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Selling a Feeling: New Approaches Toward Recent Gay Chicano Authors and Their Audience

Bush, Douglas Paul William
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1366247518

Abstract Details

2013, Doctor of Philosophy, Ohio State University, Spanish and Portuguese.
Gay Chicano authors have been criticized for not forming the same type of strong literary identity and community as their Chicana feminist counterparts, a counterpublic that has given voice not only to themselves as authors, but also to countless readers who see themselves reflected in their texts. One of the strengths of the Chicana feminist movement is that they have not only produced their own works, but have made sense of them as well, creating a female-to-female tradition that was previously lacking. Instead of merely reiterating that gay Chicano authors have not formed this community and common identity, this dissertation instead turns the conversation toward the reader. Specifically, I move from how authors make sense of their texts and form community, to how readers may make sense of texts, and finally, to how readers form community. I limit this conversation to three authors in particular—Alex Espinoza, Rigoberto Gonzalez, and Manuel Muñoz—whom I label the second generation of gay Chicano writers. In Gonzalez, I combine the cognitive study of empathy and sympathy to examine how he constructs affective planes that pull the reader into feeling for and with the characters that he draws. I also further elaborate on what the real world consequences of this affective union—existing between character and audience—may be. In Muñoz, I consider how, through the destabilization of the narrator position, the author constructs storyworlds that first pull the reader in, and then push them out of the narrative in a search for closure. Here, I theorize that he forces the reader to mind read his narrators in order to discern their true intentions. In Espinoza, I explore the typification of Latino/a literature in the marketplace and how it has become tied to magical realism. Here, I posit that Espinoza has created a magic realized novel, one that presents itself as something magical realist, but systemically discredits the notion of magic throughout the work. I use cognitive theories of surprise to explain how readers may perceive this discrediting, and what the wider implications of a novel such as his Still Water Saints may be for Latina/o literature. In the final chapter of this dissertation, I move the study towards how readers form cybercommunities of authors online. I present data collected on Amazon.com and discuss relationships found between authors through the website’s feature “Customers Also Bought Items By.” I conclude that readers do indeed appear to be connecting this second generation of gay Chicano authors online in ways that they do not appear to do for the first generation, potentially resolving the issue of these authors not forming these communities themselves.
Ignacio Corona (Advisor)
Frederick Aldama (Committee Member)
Fernando Unzueta (Committee Member)
261 p.
American Literature; Glbt Studies; Hispanic American Studies; Literature; Rhetoric; Web Studies
Gay Chicano author; Cognitive approaches to literature; empathy in fiction; sympathy in fiction; surprise in fiction; theory of mind in fiction; Manuel Munoz; Alex Espinoza; Rigoberto Gonzalez; cybercommunities; Amazon customer data

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Bush, D. P. W. (2013). Selling a Feeling: New Approaches Toward Recent Gay Chicano Authors and Their Audience [Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1366247518

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Bush, Douglas. Selling a Feeling: New Approaches Toward Recent Gay Chicano Authors and Their Audience . 2013. Ohio State University, Doctoral dissertation. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1366247518.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Bush, Douglas. "Selling a Feeling: New Approaches Toward Recent Gay Chicano Authors and Their Audience ." Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University, 2013. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1366247518

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)

osu1366247518
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This open access ETD is published by The Ohio State University and OhioLINK.