Publications

1985
Sommer D. National Romance and Populist Rhetoric in Spanish America. In: Europe and its Others. Colchester: Essex University ; 1985.
1984
Sommer D. Thomas Mann’s Gentle Prophetic Voice. In: Wojcik J, Frontain R-J Poetic Prophecy in Western Literature. Cranbury, NJ: Fairleigh Dickenson University Press ; 1984.
Sommer D. America as Desire(d): Nathaniel Tarn’s Poetry of the Outsider as Insider. In: American Poetry. Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico ; 1984.
One Master for Another: Populism as Patriarchal Rhetoric in Dominican Novels
Sommer D. One Master for Another: Populism as Patriarchal Rhetoric in Dominican Novels. Lanham, MD: University Press of America; 1984. Publisher's VersionAbstract

One Master for Another: Populism as Patriarchal Rhetoric in Dominican Novels (1984) develops a theory of patriotic narrative in response to quandaries about the nature of populism. Historians and social scientists know that it is not exactly an ideology, or a movement, or a political position. But they don't say what it is. My reading of a range of novels that follow the nation-building period shows that populism is a culture, a set of symbolic relationships that translates national crises and projects into the language of family crises: the struggle of a legitimate husband/people to recover the wife/land from the usurper. The patriarchal culture operates left and right of political and ideological differences. Either way, it blocks fundamental change, by reducing the woman (along with other sectors of the non-active citizenry) to a prize, an object of desire and struggle, instead of imagining anyone but the masculine "pueblo" as an agent.

1982
Sommer D. Populism as Rhetoric: The Dominican Republic. Boundary 2. 1982;XI.1-2.
1979
Sommer D. History and Romanticism in Pedro Mir’s Cuando amaban las tierras comuneras. In: Revista de Estudios Hispánicos. Río Piedras, PR: Unversidad de Puerto Rico ; 1979.
Sommer D. Pattern and Predictability in the Stories of Julio Cortázar. In: Minc R The Contemporary Latin American Short Story. New York: Senda de ediciones ; 1979.

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