Browsing by Author "Van Delden, Maarten"

Now showing 1 - 6 of 6
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    Character representation in "How the Garcia Girls Lost their Accents", "In the Time of the Butterflies", and ".Yo." by Julia Alvarez
    (2007) Rasmussen, Renee Marie; Van Delden, Maarten
    In her first and third novels How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents and ¡Yo!, Julia Alvarez writes about the Dominican-American experience through the lives of an immigrant family. Her personal understanding of the context results in a complex and believable set of hybrid characterizations. In her second novel, In the Time of the Butterflies, there is a purely Dominican context. In translating this history of the Mirabal sisters, Alvarez is unable to avoid the influence of her Dominican-American experience. Therefore, these characterizations are less believable, stereotypical and not reasonably justified given their context. Unconvincing and sudden moments of conversion are a further consequence of Alvarez's failure to correctly reflect Dominican culture in her translation of the story.
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    The impact of the Haitian Revolution on Jose Marti's political thought
    (2000) Lewis, Armanda Lea; Van Delden, Maarten
    The purpose of this thesis is to analyze the role of the Haitian Revolution in helping to shape Jose Marti's writings on the social, political and economic conditions in Cuba during its wars of independence. The first chapter examines some of the similarities and differences between these two events (the Haitian Revolution and Cuba's independence wars) and the impact of the Haitian Revolution on Cuba during its wars of independence. The second chapter analyzes some of Marti's political essays and shows how Marti, throughout his works, mentions Haiti as an example not to be emulated. He stresses his desire for Cuba not to become another Haiti and proposes ways for Cuba to avoid the fate of Haiti. The final chapter studies Cuba's political, economic and social environment in the years following Marti's death and establishes whether or not Cuba did indeed accomplish Marti's wish of Cuban independence.
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    ¿Realismo o posmodernidad? Una lectura de "Le tejedora de coronas"
    (2002) Builes, Ruben; Van Delden, Maarten
    Although most critics have considered the Colombian novel La tejedora de coronas (German Espinosa, 1982) as a postmodern literary text, we prove that it has a rather conservative structure. In order to demonstrate this thesis, we approached the text from three different angles: The narrative structure, the historical perspective, and the narrator's voice. In a first moment, we describe the characteristics of the realistic novel as opposed to the contemporary novel. Then we analyze the narrative structure, citing different passages, with the purpose of showing how the use of stream of consciousness misleads the reader's comprehension of the text. After this, we analyzed the historical perspective of the author, with the intention of revealing its conventional euro-centric approach. Finally, we dissect the feminine voice of the narrator, discovering the use of conservative cliches and the misogyny of the main character-narrator.
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    La desmitificacion del papel de la mujer buena y la mujer mala en los cuentos de Rosario Ferre
    (1998) Jao, Meilin Juliette; Van Delden, Maarten
    En los cuentos en Papeles de Pandora y en Las dos Venecias, Rosario Ferre escribe con el proposito didactico de iluminar la imagen de la mujer contemporanea. Ella quiere que la mujer aprenda a tomar control de su vida y deje de ser un mero reflejo, una sombra del hombre. En sus cuentos, con el uso del doble, Ferre describe dos clases de mujeres, la buena y la mala, que viven dentro de la sociedad patriarcal de Puerto Rico. Con el doble, Ferre compara a estas dos clases de mujeres con el proposito de derribar la idea machista de la mujer ideal, la mansita, la buena ama de casa, la mujer sacrificada. En Papeles de Pandora, ella muestra esa dialectica que existe entre los papeles de ambas mujeres. Mientras que en Las dos Venecias, ella sugiere que la mujer se debe hacer duena de sus propias acciones para encontrar su autenticidad. Aunque Ferre no lo dice explicitamente, vemos que la nueva mujer puertorriquena con verdadera autenticidad se parece a la taina.
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    Spanish language development in an elementary school two-way immersion program
    (2007) Holman, Andrea D.; Van Delden, Maarten
    This study analyzed the level of proficiency in the minority language, Spanish, of students in the final years of a two-way immersion program at Mark Twain Elementary School in Houston, Texas. The level of proficiency of these two-way immersion students was gauged by comparing their oral narratives to those produced by the monolingual Spanish speakers in Eugenia Sebastian and Dan I. Slobin's 1994 study, "Development of Linguistic Forms: Spanish." The Spanish-dominant and native English-Spanish bilingual students in the program were found to have a high level of proficiency in Spanish. However, the English-dominant students in the program have not attained a native-like proficiency in Spanish. Thus, the program, while beneficial for both native and non-native Spanish speakers, is still somewhat lacking in its linguistic education of non-native Spanish speakers.
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    The new face of Mexico seen through "The Crystal Frontier" by Carlos Fuentes
    (2005) Kasper, Paul E.; Van Delden, Maarten
    Building upon the historical foundations of Mexican identity assembled by his contemporaries, himself and his predecessors, Carlos Fuentes does his best to render the new face of Mexican identity in his recent novel, La frontera de cristal. Several of its characters stand out as literary embodiments of border theory. These characters not only serve as a description of the author's views of this new reality but also as cautionary tales of what might result from globalization and the neo-liberal market. This thesis will display how these characters are representations of Fuentes's conjecture about the outcome of our present NAFTA-era politics and provide interpretations of some of his characters' fates.