Type of Document	Dissertation
Author	Zinni, Mariana C
Author's Email Address	mariana.zinni@gmail.com
URN	etd-04232008-103950
Title	EL DESCUBRIMIENTO DE AMÉRICA Y LA INVENCIÓN DE UN NUEVO ESPACIO HERMENÉUTICO: ALTERNATIVAS DE LA MIMESIS Y EL SURGIMIENTO DE UNA MODERNIDAD CONTAMINADA.
Degree	Doctor of Philosophy
Program	Hispanic Languages and Literatures
School	School of Arts and Sciences
Advisory Committee	Advisor Name Title Hermann Herlinghaus Committee Chair Gerald Martin Committee Member John Beverley Committee Member Pascual Masullo Committee Member
Keywords	Las Casas Modernidad Cabeza de Vaca Mimesis Lope de Aguirre Sahagun Colon
Date of Defense	2008-04-22
Availability	unrestricted
Abstract Mi dissertation is based on literary and epistemological core problems surrounding the discovery and conquest of America. The discovery of America occurred during a very specific period of history, a moment of passage between the Middle Ages and Early Modernity, a historical “in-between” during which unique changes started to develop. Those changes made possible the rise and consolidation of a new hermeneutical space, a space of interpretation, of negotiation and configuration of entirely different historical and cultural formations: precisely, the constitution of the West as a cultural, epistemological and geopolitical space. Those changes transformed the way in which knowledge of the world -imaginary and even cartographical- was materialized. To be specific, they gave birth to Eurocentric Modernity. These topics imply a series of profound problems such as a transformation in the perception of reality, and consequently, the necessity of new narrative and discursive forms capable of constructing and reinforcing the reality of colonial encounters. In an environment characterized as “colonization”, narration and therefore writing are two of the main devices used to fulfill and understand the world. For the Chroniclers, was necessary to create a new way to “write” the world and about the world, and one of the modes for achieving this would be using a new “mimetic imagination”. The work of early chroniclers, such as Christopher Columbus, Bernardino de Sahagún, Bartolomé de Las Casas, Lope de Aguirre and Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, helps me to explore this particular narration of the world, and, most importantly, the way such narratives helped to construct the occidental imaginary and Eurocentric Modernity. I study the conflictive constitution of new cultural “hermeneutic” spaces, the phenomenon of narrative pact by which important processes of othering and representation take place, constituting an “other culture” in terms of discourse and rhetorical exchange. I show how the “other” is not simply excluded but subdued and subsume by being given a voice and an ambiguous place of enunciation, often even an in-between place conceived of as a metaphorical space, heterogeneous, possible and unstable that produces an alternative mimesis as well as a contaminated modernity.
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