Cristina Peri Rossi: Escritora del exilio.

This study focuses on the diverse representations and reconceptualizations of exile in the personal and literary texts of Uruguayan exiled author Cristina Peri Rossi. I contend that her experimentation with exile by means of its application to the social, cultural, and personal spheres not only permits new ways of thinking about the notion, but forces the politicization of these spheres. My discussions proceed against a traditional framework that has confined exile to the realm of the geographical and the political. Against this one dimensional view I move within recent theoretical discourses that aspire to widen its conceptual field. In my analyses of Peri Rossi's texts, I locate exile within the shifting grounds of social, cultural and ontological displacement as both imposed and voluntary movement between the center and its margins. Thus exile becomes a tool for studying collective and individual relationships with hegemonic forms of power, as it challenges traditional notions of identity. Chapter 1 provides the theoretical space within which to revise traditional ways of thinking about exile and explore new discourses on exile offered by diverse epistemologies. I consider discussions among members of the River Plate intelligentsia as well as recent formulations of exile within the framework of feminism, cultural studies, psychoanalysis, and theories of language. Chapter 2 situates Peri Rossi's shifting identity as a woman, as a writer, and as a political activist through an examination of her biographical text, while Chapters 3, 4 and 5 examine the interplay of exile and identity in her literary production. Chapter 3 looks at the paradigmatic presence of interior exile within a large group of texts that include narrative and poetry. Chapter 4 considers her novel La nave de los locos in order to study how exile, paradoxically, is both consequence of cultural determinism and sign of social agency. Chapter 5 looks at her novel Solitario de amor and examines how, at a intrapsychic level, exile marks the protagonists' desperate and futile search for self-unity through the love relationship.PhDRomance Languages and Literatures: SpanishUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/103930/1/9423174.pdfDescription of 9423174.pdf : Restricted to UM users only