Desencuentros en la vanguardia literaria: Nicaragua, Guatemala y Costa Rica

This dissertation explores how historical Avant-Garde production in Nicaragua, Costa Rica and Guatemala constructed and performed different, divergent anti-imperialist, and mestizo nationalist discourses in Central America. Serving as critical rearticulations and critiques of Nineteenth-Century nationalist models, these experimental works redefine modern national subjectivities and cultural expression and position Central American cultural production in the international literary sphere. These works alternately silence divergent expressions of national cultural production and reproduce previous hegemonic discourses of power. \ud The manuscript is divided into three parts that correspond to diverse literary genres: the manifesto, experimental theatre, and prose. The first chapter analyzes the diverse expressions of the Nicaraguan manifesto. The second chapter discusses five plays (Cuculcán, Miguel Ángel Asturias; Chinfonía burguesa, Joaquín Pasos and José Coronel Urtecho; Señorita Dama Segunda, Una noche de junio and El camino blanco y el camino negro: contraposición, Miguel Marscovétere y Durán). While all these plays perform diverse representations of modern cultural expression based on national mestizaje (Asturias posits a form of Avant-garde indigenism; Pasos and Urtecho convey a Hispanic-Catholic model, while Marsicovétere bases his dramatical work on an Italo-Ladino cultural expression), all of these narratives inherently limit their nationalist discourses due to their conflicting representations of social inclusivity. The third chapter analyzes the experimental narrative, “Guatemala” and “Ahora que me acuerdo” (Miguel Ángel Asturias) and Unos fantoches (Max Jiménez Huete). While Asturias strives to legitimize the centrality of the author-intellectual within his nationalist/regionalist nation-building discourse, Jiménez portrays a social context in which the Avant-garde, as a modern expression of cultural identity, and its author are displaced due to the public´s adherence to Modernista aesthetics. \ud This dissertation exemplifies how a) the Central American Avant-garde interacted with European currents, but in no way copied them since one of its underlying motives was to question and assert distinctive national and continental identities b) is heterogeneous in nature, but is rooted in a anti-imperialist continental discourse c) provides discourses of modern national and cultural identity that are inherently flawed because of their territorializing and deterritorializing nature and, finally c) produced diverse genres of experimental literary production. \u