Semester

Spring

Date of Graduation

2019

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Type

MA

College

Eberly College of Arts and Sciences

Department

World Languages, Literatures and Linguistics

Committee Chair

Sonia Zarco Real

Committee Co-Chair

Ángel Tuninetti

Committee Member

Mario Morera

Abstract

In this Master’s thesis I examine the most recent Costa Rican opera The Path of Avoidance (2017), produced by the Cultural Association for Performing Arts Abya Yala, directed by Roxana Ávila and composed by Carlos Castro, based on the homonymous novel of Yolanda Oreamuno (1948).Through a semiotic analysis, I will discuss how the innovative manner of incorporating Latin American rhythms such as salsa, bolero, vals criollo, bossa nova and tango is a musical strategy which promotes a problematization of the gender dominant discourse and patriarchal context. Simultaneously, these rhythms offer a way of resistance on the direct or psychological violence towards the feminine and masculine characters from the family los Mendoza.

The adaptation of the book into a twenty first century opera is approached through the concept of hypertextuality established by Gérard Genette who stated it as “the relationship uniting a text B (hypertext) to an earlier text A (hypotext), upon which it grafted in a manner that is not that of commentary” (Palimpsesto 14). The relationship between the novel (hypotext) and the opera (hypertext) generated by the transposition of narrative to the dramatic mode due the transmadalization intermodal (dramatization). The modifications in the hypotex have place in the temporality of narrative, regulation of information, and elimination of the narrator (357). This elimination is covered by the Latin American rhythms which allows new forms of resistance by the emerging of the semiotics according to Julia Kristeva (1974) and the verbalization of feminine subjectivity (Robbins 2000).

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