended/completed | 2009-10-12 |
| Date submitted | 2009 |
| Restricted until | Unrestricted |
| Date published | 2009-11-27 |
| Advisor (committee chair) | Diaz, Roberto |
| Advisor (committee member) |
Meeker, Natania Graff Zivin, Erin |
| Abstract | This study argues that the narratives of the Latin American novels De sobremesa (1896), La invención de Morel (1940), and A hora da estrela (1977) all thematize the masculine consumption of feminine entities, and thus serve as metaphors of modernity. These texts put the antithetical binaries of European center and Latin American periphery into dynamic play, along with those of feminine artifice and male identity, illusion and reality, the body and desire, and writing as both a sadist and masochist activity.; Using Carlos J. Alonso and Beatriz Sarlo’s crucial insights about modernity as a myth that locates Latin American culture and literary practices in the periphery with respect to those of Europe, I also incorporate Rita Felski’s discussion of European discourses that define consumption as a seductively feminizing activity, to provide readings of these novels that render the broad notion of modernity and proper modern life as artificial, decentered, and virtual.; Chapter One examines how the male protagonist José Fernández’s voracious consumption of luxuries and courtesans during his fin-de-siècle nomadic voyage in the European metropolis becomes a self-acknowledged vice in De sobremesa. Helena, the first spiritual soulmate who can halt his morally corrupting consumption, is a phantasmatic figure onto which Fernández projects the anxieties and fears that pathologizing fin-de-siècle discourses assigned to consumption. Fernández returns to Bogotá, no longer believing that the spiritual connection he was looking for can be found in Europe or that consumption is indeed pathological. He creates his own liminal aesthetic space in the Latin American city: Villa Helena. Chapter Two examines the technological effeminization that the Venezuelan fugitive protagonist in La invención de Morel experiences by falling in love with the simulacrum Faustine, whom he encounters in the inventor Morel’s island. Gradually seduced by Faustine’s beautiful image, the fugitive is transformed into an effeminized consumer who no longer maintains any aesthetic distance from Faustine’s auratic image. Rather, he identifies with her and wants to enter into her consciousness. The impossibility of this desire leads the fugitive to transform himself into a like simulacral image by masochistically surrendering his body to Morel’s machine, which ultimately records him in a rehearsed simulation of his relationship with Faustine, and annihilates his body in the process.; Unlike Helena and Faustine, who are both European aesthetic and technological images, A hora da estrela’s Macabea is a (peripherally) Northeastern Brazilian girl who moves to Rio de Janeiro, looking for a way to escape her impoverished life. Chapter Three examines how A hora’s narrator, Rodrigo S.M., decides to write “Macabea’s life into existence,” after a flaneuresque walk through Rio de Janeiro leads him to catch a glimpse of death on the face and body of the anonymous young woman. Rodrigo gradually gains access to Macabea by masochistically evacuating his own bourgeois male identity for Macabea’s female consumer identity: who identifies with female movies stars and listens to cultural products aired on the radio. Yet Rodrigo’s masochistic decentering is not sustainable. His identity as a bourgeois writer often resumes a central positionality in the text that demonstrates a sadistic pleasure enacted by writing from the center. |
| Keyword | artifice; virtual; Latin American literature; periphery; modernity; modernismo; technology; cinema; De sobremesa; La invención de Morel; A hora da estrela, Pandora's box; desire; the feminine; sadism; writing; masochism |
| Geographic subject (region) | Latin America |
| Language | English |
| Part of collection | University of Southern California dissertations and theses |
| Publisher (of the original version) | University of Southern California |
| Place of publication (of the original version) | Los Angeles, California |
| Publisher (of the digital version) | University of Southern California. Libraries |
| Provenance | Electronically uploaded by the author |
| Type | texts |
| Legacy record ID | usctheses-m2768 |
| Rights | Cotrina, Fiorella |
| Repository name | Libraries, University of Southern California |
| Repository address | Los Angeles, California |
| Repository email | http://www.usc.edu/isd/libraries/services/ask_a_librarian/email/ |
| Filename | etd-Cotrina-3303 |
| Archival file | uscthesesreloadpub_Volume32/etd-Cotrina-3303.pdf |
Description
| Title | Page 1 |
| Full text | AESTHETICS OF THE VIRTUAL: MODERNITY, CONSUMPTION AND ARTIFICE IN THREE LATIN AMERICAN NOVELS by Fiorella Cotrina A Dissertation Presented to the FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (COMPARATIVE LITERATURE) December 2009 Copyright 2009 Fiorella Cotrina |
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