This dissertation explores three Latin American novels: Los pasos perdidos by Alejo Carpentier (Cuba), Água viva by Clarice Lispector (Brazil) and Un episodio en la vida del pintor viajero by César Aira (Argentina). Even though they were published in different times and places, these novels share the same preoccupation. That is, the human necessity for a rituality that gives sense to existence. This rituality speaks about the connection of the body with the surrounding reality and the necessity to express it to others. Therefore, it opens a certain communication among humanity. The protagonists of these novels are artists. All of them have the necessity of thinking about the art they produce. In all of them, art matters for two reasons: 1) It becomes a trace of the protagonist’s journey in the world and her/his possibility of being free through expression, 2) it opens the possibility of a profound dialogue through time. Likewise, all these novels state that art has value only if it is able to disrupt a status- quo. In this sense, they display a counterbalance to power mechanisms. What is more, the concept of art trembles in these narrations. Art becomes only a posterior Western concept added to a universal and timeless human necessity. That is, the necessity of a rituality that speaks about the connection between bodies and places through expression.

The first step consisted in the creation of a proposal that went through different stages of revision and commentaries; this step also included the consolidation and reading of a wide number of texts related to the issue of art reflexivity. A committee integrated by four professors of different fields guided the reading exercise, commented and evaluated the outcomes of that process.

After the proposal approval, a thorough research of Latin American narrations that contain art reflexivity helped to choose the three novels that integrate the corpus of this book. However, the discovery of two commonalities led the corpus selection criteria. On one hand, there is a presence of a deep concern about the relation between the own body and the surrounding world. On the other hand, there is an opposition to a certain kind of power.

The main discoveries, in the three narrations here explored, are based on the presence of a special personal rituality. This rituality intends to overcome the certainty of the future body’s death through a creation, and constitutes a kind of thought; which main source is the body. A present body wants to establish a communication that travels breaking the three temporalities (present, past and future) and concentrates in the present of other bodies. This is why the texts place emphasis on perception when exploring a creational process. Água viva’s protagonist calls the readers’ attention to the importance of understanding her creation (the text) through their bodies. On the other hand, Los pasos perdidos and Un episodio intend to send a message about the knowledge that can be reached through a deep connection of body and space.

This fact constitutes a turn in ideologies that foster the belief in the supremacy of mind over body. Turning this hierarchical order becomes a fusion where perceiving is thinking. In this sense, the creation is seen as the vestige of that thought, a vestige that works to generate o meanings. However, it is possible only in connection with a body willing to open its senses, in the present.

This dissertation proposes to examine the eco-noir, a study of crime fiction, noirs, anddetective novels through the lens of the literary figure of the landscape. The aim is to explore how this genres relate to the environment and ecological thought. I delve into the generic antinomies of crime fiction, specifically the tension between the resolution of the enigma of a case and the impossibility of that, and how they intersect with climate change, and the theoretical concept of hyperobjects, which I draw from Timothy Morton’s perspective. This enables me to reflect on the ways in which this genre and reason itself are challenged by environmental disasters. Specifically, in my research, I examine how Latin American crime fiction uses environmental narratives to investigate the relationship between violence, socio-environmental conflicts, and the effects of ecological destruction. In this regard, I incorporate Rob Nixon’s concept of slow violence, which sheds light on the gradual and imperceptible violence inflicted on the environment, into the analysis of crime fiction. The central question that guides my project is how twenty-first century Latin American crime fiction utilizes landscape, environmental degradation, and related affects to highlight the historical connections between violence towards nature and society, intersecting with race, class, and gender in complex ways. The works of prominent theorists such as Jane Bennett, Donna Haraway, and Stacy Alaimo are central to my analysis as they develop ideas on the force of things, transcorporeality, and the concept of symbiotic and Chtulucene, that I use to discuss how the landscape is being transformed by different networks and agents. My dissertation comprises four chapters, each examining a different work of Latin American crime fiction. In the first chapter, I analyze Ricardo Piglia’s Blanco Nocturno, which explores how the desertification of the humid pampas intersects with indigenous genocide and climate disaster. The second chapter investigates Cristina Rivera Garza’s El mal de la taiga, which utilizes environmental rhetoric to probe the ecological imbalances caused by global warming and deforestation in the boreal forest of the North Pole. In the third chapter, I examine María Inés Krimer’s Noxa and how it critiques the use of herbicides in transgenic soybean monocultures through the biopolitical attempt to control the toxic effects of herbicides that are uncontrollable. Finally, in the fourth chapter, I study the relationships between slow violence and corruption in the Ecuadorian novel Poso Wells, which tackles the sale of ecological reserves and the environmental risks of palm monoculture in Colombia, as seen in Juan Cárdenas’ El diablo de las provincias. My methodology combines ecocritical and affective studies, examining both the history of landscape in literature and the study of emotions. I argue that violence against the environment and the landscape has both material and emotional effects on biodiversity and society. The negative emotions experienced by characters in these novels, such as nostalgia, sinister concerns, fears of destruction, and anxiety about climate change, provoke deep reflections on ecology.

This work focuses on complex-oxide superlattices as a pathway to numerous forms of emergent phenomena due to strong interfacial interactions present in unit-cell precise structures. Superlattices based on ferroelectric and dielectric materials can elicit new forms of ferroelectricity, exotic dipolar textures, and distinctive domain structures. Here, I place two different ferroelectric phases in the PbZr1-xTixO3 system and use superlattice design as a proxy for local composition – asking what happens when the overall chemistry is that of the morphotropic phase boundary, but the individual layers are far away from that boundary? The intimate interfacing of these dissimilar materials results in a unique combination of effects: simultaneous large polarization magnitude and large permittivity. The material effectively acts like a combination of the robust parent ferroelectrics and an interfacial region that akin to the phase-boundary. Next, I analyze relaxor-like behavior, which is typically associated with chemical inhomogeneity and complexity in solid solutions, in atomically precise (BaTiO3)n/(SrTiO3)n symmetric superlattices. Dielectric studies reveal frequency dispersion of dielectric response which increases in magnitude as the periodicity decreases. Techniques such as Vogel-Fulcher analysis and bond valence molecular dynamics simulations reveal that relaxor-like behavior in short-period superlattices arises from temperature-driven size variations of antipolar stripe domains in contrast to the more thermally stable dipolar configurations in long-period superlattices. Moreover, the size and shape of antipolar domains are tuned by superlattice periodicity following Kittel’s Law thus providing an artificial route to relaxor-like behavior which may expand the ability to control desired properties in these complex systems. Ultimately, I show that unit-cell-precise deposition provides a pathway to design novel heterostructures and thus access interfacial-driven phenomena, posing the question: can control at a single unit-cell be achieved with designer chemical ordering and structure? Such questions will motivate the community’s further pursuit of these matters. The current work paves the way for future research in the realization of novel approaches to ferroelectricity stemming from interfacial interactions, which will continue to be more relevant as devices get smaller.