| This dissertation began with the emblem that gave me as much comfort as discomfort as a child, the Virgin Mother and her different manifestations in the continent. Although only one of the chapters is dedicated to what I call Guadalupismo, a complex interweaving of history, myth, Church doctrine, and popular belief, constitutive of Mexican national identity, the figure informs my analysis of the varied inscriptions of difference in films, literary texts, and theories of semiosis, which have recurred, unselfconsciously, to the all-too-obvious metaphors of birth and conception at crucial moments of their exposition. The fictional texts span at least two continents and several languages and cultural traditions. The theories originate from disciplines as diverse as literary and cultural studies, philosophy, ethnology, linguistics, psychoanalysis, and feminist and film theory. My focus is the generative-constitutive operations of mimesis and myth.;My hypothesis is that the deeply unconscious, autonomous processes of ideation constitute mimetic responses to the only three modes of reproduction known in nature: sexual, asexual, and parthenogenesis. If, as I believe, this hypothesis is true, then it implies that birth or, more specifically, each of the three generative laws of natural conception, must per force be constitutive, in every sense of the word--that is, generative, formative, signifying, and foundational--as much of the structure structuring a work, be it fictional or theoretical, as of each and every sutured articulation of its body. The structure of structure can't but obey the same constitutive laws as the form of the form it both in-forms and comes to embody. Situated at three historically, geographically, and culturally distant and distinct times and places, each chapter offers a specific response to the question of modernity: that of the early-European avantgarde, particularly Futurism; that of Golden Age cinema in postrevolutionary Mexico; and that of Hollywood in the transition to postmodernity and multinational capitalism. |
