Whereas contemporary debates in Latin American studies addressing sovereignty often focus on dictatorships and the transitions to democratic governments in Latin America in the late twentieth century, Sovereignties Displaced: Avant-Garde Prose and Authoritarianism in Spain, Chile, and Argentina (1923-1936) adopts a transatlantic framework and directs critical attention to the cultural production of the interwar period. The historical and cultural events preceding and following 1929 are connected to World War I, the political crisis of democratic systems, and the global socioeconomic instability of the period. The three countries studied in the present work would be affected by these conditions, sharing an almost synchronic development of the authoritarian governments of Miguel Primo de Rivera in Spain (1923-1930), of Carlos Ibáñez del Campo in Chile (1927-1931), and José Félix Uriburu in Argentina (1930-1932). Additionally, the rise of authoritarianism and the decay of parliamentary institutions characterizing this epoch condition and inscribe the political essays and avant-garde novels composed by the intellectuals and writers analyzed in this study: from Spain, María Zambrano (1904-1991), Ramón Gómez de la Serna (1888-1963), and Benjamín Jarnés (1888-1949); from Chile, Alberto Edwards Vives (1874-1932), Juan Emar (1893-1964), and Vicente Huidobro (1893-1948); and from Argentina, Ramón Doll (1896-1970), Norah Lange (1905-1972), and Roberto Arlt (1900-1942). It should be noted that while considering national circumstances, my argumentation is divided into sections organized not by country, but rather by subject matter: a methodological and theoretical introduction, three analytical chapters, and concluding remarks. Established critical assessments of the avant-gardes, as offered by experts like Renato Poggioli (1907-1963), have underscored that democratic forms of government would provide the initial conditions of possibility of the historical avant-gardes. Other scholars, however, have recognized the interdependency of early twentieth century artistic discourses, revolutionary ideas, and authoritarianism. Informed by the theorization of sovereignty and democracy of Jacques Derrida (1930-2004), and the concept of community of Roberto Esposito (1950-), my research examines, in political essays and vanguard novels, the opposition of individual vis-à-vis collective forms of rule. The texts of my corpus manifest a recurrent concern relating to the tension between self-rule and collective-rule, a dynamic which organizes and destabilizes avant-garde formations themselves. Consequently, I analyze the philosophical and political ramifications of these authors’ defense, negation, or destabilization of the individual-collective opposition in the context of the deterioration of parliamentarism. In my first chapter, I examine the following essays that represent a range of political positions from the interwar years: Horizonte del liberalismo (1930) by María Zambrano, Liberalismo en la literatura y la política (Con una segunda edición de: “Democracia mal menor”) (1934, n/d) by Ramón Doll, and La fronda aristocrática en Chile (1928) by Alberto Edwards Vives. Framed by the sociological assessments of José Ortega y Gasset in La rebelión de las masas (1930), this chapter considers these essayists’ observations regarding mass politics and the role of political and economic elites. I foreground the ethical problems relating to these authors’ conceptions of the human subject and their concomitant formulations of governance, deriving from various ideological orientations. The essayists’ comparable anxieties regarding the limits of democratic politics reveal the complexities of the period and serve as a springboard for the subsequent chapters that study the politics of avant-garde novels. In my second chapter, shifting from essayistic discourse to vanguard fiction, I analyze philosophical oppositions central to the configuration of sovereignty, and to the theory and practice of democracy. These tensions organize various components of the following novels: Un año (1935) by Juan Emar (pseudonym of Álvaro Yáñez Bianchi), 45 días y 30 marineros (1933) by Norah Lange, and El caballero del hongo gris (1928) by Ramón Gómez de la Serna. I demonstrate that, although these narratives do not contain explicit references to the emergence of authoritarianism and the erosion of parliamentarism of the period, these narratives are structured by problems that have implications for a thinking of issues relating to sovereignty and democracy. These novels similarly present how individuals interact with groups, such that it becomes imperative to consider the political consequences of these relations in order to critique, for example, fraternalistic and nationalistic notions of political filiation. My final chapter studies the narrative presentations of radical political projects that aim to restructure society in Los siete locos (1929) by Roberto Arlt, La próxima (1934) by Vicente Huidobro, and Lo rojo y lo azul (1932) by Benjamín Jarnés. In contrast to the narratives included in the second chapter, these avant-garde novels establish an explicit dialogue with the conditions of crisis of the interwar years. From insurrections and utopian settlements, to revolutionary military revolts, these narrations depict small vanguard groups that propose various plots that seek to radically reshape the social order. Even though poetry is often positioned as the paradigmatic form of vanguard literary expression, my research theorizes the understudied phenomenon of Hispanic avant-garde prose. In particular, I account for the variation among avant-garde novels of the period, by sustaining that there are gradations of vanguard narrative depending on different factors that range from the transparency or opacity of linguistic expression, to the organization of the narrative material. In this sense, some novels considered vanguardist, while approaching a certain radicality in terms of language and form, may incorporate elements of the realist-naturalist novelistic tradition. Likewise, I assert the importance of attending to the varied uses of meta-reflexive procedures in Hispanic vanguard prose. Given their implicit and explicit interaction with contemporary historical conditions and political and artistic discourses of the 1920s and 1930s, I contend that the essays and avant-garde novels analyzed offer a fertile ground to examine the nature of sovereignty, while also presenting, in some crucial instances, potential images of what a democracy worthy of this name could look like. / Spanish

This dissertation offers the first extended study of the work of the Welsh-French poet Heather Dohollau, whose substantial œuvre in French, published since 1974, has recently received international critical recognition. My thesis centres on the idea of traversée, which originates in Dohollau’s experience of exiles, returns and bilingualism. My chapters elucidate five interconnected themes which all relate to that overarching paradigm. Chapter 1 focuses on Dohollau’s trajectories as reflected in poems on the memory of place, concentrating on South Wales and the island. The quest for place is also a quest for the past, which is handled as an after-image capable of upwelling into the present. Chapter 2 investigates the visual-verbal bilingualism towards which Dohollau’s texts on specific artworks (or ekphrastic texts) seem to strive. Dohollau revitalizes the ekphrastic tradition and challenges its conventional connotations of power struggle (W. J. T. Mitchell) in favour of a poetics of hospitality. Chapter 3 is dedicated to Dohollau’s ethos and practice of slowness. It undertakes a close-reading analysis of her syntactic and sound-related rhythms, connecting them with Derrida’s différance. The idea of poetry as a foreign language is discussed in chapter 4: Dohollau’s adoption of French as her main poetic language in the mid-1960s, her handling of motherhood and daughterhood, and her quest for a poetics of mourning and fidelity are examined in their interrelations. The concluding chapter explores the boundaries between language and the unsaid. Dohollau has been uniquely placed to engage with postwar reassessments of language and its limits (Derrida, Heidegger, Blanchot), poised as she is between languages and media. As her poems show, such limits constitute a poetic resource in their own right. Her carefully cultivated liminal stance has given her important insights into the creative process as a passage into words from an unwritten, yet not utterly inchoate other of the poem.

This study uses the Tibetan mandala, a Buddhist meditation aid and sacred artform, as a secular critical model by which to analyse the complete fictions of author David Mitchell. Discussing his novels, short stories and libretti, this study maps the author's fictions as an interconnected world-system whose re-evaluation of secular belief in galvanising compassionate ethical action is revealed by a critical comparison with the mandala's methods of world-building. Using the mandala as an interpretive tool to critique the author's Buddhist influences, this thesis reads the mandala as a metaphysical map, a fitting medium for mapping the author's ethical worldview. The introduction evaluates critical structures already suggested to describe the author's worlds, and introduces the mandala as an alternative which more fully addresses Mitchell's fictional terrain. Chapter I investigates the mandala's cartographic properties, mapping Mitchell's short stories as integral islandic narratives within his fictional world which, combined, re-evaluate the role of secular belief in galvanising positive ethical action. Chapter II discusses the Tibetan sand mandala in diaspora as a form of performance when created for unfamiliar audiences, reading its cross-cultural deployment in parallel with the regenerative approaches to tragedy in the author's libretti Wake and Sunken Garden. Chapter III identifies Mitchell's use of reincarnation as a form of non-linear temporality that advocates future-facing ethical action in the face of humanitarian crises, reading the reincarnated Marinus as a form of secular bodhisattva. Chapter IV deconstructs the mandala to address its theoretical limitations, identifying the panopticon as its sinister counterpart, and analysing its effects in number9dream. Chapter V shifts this study's use of the mandala from interpretive tool to emerging category, identifying the transferrable traits that form the emerging category of mandalic literature within other post-secular contemporary fictions, discussing works by Michael Ondaatje, Ali Smith, Yann Martel, Will Self, and Margaret Atwood.

Eva Krásová: Émile Benveniste and the role of sens My thesis "Émile Benveniste and the role of sens" is a monographic study of the life work of Émile Benveniste (1902-1977) through the role that the concept of meaning (sens) takes in his thought. I adopt the methodology defined by K. Kœrner as "historiography of language sciences", and thus my perspective on Benveniste's work is mainly chronological and developmental. First part of the thesis concentrates on theoretical foundations of Benveniste's thought in the school of Paris (A. Meillet and M. Bréal), Prague (R. Jakobson and V. Skalička) and Copenhagen (texts around 1939). I point out the concept of language system in diachrony in A. Meillet's thinking and in Prague school and present a hypothesis about the role of Émile Bneveniste in their contact during the International congresses of linguists. This results into a description of the perspective of meaning as it was presented in Benveniste's 1962 lecture "Levels of linguistic analysis". Second part deals with Benveniste's concept linguistics of discours. First chapter explains the main concepts of Benveniste's theory of language: semiotics and semantics or the semiotical and the semantical (le/la sémiotique, sémantique), enunciation (énonciation), appropriation (appropriation) and the theory...

Includes bibliographical references (leaves 123-127) / This dissertation examines how three dystopian texts, namely Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, Jasper Fforde’s Shades of Grey and Veronica Roth’s Divergent trilogy, exhibit social conformity as a disciplinary mechanism of the ‘carceral’ – a notion introduced by poststructuralist thinker Michel Foucault. Employing poststructuralist discourse and deconstructive theory as a theoretical framework, the study investigates how each novel establishes its world as a successful carceral city that incorporates most, if not all, the elements of the incarceration system that Foucault highlights in Discipline and Punish. It establishes that the societies of the texts present potentially nightmarish future societies in which social and political “improvements” result in a seemingly better world, yet some essential part of human existence has been sacrificed. This study of these fictional worlds reflects on the carceral nature of modern society and highlights the problematic nature of the social and political practices to which individuals are expected to conform. Finally, in line with Foucault, it postulates that individuals need not be enclosed behind prison walls to be imprisoned; the very nature of our social systems imposes the restrictive power that incarcerates societies / English Studies / M.A. (English Studies)

The focus of this practical theological study is Pentecostalism, and the relationship between the hermeneutics of Pentecostalism and Postmodernism. Through a literary search, we observe the points of congruency between the hermeneutics of early Pentecostals and the key tenets of Postmodernism. We note the unprecedented acceptance of Pentecostal scholars into the larger theological world and question whether this is a result of the increased Modernization of Pentecostal hermeneutics. The Postmodern world of youth is explored, and we observe their tremendous openness to spirituality. This thesis will show that Pentecostals may contribute to the Christian world a Pentecostal hermeneutic that will speak a relevant message to generations of youth. Chapters two and three examine the convergent viewpoints of Pentecostalism with Postmodernity, in terms of rationalism, narratives, and the place of experience in life and theology. Chapter four highlights the hermeneutical debate between Gordon D. Fee and his Pentecostal responders, noting the Modern approach in the principles debated. Chapter five seeks to provide interaction with a giant of theology seldom engaged by Pentecostals - Rudolf Bultmann - and his modern followers, and explores the world of Postmodern youth. Chapter six explores the work of Kenneth Archer, who has proposed a specific Pentecostal hermeneutical approach, and chapter seven discusses the role of the Holy Spirit in hermeneutics, including whether Pentecostal experience may be considered an ”edge” in hermeneutics. Chapter eight summarizes the findings of this study. / Practical Theology / D. Th (Practical Theology)

本篇論文企圖探討史蒂芬‧佛瑞爾斯 ( Stephen Frears ) 的電影《美麗壞東西》( Dirty Pretty Things ) 中的公民權與人權之議題。片中描述從奈及利亞非法入境的奧奎 (Okwe) 與來自土耳其申請政治庇護的桑娜 (Senay) 因其游移的身分，遭逢英國政府監控與資本主義社會剝削，並揭露倫敦城市中非法難民販賣器官以求生存的黑暗面。本篇論文著重分析政治庇護者的矛盾身分如何擾亂民族國家的監視、暴露僅以公民權利保障境內人民的缺失，並主張唯有透過跨種族、階級，與性別的聯合 ( solidarity ) 才能對抗國家機制裡的矛盾與全球資本主義的剝削。論文第二章以德希達 ( Jacques Derrida ) 的制約款待 ( conditional hospitality )，與傅柯 ( Michel Foucault ) 的監視 ( Panopticon ) 概念，探討片中監控 ( surveillance ) 機制的形成。第三章引進布斯克與夏弗 (Alison Brysk and Gershon Shafir ) 提出公民權 (citizenship) 與人權 ( human rights ) 的差距，來揭發片中政治庇護者與外籍勞工在地主國 ( host countries ) 因為缺乏公民權而導致人權被忽視的困境。第四章從傅柯 ( Michel Foucault ) 的反抗 ( resistance ) 與拉克勞 ( Ernesto Laclau ) 與穆芙 ( Chantal Mouffe ) 的激進多元民主 ( radical plural democracy ) 的概念，探討以跨種族、階級，與性別的聯合 ( solidarity ) 來對抗國家制度本身的裂縫與經濟全球化的無情剝削。最後總結在全球化時代，唯有檢視國家制度的缺失，並揚棄封閉排他的意識形態，才能體現種族與文化的差異與多元性，並促進跨界聯合之實現。 / This thesis aims to explore the issue of citizenship and human rights in Stephen Frears’s Dirty Pretty Things. Dirty Pretty Things describes the British government’s surveillance on asylum seekers, such as Okwe, an illegal refugee from Nigeria, and Senay, the Turkish asylum applicant, and unveils illegal refugees’ organ trade in exchange for passports in London. The thesis attempts to decipher how the ambivalent status of asylum seekers disturbs the surveillance of nation-states, exposes the defect of the citizenship gap and argues only through solidarity among different ethnicity, class and gender, could the subordinated fight against deficiencies in the mechanism of nation-states and exploitation of global capitalism. Through the perspectives of Derrida’s conditional hospitality and Foucault’s Panopticon, Chapter Two examines the surveillance of nation-states on asylum seekers in Dirty Pretty Things. In Chapter Three, I adopt Brysk and Shafir’s analysis to explore the citizenship gap between citizenship and human rights in the film, which reflects the difficulty in handling the cases of legal and illegal asylum seekers in nation-states on the basis of citizenship in the era of globalization. In Chapter Four, I will utilize the perceptive of Foucault’s resistance and Laclau and Mouffe’s radical plural democracy to suggest how counter strategies and solidarity could rebel against fissures in nation-states’ apparatuses and reveal a new possibility of alliance beyond borders in the era of globalization. The last chapter concludes by summing up the gaps in the system of nation-states and rejecting any enclosed ideology so as to articulate multiplicities and differences beyond limitations of ethnicity, class and gender across borders in the era of globalization.

The focus of this practical theological study is Pentecostalism, and the relationship between the hermeneutics of Pentecostalism and Postmodernism. Through a literary search, we observe the points of congruency between the hermeneutics of early Pentecostals and the key tenets of Postmodernism. We note the unprecedented acceptance of Pentecostal scholars into the larger theological world and question whether this is a result of the increased Modernization of Pentecostal hermeneutics. The Postmodern world of youth is explored, and we observe their tremendous openness to spirituality. This thesis will show that Pentecostals may contribute to the Christian world a Pentecostal hermeneutic that will speak a relevant message to generations of youth. Chapters two and three examine the convergent viewpoints of Pentecostalism with Postmodernity, in terms of rationalism, narratives, and the place of experience in life and theology. Chapter four highlights the hermeneutical debate between Gordon D. Fee and his Pentecostal responders, noting the Modern approach in the principles debated. Chapter five seeks to provide interaction with a giant of theology seldom engaged by Pentecostals - Rudolf Bultmann - and his modern followers, and explores the world of Postmodern youth. Chapter six explores the work of Kenneth Archer, who has proposed a specific Pentecostal hermeneutical approach, and chapter seven discusses the role of the Holy Spirit in hermeneutics, including whether Pentecostal experience may be considered an ”edge” in hermeneutics. Chapter eight summarizes the findings of this study. / Philosophy, Practical and Systematic Theology / D. Th (Practical Theology)