The German-Turkish director Fatih Akin and the Armenian-Russian Anna Melikian represent a new wave of successful young European filmmakers. Their works capture intermediate results of the quest for national identity that began in Germany and Russia after the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989 and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 respectively. This thesis offers a comparative analysis of Akins In July (2000) and Head-On (2004) and Melikians Mars (2004) and Mermaid (2007) and explores how issues of identity and its key categories including gender, sexuality and ethnicity are treated in each of these works. The goal of the thesis is to look into how the historical cataclysms toward the end of the 20th century affected perceptions of national and personal identity, and how these changes were then reflected in the German and Russian outsider cinema of the 2000s.

My thesis examines the literary portrayal of women in Dominican politics as historical figures/actors and how Dominican women have also used the medium of literature to draw attention to these lesser known heroines and inspire future participation and involvement in public life. The creation of fiction out of history, through which authors imagine the inner lives and feelings and motivations of Dominican women protagonists, can add a new dimension to the study of women and gender in the Dominican Republic, especially when written by Dominican women authors. More specifically, I will explore the following issues and areas: 1) how the works revise or expand on the traditional interpretation of political activism 2) how the works honor women historical actors, giving them a voice and 3) what the works reveal about the gendered nature of political activism. The novels I will be analyzing are Julia Alvarezs novels In the Name of Salome and In the Time of Butterflies, as well as Charamicos by Angela Hernandez. These works are based on real women activists who have been fictionalized in the novels, such as Salome Urena de Henriquez and the Mirabal sisters, as well as imagined or fictional women who are not based on specific Dominican women, but rather a fictionalized compilation created to embody the experiences of many, such as the characters in Charamicos. My analysis of the literary representation of womens activism draws from the fields of gender, political, historical and literary studies, however Joan W. Scotts discussion of her-story and social history, as well as Paul Ricoeurs theories on the relationship between memory and history are especially useful. In conclusion, I show that these novels have created a space for the imagined experiences of these women and given them a voice which was lacking, since these women activists have been left hidden in the pages of history, without detailed autobiographies or much more than a paragraph even in recent historical publications. I will also explore future research considerations that would build on the work in this thesis and further contribute to the expansion of the field of Dominican womens studies.

La violencia en Colombia es un problema que lleva más de sesenta años. Siempre se ha hablado de la Época de la violencia como los años de la guerra entre conservadores y liberales que se inició con el asesinato del líder liberal Jorge Eliecer Gaitán en abril de 1948. Sin embargo, esa época no tuvo un final, ella fue simplemente la introducción a una forma de vida a la cual los colombianos se han acostumbrado, la violencia. Esta violencia sin tregua ha sido tema importante en la narrativa contemporánea. Desde los años noventas hemos visto la incursión en ese campo de una escritora colombiana que además de haber sido periodista por muchos años y de haber participado en los procesos de paz que se llevaron a cabo en los años ochentas en Colombia, ha tenido como uno de los temas fundamentales en sus novelas la violencia en Colombia y la actitud del colombiano ante la misma. Laura Restrepo, colombiana nacida en Bogotá en 1950, se ha convertido en una de las escritoras más leídas en Colombia en la actualidad. En sus novelas se aprecia siempre una conexión muy grande con su país y una posición muy crítica en relación con los problemas y la sociedad colombiana. El propósito de la tesis es, usando las novelas El leopardo al sol (1993), La multitud errante (2001) y Delirio (2004) de Laura Restrepo, analizar como la escritora percibe y presenta el problema de la sociedad colombiana a partir de los años cincuentas. Con tres historias muy diferentes y sólidos personajes Restrepo recorre la historia de Colombia en los últimos 60 años y retrata, por una parte, una sociedad golpeada por la violencia en donde impera la corrupción y el desorden y por otra, el papel del colombiano que tiene que sobrevivir en esta sociedad. Para el análisis se utilizará como marco teórico la teoría marxista de Georg Lukács ya que dicha teoría se enfoca en el hecho de que la novela debe llevar al lector hacia una inmersión en la realidad. Esta realidad no debe ser una simple descripción de la misma, el escritor debe mostrarla a partir de una proyección que incluya todos los elementos de la sociedad ya que estos están relacionados. La existencia humana se debe percibir como parte de un ambiente histórico dinámico. La selección de estas tres novelas de Laura Restrepo se hizo basada en la idea de que cada una de ellas contribuye a reflejar una parte de la historia de la violencia en Colombia y que al ser unidas conforman una buena representación de la experiencia colombiana con dicho fenómeno. La multitud errante, a través de la vida del protagonista Siete por Tres, enseña el fenómeno de los desplazamientos por la violencia entre conservadores y liberales de los años cincuentas y los de los desplazamientos por la inseguridad en el campo en los años setentas. El leopardo al sol narra la historia de dos familias emparentadas entre sí que entablan una lucha fratricida en donde prosperan los negocios ilegales y el dinero fácil. Finalmente, Delirio cuenta la historia de una familia de la clase alta y las complejas relaciones con el narcotráfico y la corrupción. La tesis estará compuesta de una introducción histórica y teórica. Seguidamente vendrán tres capítulos destinados cada uno de ellos a los libros mencionados en el siguiente orden: Capítulo uno Un desarraigo que va de arriba para abajo usando el libro La multitud errante. Capítulo dos El rugido de la muerte basado en el libro el leopardo al sol y capítulo tres: Locombia apoyado en Delirio. Finalmente se presentaran las conclusiones de este estudio y la bibliografía.

This thesis explores the transgressive representations of gender in the works of Emilia Pardo Bazán. In her short story Cuento primitivo (1893) and her novels Memorias de un solterón (1896), La quimera (1905), and Dulce dueño (1911), the myths and images that surround the figures of New Woman, femme fatales, and dandies expose the fear fin de siècle Spanish society felt toward these models that did not conform to the gender stereotypes expected of them. Their straying from the established norm was seen as the symptom of decadence and the herald of the destruction of the race. Each of the characters are marginalized in some way because of their gender or because they do not conform to the established gender order. Therefore, much of the theory used in this thesis is drawn from feminist sources including Elaine Showalter, Gilbert and Gubar, Laura Mulvey, and Hélène Cixous. I also incorporate psychoanalytic theory and its relationship to the preoccupation concerning masculinity and degeneration from the work of Freud, Neil Hertz, and Max Nordau. My analysis of the representation of these transgressive figures extends to art as well as many of the cultural myths or images that surrounded these men and women can be found in the paintings of the time, such as those from Santiago Rusiñol, Franz von Stuck, and Hermen Anglada-Camarasa. As a response to this problem of fin de siècle Spanish decadence, Pardo Bazán offers Spanish society a fairly unusual solution. She proposes a combination of the traditional in the form of the Catholic faith and the modern in the form of equality of the sexes. It is through this unique combination that she is able to integrate these foreign, subversive images of gender into Catholic Spanish society. She particularly celebrates the New Woman who demands to be seen as equal to man. Yet, the New Woman is foreign concept that she does not merely import to Spain; instead, she adapts her to fit within her culture. At the same time, she can promote a modern Spanish society without strict gender hierarchy yet still retain the essential Spanish-ness of Catholicism.

This thesis analyzes postmemory, feminism, and women's writing seen in three contemporary novels written by women about women who lived and defied traditional gender roles during the Spanish Civil War and the Francisco Franco dictatorship. I discuss how these female characters and real-life women were marginalized for defying women's roles, while facing extreme injustices. They refused to adhere to the norms that the patriarchal discourse imposed on them during the era and never gave up in the fight to express their voice. I discuss the novels, La voz dormida by Dulce Chacón, Donde nadie te encuentre by Alicia Giménez Bartlett, and Su cuerpo era su gozo by Beatriz Gimeno. Each novel is written in the 21st century by female writers who did not experience the same tragedies as the characters in the novels. However, the writers give a voice to these women through the use of postmemory. The novelists rediscover the women's experiences through their writing and give them the voice that the women were denied throughout their lives. The women I discuss are all marginalized because they are women and do not conform to the established gender roles that their society has imposed. The women in La voz dormida were marginalized because they dared to fight as soldiers alongside men against Franco's forces. La Pastora in Donde nadie te encuentre was marginalized because she was born an intersexual who is also a member of the Maquis, a group also opposing Franco's forces. Finally, I speak about two lesbians who are marginalized and punished due to their sexuality and independent lifestyle. I use feminist, lesbian, and queer theory by citing philosophers such as Hélène Cixous, Adrienne Rich, Judith Butler, Monique Wittig, and Raquel Platero Méndez among others. I also include theory from Michel Foucault and scholars who write about postmemory such as Sarah Leggott and Marianne Hirsch. Through these concepts of postmemory, feminism, and women's writing, these novels finally give voice to several women who defied the roles imposed on them during the Spanish Civil War and Franco's dictatorship.

The dominant language in the United States is English but there are different minority languages spoken such as Spanish. Today, Spanish can be found in every state and territory of the United States. In Texas, the city of San Antonio is in intense contact with Spanish, partly because of the long history between Texas and Mexico and the constant influx of Hispanic immigrants. This thesis studies the attitude toward Spanish in San Antonio, investigating the uses of Spanish and English and the social factors (age, generation, education, gender, etc.) that affect the use of Spanish. Through a questionnaire designed to determine attitude and given to 150 participants, the attitude in San Antonio is in conflict due to the intense contact between the two languages and the social pressure from the dominant language on the minority community. En los Estados Unidos la lengua más dominante es el inglés pero se encuentran diferentes idiomas minioritarios como el castellano. Hoy en día se encuentran hablantes de castellano en todos los estados y territorios de la Unión Americana. En Texas, la ciudad de San Antonio está en contacto intenso con el castellano debido a la larga historia del estado con México y la constante inmigración de hispanos. Esta tesis investiga la actitud hacia el castellano en San Antonio, estudiando los usos del castellano y el inglés y los factores sociales (la edad, la generación, la educación, el género, etc.) que afectan el uso del castellano. A través de un cuestionario diseñado para averiguar la actitud y dado a 150 participantes, la actitud en San Antonio está conflictiva debido al contacto intenso entre los dos idiomas y la presión de la sociedad dominante a la comunidad lingüísticamente minoritaria.

My dissertation argues that while Thaw cultural producers believed that they had abandoned Stalinist cultural practices, their works continued to generate, in revised form, the major tropes of Stalinist culture: the positive hero, and family and war tropes. Although the cultural Thaw of the 1950s and 60s embraced new values, it merely reworked Stalinist artistic practices. On the basis of literary and cinematic texts, I examine how these two media reinstantiated the fundamental tropes of Russo-Soviet culture. In the first two chapters, I discuss approaches to Thaw literature and film in Western and Soviet scholarship, and my methodology, which is best defined as cultural semiotics. Chapter Three discusses the instantiations of the positive hero in Thaw literature and film. As case studies I adduce Boris Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago (1957) and Grigorii Kozintsev's film adaptation of Hamlet (1964). The fourth chapter examines how Thaw culture redefines the family and war tropes in trench prose and film melodrama. As case studies I discuss Viktor Nekrasovs war novel In the Trenches of Stalingrad (1947) and Mikhail Kalatozovs melodrama Cranes Are Flying (1957). The fifth chapter treats the ironic reworkings of the major tropes in Soviet culture of the 1960s. My case studies consist of Vasilii Aksenov's novel Ticket to the Stars (1961) and El'dar Riazanov's film Beware of a Car (1966). Irony, as one of the major taboos of socialist realism, was absent during Stalinism and early Thaw culture but became an increasingly dominant mode of late Soviet aesthetics. The dissertation traces the evolution of Soviet cultural tropes in literature and film of the Thaw: from the project of redefining them to the project of distancing from them. While the majority of writers on the period argue the radical departure of Thaw producers from the Stalinist cultural practices, I argue for the understanding of the Thaw as the period sharing basic cultural tropes with Stalinism while their specific instantiations in various modes of cultural production became different due to the changes in cultural capital, technologies, and values.

My dissertation provides an analysis of the Soviet television mini-series released between the late 1960s and early 1980s, specifically the spy thriller, the police procedural, and the detective series. I argue that serialized production were an ideal form for the negotiation of the inherited models of individual and collective identity with the new cultural, social, and political values that came into play during the Brezhnev era. Chapter One provides an overview of Russian and Western studies of Soviet television and describes the methodology used in the three analytical chapters. I approach the three genres as variations of the socialist realist masterplot, which undergoes fragmentation and transformation in mini-series. Chapter Two discusses the spy thriller, which addresses the issue of inside vs. outside of the political system, revealing the absence of a stable meaning behind the category of the Soviet us. My case studies in this chapter are Evgenii Tashkovs His Highnesss Adjutant (1969) and Tat'iana Lioznovas Seventeen Moments of Spring (1973). Chapter Three analyzes the genre of police procedural. The institutional version of the genreThe Investigation Is Conducted by Experts (1971-89)--lays bare the absurdity of the Soviet economy, while The Meeting Place Cannot Be Changed (Stanislav Govorukhin 1979) redefines police narrative as a populist story of idealized past. Chapter Four discusses detective mini-series. As case studies I use the Aniskin series of made-for-TV films (1968, 1974, 1978) and The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson (Igor' Maslennikov 1979-86). These productions use temporal and spatial displacement to construct a protagonist, whose status of positive hero is entirely determined by the utopian nature of the community he represents. In late Soviet culture, modernist utopia turns into a stylized Victorian past, which above all values stability. Finally, Conclusion discusses the role of Brezhnev era productions on post-Soviet television. I argue that these series both fulfill a therapeutic function by establishing a link with the past culture and serve as models for the construction of a new Russian identity. I interpret Russian televisions privileging of the police procedural as the revival of Russians search for a communal, rather than an individual identity.

Throughout the course of this dissertation, I respond to three related research goals. In order to investigate these goals, I gathered data from 169 members of two Cuzco, Peru non-profit governmental agencies, the Asociación Civil 'Gregorio Condori Mamani' Proyecto Casa del Cargador, 'Gregorio Condori Mamani' Civil Association House of the Carrier Project' and El Centro de Apoyo Integral a la Trabajadora del Hogar, 'Center for the Integral Support of Female Home Workers'. The majority of my participants speaks Quechua natively and acquired Spanish as an L2 during childhood or adolescence. I collected data from these two populations through the means of ethnography, demographic questionnaires, a social network analysis, a language attitudes study, elicitation of short narratives, role play interviews and a subjective reaction test. In response to my first research goal, I examine the nature of the semantics and pragmatics of the Cuzco Quechua epistemic system, including the epistemic suffixes, -mi/-n and -si/-s, and the Quechua verb past tenses, -rqa- and -sqa-. I find the Quechua epistemics to encode meaning beyond information source and level of certainty and to be affected by a variety of discourse factors. In my treatment of my second research goal, I find 31 different phonetic, morphosyntactic, and calque Quechua to Spanish cross-linguistic influence features to occur in my participants' speech. I also examine the specific case of the cross-linguistic influence of the Quechua epistemic system on the Spanish spoken by my participants. The presence of cross-linguistic influence in my participants' speech supports a model of child SLA in which the L1 plays a significant role in the acquisition of the L2. Finally, in response to my third research goal, I find various demographic characteristics, social network characteristics, and the language attitudes of my participants to correlate with their production of the 31 Quechua to Spanish phonetic, morphosyntactic, and calque cross-linguistic features. While presenting my results for my third research goal, I suggest that my participants may purposefully use various Quechua cross-linguistic features in order to identify themselves as Quechua speakers and distinguish themselves from native Spanish speakers, thereby creating an in-group variety of Spanish.

This is a study of the cultural significance and generic specificity of the Russo-Soviet joke (in Russian, anekdot [pl. anekdoty]). My work departs from previous analyses by locating the genre's quintessence not in its formal properties, thematic taxonomy, or structural evolution, but in the essential links and productive contradictions between the anekdot and other texts and genres of Russo-Soviet culture. The anekdot's defining intertextuality is prominent across a broad range of cycles, including those based on popular film and television narratives, political anekdoty, and other cycles that draw on more abstract discursive material. Central to my analysis is the genre's capacity for reflexivity in various senses, including generic self-reference (anekdoty about anekdoty), ethnic self-reference (anekdoty about Russians and Russian-ness), and critical reference to the nature and practice of verbal signification in more or less implicit ways. The analytical and theoretical emphasis of the dissertation is on the years 1961-86, incorporating the Stagnation period plus additional years that are significant in the genre's history. That quarter-century span in the USSR saw not only the coagulation of a way of life that provided ample fodder for oral satire, but also the appearance of a series of texts that provided source material for the topical anekdot cycles that to this day constitute a large portion of the Russian jokelore corpus. Before turning to the Soviet-period anekdot, I discuss the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century distinction between the literary or historical anekdot - a written genre not reliant on humor and in which real-life people figured - and the traditional folk anekdot, an offshoot of the folktale. The twentieth-century anekdot represented a confluence of its folkloric and inscribed forebears, combining features of (and effectively superseding) both traditions. By the 1960s, the attributes and functions the genre had accrued over the course of its development began to resonate with the underlying tropes, conflicts, and values of the society to such a degree that the anekdot became a kind of "genre-laureate" of the age. The dissertation concludes with an examination of the post-censorship anekdot, and a contextualization of the genre in the larger cultural atmosphere of contemporary Russia.