A presente dissertação versa sobre a obra conhecida, na tradição italiana, por Il Milione, escrita em Gênova, em 1298, por Marco Polo e Rustichello da Pisa. Trata-se da famosa obra que compartilhou com o mundo os conhecimentos adquiridos pelo viajante veneziano em sua estada na corte de Kublai Khan, Grande Khan do Império Tártaro. No primeiro capítulo desse estudo são tratadas algumas questões estruturais da obra, tais como o narrador, a dupla autoria tema assumido como fundamental para os estudos da obra polo-rusticheliana apenas no século XX e a questão do gênero. Já no segundo capítulo, são exploradas as ligações da obra com o maravilhoso literário proposto por Tzvetan Todorov e com o maravilhoso medieval proposto por Jacques Le Goff. / The present essay proposes a reflection on the work known in the italian tradition as Il Milione, which was written in Genoa, in 1298, by Marco Polo and Rustichello da Pisa. The famous work shared with the world the knowledge acquired by the venetian explorer during his stay in the Kublai Khan\'s court, the Great Khan of the Tatar Empire. In the first chapter of this research, some structural elements of the work are analyzed, such as the narrator, the co-authoring (this theme was considered essential for the study of the polo-rustichelian work only in the 20th century) and the genre question. In the second chapter, the liaisons between the work, the Literary Wonderful proposed by Tzvetan Todorov and the Medieval Wonderful proposed by Jacques Le Goff are explored.

Le point de départ de cette thèse est une interrogation sur la littérature contemporaine, sur le rapport qu’elle entretient avec la tradition littéraire et sur la figure auctoriale qu’elle bâtit. Les oeuvres de Gonçalo M. Tavares (1970), Enrique Vila-Matas (1948) et Henri Raczymow (1948), placées à la croisée de la fiction et de l’essai, proposent un dialogue intense avec la théorie littéraire. Le travail de ces trois auteurs européens peut en effet être lu comme une réponse aux problèmes posés par la théorie, comme ceux soulevés par les notions de « mort de l’auteur » et d’épuisement de la littérature. La présente étude cherche à trouver de nouveaux outils pour lire ces textes contemporains, tout en observant, en même temps, leur corrélation avec les débats qui ont animé les études littéraires dans les années 1960 et 1970. Pour guider cette démarche, j’ai choisi le dernier cours de Roland Barthes au Collège de France, La Préparation du roman, entre 1978 et 1980. Barthes y réfléchit sur son désir d’entamer une écriture qui rompt avec ses travaux précédents, et réalise une recherche sur la façon dont l’écrivain fait une oeuvre. Il y ébauche certaines notions qui restent pourtant dans un état sommaire. Mon travail consiste à les interroger, les problématiser et à les dépasser, afin de les projeter sur l’oeuvre de trois auteurs en activité. L’étude des oeuvres de Tavares, Vila-Matas et Raczymow me permet d’esquisser une nouvelle figure auctoriale, plus active que celle du lecteur/scripteur, et qui ne ressent pas le besoin de choisir entre la maîtrise totale du texte et la « mort de l’auteur ». Cet auteur devient un auteur-squatteur, qui occupe sa place à force de filiation. Il construit son autorité en l’insérant dans un « lignage », en tant que continuateur de la littérature. / The starting point of this thesis is an examination of contemporary literature, specifically, the relationship it establishes with the literary tradition and the figure of the author that is constructed by its discourse. The works of Gonçalo M. Tavares (1970), Enrique Vila-Matas (1948) and Henri Raczymow (1948), situated at the crossroads between fiction and the essay, embody an intense dialogue with literary theory. The works of these three European authors can be understood as a response to the problems raised by theory, such as the idea of the “death of the author” and the exhaustion of literature. This study seeks to set out new perspectives for reading these contemporary texts while considering, at the same time, the way in which they correlate with the debates that animated literary studies in the 1960s and 1970s. In order to guide this approach, I chose Roland Barthes’ final course at the Collège de France, The Preparation of the Novel, which took place between 1978and 1980. Barthes reflects upon his desire to create a form of writing that breaks with his earlier work and proposes an investigation of how a writer creates a work. He puts forward some concepts, although leaving them underdeveloped. My research consists therefore in problematizing and elaborating these concepts through turning them into approaches for analyzing the works of three authors in action. The study of the works of Tavares, Vila-Matas and Raczymow allows for a vision of a new literary figure, more active than the lecteur/scripteur and who does not feel the need to choose between the total mastery of the text and the “death of the author”. This author becomes a squatter-author, who occupies his place through his affiliations. He constructs his authority by integrating himself into a lineage, as a continuator of literature.

With new technology come new possibilities for the creation of artistic works. The invention of sound recording at end of the nineteenth century enabled musical performances to be “written” in the same manner as traditional, printed literature. The status of records as a form of writing and, moreover, as the material for further writing is demonstrated in the work of two hip hop artists, DJ Shadow and Cut Chemist, who assemble new, heteroglossic texts out of a wide array of sampled records. Two concerts, Product Placement (2004) and The Hard Sell (2008) – both of which have been memorialized on DVD – serve as fruitful examples of the potential for artistic production enabled by technology. Indeed, the genre of turntablism, which involves the live manipulation of vinyl records, requires the usage of technology in ways not intended by its original developers – a recurrent theme throughout the history of sound recording. By transforming the turntable from a passive playback device into an active compositional tool, turntablism collapses the distance between consumption and production and so turns the listener into a performer. Furthermore, the exclusive usage of 45 rpm records as the source texts for the two sets dramatizes theories of intertextuality while simultaneously tracing the constraints placed on such artistic piracy by the copyright regime. These texts entail more than just their cited musical content; they also involve visual components. These include not only the video imagery that accompanies and comments on the records being played, but also the physical performance of the DJs themselves and the spectacle of the attending crowds whose response to the music constitutes part of the text itself. Following a theoretical and historical background that will situate these works within the history of hip hop and literature in general, this study will explicate these two multimedia texts and reveal how they demonstrate a concern not only with the history of sound recording, but also such issues as the influence of technology on cultural production, the complication of authorship through intertextuality, and the relationship between culture and commerce. Above all, however, both the form and content of these two performances also serve to highlight the value of physical media as historical artifacts in the face of increasing challenges from incorporeal digital media.

O materialismo cultural de Raymond Williams, como formulação de uma nova teoria da cultura inscrita no materialismo histórico, centra-se em um dos debates mais polêmicos e fecundos da tradição marxista - a questão da determinação econômica da cultura e da arte. O presente trabalho visa a uma leitura crítica do livro Marxismo e Literatura, no qual Williams expõe sua teoria de forma abrangente. Por tratar-se de um livro expositivo, sua discussão será acompanhada de diversas análises culturais e literárias do crítico, trazendo à tona seu método teórico-prático as análises criando a teoria, que reorganiza, por sua vez, as formas de entendimento da realidade. / Raymond Williamss Cultural Materialism, working as a formulation of a new cultural theory inscribed in Marxs historical materialism, takes part in one of the most polemical and productive debates in the Marxist tradition the question of the economic determinantion of culture and the arts. The present dissertation has as its aim a critical reading of Marxism and Literature, book in which Williams thoroughly exposes his theory. Being of an expositive kind, its discussion will be conducted along with the study of some of Williamss literary and cultural analyses, bringing forth his method both theoretical and practical the analyses producing the theory that, in its turn, reorganizes the forms of understanding reality.

This dissertation will trace the emerging paradigm of transaction as a model for the dynamics of the reading process. The paradigm of transaction, implicit in John Dewey's writings as early as 1896 in "The Reflex Arc Concept in Psychology," was originally described in terms of "interaction" between organism and environment. Only in 1949, in the twilight of his career, did Dewey definitively distinguish between "transaction" and "interaction," ascribing a mutually transformative character to the former process. In Knowing and the Known, Dewey and co-author Arthur F. Bentley (1949) proposed adoption of a wholly new "transactional vocabulary" as a precision tool for a new mode of scientific inquiry, whereby inquiry itself was recognized as a species of transaction between inquirer and observed phenomena. Even before the publication of Knowing and the Known, literary theorist Louise M. Rosenblatt had applied an implicitly transactional model of the relationship between organism and environment to the relationship between reader and text. She described this dynamic model of the reading process in Literature as Exploration (first published in 1938), a work that has inspired an ongoing revolution in the teaching of reading and literature at all instructional levels. In the first edition of this work, Rosenblatt employed Dewey's original term--"interaction"--to describe the dynamic relationship between reader and text. Following the publication of Knowing and the Known in 1949, Rosenblatt began systematically to appropriate Dewey and Bentley's transactional terminology in her analysis of the reader-text relationship. Educators who share the transactional vision of Dewey and Rosenblatt tend to see the role of the teacher as that of a facilitator of reader-text transaction and of reader-reader transaction as arbitrated by the text, rather than as an imparter of authoritative interpretations of texts. Envisioning potentialities for students' growth through such transactions gives rise neither to sanguine optimism nor to despair, but rather to a hopeful meliorism. / Ph. D.

<p>This dissertation focuses on a variety of African-American musical expressions of the later twentieth century, situating them along a continuum of musical modernism that constitute various modes of survival technology, inextricably connected to the cultures from which they arise. My application of the term <i>survival</i><i>technologies </i>denotes two primary aspects: musical “technologies” in the sense that the term is commonly understood to refer to the construction of musical instruments and recording instruments both old and new, but also “technologies” in the sense of the term employed by Murray and Dinerstein: as modes of knowledge and strategies of resistance. My use of <i>survival technologies</i>as the conceptual underpinning that unifies my research entails bringing these two aspects together, and the two senses of the term converge especially when African-American musicians use musical instruments and tools in new, unexpected ways, as frequently happens throughout the history of African-American music in the twentieth century. I analyze how African-American musicians’ use of electric guitars, amplification, synthesizers, analog sequencers, studio effects, turntables, samplers, drum machines, and digital audio workstations constitute a uniquely African-American mode of musical knowledge and practice that is improvisational, heuristic, non-linear, and constantly aware of the past while simultaneously re-imagining the future. I link this analysis to works by twentieth-century literary authors and theorists in order to examine how African-American musicians’ <i>modus operandi</i>, varied and distinct as they are, are nonetheless consistent not only across divergent musical styles and eras, but also function inseparably from other arts and broader cultural contexts.</p><p>Throughout this project, written words interact with musical recordings. I strive to “hear” written texts (literature and literary criticism) and to “read” sound texts (recordings), highlighting the resonances between “literary texts” and “sound texts.” The Chicago blues style of Muddy Waters interacts with Richard Wright’s literary documentary of life on Chicago’s South Side, <i>12 Million Black Voices,</i>to highlight how old rural black vernacular “folk” expressions could serve as the basis of a new urban African-American modernism. Likewise, the electronic experiments of Herbie Hancock, which innovatively combined European modes of music creation and African diasporic musical concepts, interacts with Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s <i>The Signifying Monkey </i>to highlight how African-American modernism entails Signifyin(g) on European precedents as well as precedents in African-American art. Additionally, the historically informed jazz of Wynton Marsalis interacts with T. S. Eliot’s ideas of tradition in order to highlight how artistic conceptions of the past inform African-American modernist expressions today, such as jazz and sampled electronic music. Finally, Detroit techno music interacts with the musical and cultural criticism of Theodor Adorno to highlight how African-American modernism uses survival technologies to construct visions of the future that resist what Adorno called the “culture industry.”</p>

Este estudio analiza la relación entre la ortografía de la excongresista Supa y las valoraciones expresadas por el diario Correo en torno a lo que se considera “la escritura” para legislar. Metodológicamente, se realizó un análisis ideológico del discurso periodístico. En el trabajo se identificaron dos representaciones acerca de la ortografía y la escritura en general. Considerando el modelo autónomo de la literacidad, se explica que Correo asume que la escritura crea y desarrolla habilidades cognitivas de nivel superior, y que conduce al progreso económico, por lo que cualquier persona no puede ser parlamentaria. Por otro lado, desde los nuevos estudios de la literacidad, se concluye que estas asunciones resultan ser creencias insostenibles, e incluso generadoras de racismo, porque la literacidad trasciende los aspectos técnicos y raciales. / This study analyzes the relationship between the spelling of former congresswoman Supa and the related assessments by the Correo newspaper of what is considered “writing” for legislation. The methodology applied is an ideological analysis of journalistic discourse. The paper identifies two representations of spelling and writing in general. Considering the autonomous model of literacy, it is explained that the newspaper assumes that writing creates and develops higher-level cognitive skills, and that it leads to economic progress, so that not everyone can be a member of Congress. On the other hand, from the new studies of literacy, it is concluded that these assumptions turn out to be unsustainable beliefs and even generate racism, because literacy goes beyond technical and racial aspects. / Revisón por pares

This study aims to examine the potential of reading dramatic scripts in the Swedish EFL classroom, using the play Top Girls by Carol Churchill as an example. In particular, it focuses on how literary theory and different aspects of feminism can be taught through the use of the play. The study is conducted through a textual analysis of the play’s main characters and the Swedish National Syllabus. The results show that there is a great potential in working with dramatic literature in the EFL classrooms. Using drama is effective in the way it covers several aspects of the core content of English in upper secondary school, and may be used to develop language skills, cultural understanding and critical thinking. The play contains complex ideas about different types of feminism, and the two main characters Joyce and Marlene represent two ways of striving for equality between men and women. These ideas are, in other words, represented by and embodied in the two main characters, which could make the ideas easier for students to understand.

<p>An experimental piece blending theory, fiction, and academic writing in order to both create and criticize a work in the tradition of science fiction while seeking to undermine the hegemonic ideals that sometimes lie at the heart of works in that tradition.</p>

An examination of contemporary feminist literary theory reveals that man's traditional association with culture has created a position of privilege from which men are encouraged to write, while women have been denied access to language and, therefore, must escape imprisoning conceptions of femininity before they are able to envision themselves as creators of culture. In Alice Munro's Lives of Girls and Women (1971), Del Jordan is a young woman and developing artist who struggles against objectification to achieve a sense of her own creative autonomy. Del's quest for authorial power effectively marginalizes her in Jubilee. However, she welcomes the freedom implied by this marginalization and encourages it through acts of social indiscretion and, later, through sexuality. Del's quest for freedom through sexuality ultimately parallels her quest for a language, or narrative voice, which challenges the confines of masculine discourse. As Del matures beyond the illusions generated by fantasy and love, she realizes that her own sense of identity and her creativity are the only true sources of salvation. The creative vision that Del fosters throughout the novel acknowledges and reconciles paradoxes, and, thereby, rejects the binary schemes and imprisoning labels that patriarchy has traditionally used to limit and contain female identity. / Thesis / Master of Arts (MA)