USA

The present dissertation is concerned with a set of art and literary practices from the Latin American avant - garde conversant with the technologies, the techniques of display, and the social and symbolic dynamics that vector into and out of advertising. Drawing on a set of paradigmatic avant - garde works from Mexico and Brazil, it posits sense perception and sensory experience as contested grounds within which viewing and reading postures can be steered towards critical consciousness even as they are subjected to coercion and control. These works, by Mexican muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros, Brazilian concrete poets Augusto de Campos, Haroldo de Campos, and Décio Pignatari (collectively known as the Noigandres poets), and Mexican poet and writer Octavio Paz, function and signify under the two - pronged conviction that mass media (film, photography, newspapers, radio, television) and mass culture (mostly advertising and forms of advertising: billboards, logos, slogans, etc.) reconfigure conditions of reading and spectatorship in modern urban environments, and insist that it is the task of the writer and artist to intervene the dynamics under which this reconfiguration takes place.