ABSTRACT
This final section is dedicated to the exploration of the last stage of Bildung as it has been articulated through the structure of Gender and the Self in Latin American Literature-that of ‘reconstruction’, which will be explored using the topos of the body as the primary point of reference. In many ways this part of the threefold process of the dialectic is the most complex and difficult to define, for it is a point of culmination, yet not an ending per se. Rachel Blau DuPlessis has succinctly evaluated the importance of endings in Writing Beyond the Ending: Narrative Strategies of Twentieth-Century Women Writers, remarking that ‘one of the great moments of ideological negotiation in any work occurs in the choice of a resolution for the various services it provides’.1 And whereas this moment of reconstruction is the end point of this study, it is also a site of potentiality that needs to be left in a state of openness through its literary representation, so it is apt that both of the works examined here in Part Three end at a point of nonclosure.
