The purpose of this study is to analyze the importance of spatiality in the works of Julio Ramon Ribeyro and how these spaces reflect on the city’s physical and architectural transformation related to the inhabitants. The centralism of Lima has been a social phenomenon that accompanies the Peruvian culture from the 1940s to the 1950s due to the first wave of modernization of the city. This modernizing movement involved tremendous changes in the environment of Lima’s residents. Through these massive transformations, the city of Lima became an alienating space full of new symbols and meanings that altered the social geography of Peru’s capital city; in other words, Lima went from being “the garden city” to “Lima the horrible”. This modern city sets new environments characterized by personal, residential and urban spaces, where the residents try to become part of the urban landscape. This analysis uses five characters with their own spaces that represent three different places in the lives of the new citizens during their adaptation and survival to the capital. To complete this study, I primarily based my research on close reading and literary analysis of five short stories that deal with typical spaces in the urban landscape of Lima while also focusing on different kinds of characters to expand the vision of the meaning of “limeño”, a native from Lima, during the mid 20th century. I retake the discourses on “spatial turn” as a resource to evaluate the spatiality in the humanities, particularly, the use of literary maps to understand the relationship between space and literary characters. In sum, this study demonstrates the influence of spatiality throughout the everyday life of literary characters based on three different spaces. The first space is the personal space that is an intimate space, considered as a survival shelter that is accompanied by a spatial disjunction. This disjunction means abandonment by the character in the center or border of Ribeyro’s city. The second space is the residential space; it is a closed space which is far from providing salvation to the character and becomes another factor of marginalization. The last space is the urban space. This space shows the subjectivity of heterogeneous and fragmented city dwellers during the fifties and allows me to study of city under different perspectives as a social place, a place of experience, of diversity and as a lived space. In addition, it is added as a place of spatial (in)justice as proposed by Tally Jr. Thus, urban space is read here as domination and discrimination, while the role of the neighborhood and the street become spaces of coexistence through everyday life.
Date of Degree
Master of Science (MS)
World Languages and Cultures
Arts and Humanities
Torres Mallma, Anna Vanessa, "El espacio como constructor de identidad en los cuentos de Julio Ramón Ribeyro" (2016). All Theses, Dissertations, and Other Capstone Projects. 606.
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