Date of Award

2017

Document Type

Open Access Thesis

Department

Comparative Literature

Sub-Department

College of Arts and Sciences

First Advisor

Andrew Rajca

Abstract

Much of the comparative scholarship on the works of Gabriel García Márquez assumes the position that he was most significantly influenced by the works of William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway. However, beyond the citation of techniques shared extensively by other Modernists and dependence upon superficial comparisons between texts, the connections between García Márquez and these writers frequently remain tenuous. I suggest that to privilege Faulknerian or Hemingwayan readings of García Márquez is to overlook his position as a postcolonial Latin American novelist; I therefore consider in relationship with García Márquez the Irish writer James Joyce. Both writers participate in what I call archival resistance, constructing in Ulysses and One Hundred Years of Solitude a depository of images and scenes relating the experiences of life in Ireland or Latin America, respectively. The presence of colonialism in both Ireland and Latin America has historically impeded their ability to create narratives through which their own identities may be expressed, subordinated instead to overarching imperialist chronicles. I argue that it is in this shared resistance that an extensive ideological relationship—if not direct influence—is revealed between James Joyce and Gabriel García Márquez.

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