Abstract

In his novels, short stories, and essays, the Mexican writer Juan Garcia Ponce unites diverse cultural and aesthetic traditions to produce hybrid texts foregrounding the concept of the gendered subject. The articulation of subjectivity, in conjunction with the transgression of social and sexual taboos, is the marker of these texts. ;Culled from sources as varied as the narrative works of Klossowski, Bataille, and Tanizaki, in addition to the paintings of Balthus, Garcia Ponce's female subjects form a constellation of erotic bodies around which the narratives revolve. A focal point of this study is the author's construction of such narrating subjects whose identity is contingent on their relationship to a variety of social and historical circumstances. I draw from the phenomenological writings of Merleau-Ponty and Kristeva's essays on melancholia and abjection to examine the representation of identities in crisis as Mexico emerges into "Modernity." ;Examination of the trilogy Cronica de la intervencion , De anima , and Inmaculada o los placeres de la inocencia uses the visual concept of the triptych as a series of panels around which a collection of stories are articulated in shifting scenarios. I pursue, on both thematic and formal levels, the vexed issue of Garcia Ponce's representation of women and the place of the subject in history and in the "modern" world. The first and the last chapters of the dissertation place Garcia Ponce's trilogy of novels and other writings, including Pasado presente , within a larger cultural, aesthetic, and historical framework of Mexican, Latin American, and European literary production. ;To conclude my study of the subject, I address the politics of the texts in terms of the characters' encounters with the cultural world surrounding them. The gendered body serves as a permeable tissue across which human erotic experiences are filtered and identities are formed. The dissertation dismantles Garcia Ponce's visions of the complex and problematic relationships between America and Europe, East and West, eroticism and pornography, authoritarian regimes and literary artifacts, nationalism and "Modernity," in the context of Freud's notion of the "unheimlich."