Border incidents: Narrative, cultural production and translation in twentieth-century Ecuadorian and American literature

The breaking up of hegemonic discourse by means of the narrative insertion of dissenting and/or popular voices is one of the key features of most of the Ecuadorian literature examined in this dissertation. Many of these works make significant use of the group story, a "democratic" form in which the separation between tellers and listeners collapses, which has proven to be especially useful in the novelists' attempts to reconstruct their history from conflicting discourses.;Bakhtin's contributions to literary and cultural studies are particularly relevant to a discussion of the Ecuadorian sociopolitical and cultural situation because Ecuador's literary and other spheres of discourse are dominated by a mixing of languages and cultures; a heteroglossia on a national scale, complicated in this case by the dominant population's denial of that other voice. This struggle is one of the principal themes of twentieth-century Ecuadorian literature.;As early as the 1920s, Pablo Palacio was writing stories that focus on undermining the authority of narrative texts. Novels examined from the 1930s and 1940s use forms that might be called "Socialist Magic Realism" to depict struggles for land, ethnic identity and power in material, and in textual and linguistic, terms; one work from the 1950s presents simultaneously the contradictory realities of conqueror and conquered, without privileging either one. Works discussed include Don Goyo, Huasipungo, The Grapes of Wrath, Nuestro pan, Los Sangurimas, One Hundred Years of Solitude, El tigre, The Emperor Jones, Polvo y ceniza and Alicia Yanez Cossio's Bruna soroche y los tios, which presents a contemporary young woman's struggle to reconstruct her family history against the grain of official history and the suppression of her foremother's race.;In writing criticism in English of Ecuadorian texts I found it necessary to translate works never before translated, since one of my goals is to introduce the English-speaking reader to twentieth-century Ecuadorian literature. The translation process is central to the debates concerning the canonization, domestication and incorporation into a dominant culture of potentially dissident voices.