Date of Award

2018

Degree Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Arts (MA)

Department

Spanish

Abstract

The urban imaginary is that which bases itself in a real physical and concrete space,

but is a construction created through the lense of a city's inhabitants. This thesis follows

narratives that have reconfigured the cities of México City, San Juan and Caracas from the

novels Hotel DF (2010), Simone (2011) and the film Pelo Malo (2013) respectively. These

contemporary Latin American & Caribbean narratives provide insight into sentiments

about one's country. Néstor García Canclini and Henri Lefebvre have argued the city is a

whole, and therefore it is analyzed as a microcosm and epicenter of its nation. With

emphasis on everyday movement as living in urban spaces among other bodies, people give

rhythm to the city and eventually give it form. Their inhabiting the city inherently tie

together time, space and being. The city itself, a defined space, depicts the passage of time

in its architectural infrastructure its landscape €“ buildings and streets €“ that are weaved with

history and memory. The dynamic between the social and the physical, the entanglement of

temporalities conjure a variety of memories to recount a spaces story that interacts with

that of its subject. This conversation between the being and the space initiates the

construction of the urban imaginary. Within these texts, are visible and legible the living

remnants of the projected realities of their city's struggle for democracy, national identity

and colonial subjectivity. This thesis aims to analyze the types of memory represented in the

literary and visual urban spaces that unfolds in a dialogue between its subjects and the city.

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.

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