New World romance and authorship (Edgar Allan Poe, Hart Crane, Jorge Luis Borges, Argentina, Alejo Carpentier, Cuba, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Colombia)

This dissertation argues that the recourse to romance in post-realist New World writing was accompanied by a re-conceptualization of the figure of the author. While it is true that American romance in its first incarnation exemplified the generic norms of romance, this dissertation focuses on a later generation of romancers, self consciously writing against realism in an attempt to return to romance. I dub this movement "New World romance" and hold that its primary innovation was to replace the traditional plot of romance of voyage, return and heterosexual union with a meta-textual plot that concerns the attempted but failed return to the generic "innocence" of traditional romance after the collapse of realism. In the process of writing back to romance, the writer sheds the figural trappings of the realist author and adopts a new identity.; In The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket Edgar Allan Poe transforms realism from an epistemological project into a rhetorical ploy meant to dupe his readers. The author becomes a despotic figure, subjecting the reader to the tyranny of his fictions. Jorge Luis Borges explores the political consequences of such overweening authority in "Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" and proposes instead a dialogical model of the writer: the author as translator.; What happens when the real is no longer the exclusive property of an author, or even a government? Culture defines reality, and when cultures come into conflict, the "clash of civilizations" ensues. In El reino de este mundo and "Black Tambourine" Alejo Carpentier and Hart Crane manage "the clash" by transcribing cultural conflict into musical form, thereby transforming the author into a jazzman.; Finally, in Cien anos de soledad Gabriel Garcia Marquez re-imagines the encounter between reader and text as the encounter between Echo and Narcissus. Arrogating upon himself the authority to condemn the reader to perpetual longing, Garcia Marquez becomes a kind of deity, thereby adopting a role as author that reaches beyond realism, beyond romanticism to the very origins of literature in myth and romance.