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Angles of otherness: Subjectivity and difference in the fiction of Cristina Fernández Cubas
Folkart, Jessica A.
Folkart, Jessica A.
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Abstract
Cristina Fernandez Cubas has published four collections of short stories, Mi hermana Elba (1980), Los altillos de Brumal (1983), El angulo del horror (1990), Con Agatha en Estambul (1994); and two novels, El ano de Gracia (1985) and El columpio (1995). I analyze these six works to explore the ongoing re-construction of identity in post-totalitarian Spain. In Fernandez Cubas's representation of the mediation of subjectivity she always subverts the limits of identity by problematizing the issue of difference--how the subject defines and distinguishes itself from others. She examines the way otherness is implicitly identified within the very subject that professes to exclude it; thus her works interrogate, reverse and finally erode the borders that define the self. Each of the five chapters of this study focuses on a separate theoretical issue--power relations, gender roles, discursive constructions of identity, spatial positioning, and visual constructions of desire--as it is played out in a collection of short stories or the author's two novels. These theoretical considerations illuminate the way subject/object relations are mediated and reversed in the author's fiction in order to reveal identity as a construct that can be altered. By opening subjectivity to angles of otherness, Fernandez Cubas's texts show how difference and multiplicity can expand and enrich the subject's vision of itself.
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Dissertation (Ph.D.)--University of Kansas, Spanish and Portuguese, 1998.
Date
1998-05-31
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University of Kansas
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Keywords
Romance literature, Womens studies, Literature, Modern literature