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Lo parafilico como estructurador de la ficcion en la narrativa de Felisberto Hernandez

Cervetto, Martin R

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2015, PhD, University of Cincinnati, Arts and Sciences: Romance Languages and Literatures.
The purpose of my dissertation is to demonstrate that the paraphilic element is not a mere topic in the narrative of Felisberto Hernandez, but that it structures his complete fictional project. This study analyzes the works of the Uruguayan writer in the light of the psychoanalytic and philosophical traditions as well as the literary criticism in order to expose and understand the way that the paraphilic thread informs the different layers of his fiction. My dissertation comprises six chapters. The first one presents the theoretical structure of the paraphilic component. The work of Sigmund Freud is especially relevant at this point, since his article on fetishism from 1927 is the foundational keystone on the subject. Lacan’s contributions are going to be incorporated as well in the interpretation of Hernandez’ fictionalization of the deviation. The concepts of substitution and exclusivity will be significantly pertinent in this analysis as well. The second chapter exposes the splitting off mechanism as a constitutive of the paraphilic process both at the level of the body and of the ego. The ambivalence as its constitutional device will also be analyzed and explained as the theoretical and structural basis of this representational strategy. Viktor Shklovsky’s concepts of defamiliarization and desautomatization will help us understand the particular poetic that is behind the eccentric ways of decodification and interaction with reality Hernandez’s main characters continually present. The third chapter is mainly focused in childhood as the period of life when the paraphilic components are shaped in the unconscious. This is directly related to the recurrent character in Hernandez’s narrative that we call “the paraphilic kid” as an incarnation of this deviated logic and sensibility. Again, Freud’s discoveries about children’s sexuality, especially the perverse polymorphic disposition, are going to be incorporated in our investigation. In the fourth chapter, we explore the enormous productivity that the philosophical ideas of Henry Bergson trigger in the fictional constructions of our author. The disarticulation of the phenomenological parameters the French philosopher develops throughout his system is used by Hernandez to contribute to the paraphilical communication among entities belonging to different species in the creation of a fictional universe informed by the erotically deviated drives that informs his creative project. The fifth chapter is precisely an immersion into this deviated sexual configuration that Hernandez maintains as a distinctive trait of his fiction. The transgressive character of his aesthetical approach will be articulated with his philosophical ideas in order to restructure the conventional ways we understand reality, beauty and eroticism. In the final chapter we will confront Hernandez’s literature with the concepts of the uncanny and the fantastic in order to expose the way our author redefines reality by subjecting its parameters to the necessities of his paraphilic drives and intuitions.
Enrique Giordano, Ph.D. (Committee Chair)
Andres Perez-Simon, Ph.D. (Committee Member)
Nicasio Urbina, Ph.D. (Committee Member)
254 p.

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Citations

  • Cervetto, M. R. (2015). Lo parafilico como estructurador de la ficcion en la narrativa de Felisberto Hernandez [Doctoral dissertation, University of Cincinnati]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ucin1423581004

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Cervetto, Martin. Lo parafilico como estructurador de la ficcion en la narrativa de Felisberto Hernandez. 2015. University of Cincinnati, Doctoral dissertation. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ucin1423581004.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Cervetto, Martin. "Lo parafilico como estructurador de la ficcion en la narrativa de Felisberto Hernandez." Doctoral dissertation, University of Cincinnati, 2015. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ucin1423581004

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)