This dissertation deals with epistemological and literary problems surrounding Spanish Baroque reflection on the concepts of experience and perception, two of the most crucial and important notions linked to the origins of Western Modernity. Problems of experience and perception were treated by many Spanish philosophers and literary figures, including, Francisco Suárez, Francisco Sánchez, Miguel de Cervantes, Calderón de la Barca, Baltasar Gracián, and Mateo Alemán. My approach focuses on the development of these concepts in the Spanish seventeenth century, as an epistemological alternative to the crystallization of the modern Cartesian philosophical paradigm. I am particularly interested in examining the speculation about the ultimate nature of cognition, experience, and perception. I read different textual manifestations of seventeenth century Spanish Baroque thought as an alternate cognitive paradigm that gives raison dêtre to well-known Baroque intellectual qualities of wit, attention, prudence, and discretion, all of which are pragmatically and epistemologically tentative. In this sense, my central hypothesis is that seventeenth century Spanish thinkers and writers avoid the Cartesian crystallization of the relationship between cognition and perception, by making it more unstable and open to heteronomy and ambiguity. The authors that I study struggle to design a broader idea of human experience and knowledge, and show traces of a heterodox, pre-modern philosophical framework. In numerous examples this approach shows itself to be more capable of dealing with a universe in a constant state of flux, paradoxically typified by both tension and order. At the same time, my dissertation proves that, although heterodox, the Baroque cognitive gaze is never ingenuous. The primary goal of such epistemological theory is not demarcation between true and false (as in the rationalist model) but open examination using cognitive values of juicio (discernment), agudeza (sharpness) and discreción (discretion). The Baroques epistemological aim is not the ultimate and typically modern- elimination of uncertainty, but the exploration of a different relationship between appearance and being conducted through an original revalidation of the notion of human experience.

The thesis examines the transition from post-revolutionary Soviet culture (1917-1928) to the culture of the Stalinsist period, arguing for a crucial transformation in the status of agency, subjecthood, and authorship between these two historical and cultural frames. I contend that Soviet culture has much to tell us about that momentous event of the twentieth century, the death of author or, more broadly, the death of the subjectan event that Western thought has illuminated from various perspectives (philosophy, psychoanalysis, linguistics, structural anthropology, political economy, etc.). The analysis proceeds from a consideration of prominent literary and aesthetic theories of the 1910s and 1920sFormalism, the sociological criticism of the Pereverzev school, the artistic platforms of left avant-garde, the ideological positions of RAPP, etc.in an attempt to present these often divergent currents of thought and praxis as homologous, as participating in the same act: the cultural act of modernism. Characteristic of this act, I argue, is the attempt to transcend the dimension of the individual subjective and, in this very transcendence, institute an impersonal, suprahuman objectivity. The symbolic price for reaching this state of superhuman truth is the instrumentalization of human agency. The concrete result of the modernist act is Stalinism: a world in which the very production of truth and reality is coterminous with the ritualistic surrender of agency and autonomy. In the thesis second part, I discuss socialist realism as a concrete instance of this surrender, seeking to demonstrate to what extent the position of the so-called representing subject in socialist realism is antinomic with the notion of authorship.

This dissertation addresses the relationship between narrative and extraterritoriality in Argentine and Cuban novels from the 1970s through the present, from a perspective that stresses the role of political exile in the configuration and revision of the dynamics of national and Latin American imaginaries and literary histories, and the formation of a Latin American exile discourse. The analysis opens with the discussion of the naturalization of extraterritoriality as the normal locus of enunciation for Latin American narrative, in an ideological construct that works to localize politics and esthetics. Against this normalization, some exile novels which are not necessarily defined in terms of space in relation to politics impose their political impact over the materiality of location, some introduce and develop the notion that territorial dispersion of a national population accounts for the dispersion of the nation itself, and some others reevaluate exile thematically in an effort to offer a revised version of the nation and of national literary history. The dissertation focuses on the narrative analysis of this process in a corpus of novels that allow thinking of exile as a defining feature of the national experience, a major trait of Latin American culture, and a discursive formation that will continue to be relevant in the renovation of the very idea of Latin America. The questions that articulate this comparative approach which lays claim to an embracing regional representativity are: how do exiled writers inscribe their production in national literary history once the intellectual field in their countries has gone through a process of fracture?; how do they conceive of political intervention in a space that has excluded them?; can these texts be approached from Jamesons standpoint of third world narrative as national allegory?; can a tradition of exile help in solving new occurrences of dislocation in the national context?

This study investigated the role of meaning activation and L2 oral language proficiency among Moroccan children learning to read in Spanish for the first time. Recent cross-linguistic research suggests that children learning to read in an L1 or L2 transparent orthography can achieve phonological decoding accuracy faster by relying on grapheme-phoneme strategies. In that case, it becomes extremely important to investigate the role of meaning and its relation to the development of phonological decoding and reading comprehension, especially when children are learning to read in an L2 transparent orthography. The main objective of this study was to discover whether phonological decoding and meaning identification can be considered to be two independent constructs or only one. The second objective was to expand the scope of L2 Spanish oral language proficiency by examining its influence on each of these constructs and on sentence reading comprehension. A battery of measures for assessing the various domains of phonological awareness, decoding, meaning identification and sentence comprehension, were administered to 140 Moroccan children with at least one year of literacy instruction in Spain. Letter knowledge and concept of print were used as control variables. Confirmatory analysis results demonstrated that decoding and word identification form different but dependent constructs. Structural equation modeling indicated that the contribution of L2 oral language proficiency depended on the exact nature of the dependent variable: L2 oral language proficiency does not directly predict decoding skills but is directly related to meaning identification skills and sentence comprehension. The findings provided an understanding of the roles of meaning and L2 oral language proficiency in isolated word reading and sentence comprehension, and clearly implied that decoding and comprehension are more independent when learning to read in an L2 transparent orthography. L2 decoding in Spanish can take place without comprehension. Possible theoretical, instructional and assessment implications related to L2 Spanish reading development are drawn based on the studys results.

Incorporated into contemporary culture through high-, middle-, and lowbrow manifestations, Tolstois Anna Karenina repeatedly demonstrates its ubiquity. The novels reincarnations in various cultural forms consistently privilege the Anna-Vronskii story line over the parallel narrative of Kitty and Levin, thus liberating the adultery myth from its novelistic shackles. This remarkable diffusion and myth-oriented interpretation of Anna Karenina largely stems from the cinemas fascination with the novel. The freedom with which filmmakers handle the allegedly well-known novel reveals the discrepancy between the literary text and its idea in the collective unconscious. This freedom also indicates that in popular awareness visual embodiments of Anna Karenina have become more authoritative than the novel itself. While shedding light on dramatic changes that have occurred in the collective idea of Tolstois novel, cinemaas a medium aiming at a mass audiencealso manifests its essential connection with a myth of love that is stronger than death. The filmmakers constant maneuvering between myth and novel defies the latter as an unequivocal source of adaptation and thus justifies the approach I advocate in my dissertation: namely, bypassing the rigid binary opposition the literary source versus its screen version. Interpreted as vehicles for recycling an old story of adulterous love, films of Anna Karenina reveal two overarching tendencies in their attempts to transpose the nineteenth-century text to the screentendencies they share independently of their production date, country of production, and film format. The first strengthens the underlying myth of adultery by stripping the literary text of everything irrelevant to the mythical skeleton. The second disguises that skeleton by reproducing the accompanying subplots from the literary source. Yet even versions deeply rooted in the literary source are influenced by a myth-oriented perspective. Though my principal emphasis falls on screen adaptations, I also analyze the novels recasting as a comic book. Unlike screen adaptations, this postmodernist revision of the novel was undertaken with the hope of undermining the novels elevated status as well as the fame of its creator, thus signaling a successful completion of its long journey into the mass unconscious.

THE RUSSIAN REFLEXIVE IN SECOND-LANGUAGE ACQUISITION: BINDING PREFERENCES AND L1 TRANSFER Annalisa Czeczulin, PhD University of Pittsburgh, 2007 This dissertation investigates knowledge of reflexives by adult English-speaking learners of Russian as a second language. The study uses an experimental methodology to ascertain the extent to which a speakers native language (L1) influences his or her acquisition of the second language (L2). The thesis concerns L2 acquisition of the reflexive object pronoun sebja, the reflexive possessive pronoun svoj, and the post-verbal affix sja and investigates the claim that unlike in English, in Russian some anaphors may be bound long-distance (LD) outside non-finite embedded clauses. Twenty non-native and ten native speakers of Russian were tested during the first experiment, and ten non-native and ten native speakers during the second experiment. The experiments were based on Bennett and Progovac (1993) and White et al (1997). The first experiment found that the more proficient the L2 speakers become, the more their binding pattern reflects that of the L1 informants, suggesting that the L2 subjects depend on their L1 parameters and settings to bind in the L2, but that this dependence wanes as they become more proficient. L2 learners of Russian maintain their L1 AGR parameter in the L2, but transfer their L1 Xmax binding type at first. Following training, L2 subjects showed greater sensitivity to ambiguity of reference for sebja than native Russian speakers or overgeneralized the training. Although no resetting of parameters was observed during the research, the possibility of resetting parameters looks promising. This resetting will vary across reflexive and sentence types. The second experiment, which evaluated the effects of preferences and pragmatics on binding, suggests that two grammars exist in Russian speakers and that language change may be underway in Russian where LD anaphora are concerned. The L2 subjects were less successful in this experiment and violated the c-command requirement for reflexives. LD binding could be induced through introduction of a verb of power in combination with a LD antecedent deemed to have control over the local antecedent. The experiments results conclude that Bennett and Progovacs (1993) X0/Xmax addition to Chomskys Binding Theory does not adequately explain the current binding situation in Russian.

The purpose of this study is to highlight the colonial assumptions underlying the representations, and narratives of Latinamericanism, Indigenism, and hegemonic discourses about ethnicity, locating them in the social, political, and cultural context of the twentieth-century Andes. The first chapter deals with Latinamericanism as a discursive formation that supported the dominant forms of political identity in Latin America from the emergency of a criollo subjectivity in the colonial period to the present. I argue that the genealogy of the Latin American subject implies an understanding of the criollo project of colonial self-determination as a political imposture that legitimized its position as subject of knowledge and power. The second chapter focuses on the critical discourse of Peruvian writer José Carlos Mariátegui, to show how his cultural criticism is complicit in constructing essentialist images of indigenous societies as an exotic other, and how it continues to be articulated within the perceptional and representational structures of colonial epistemologies. From this same perspective, in the third chapter I analyze the novel Yanakuna (1952) by the Bolivian writer Jesús Lara and his narrative worlds. Finally, the focus shifts to the emerging discourses of subaltern indigenous subjectivities, focusing on number of marginal, non-canonical testimonies from Ecuador by José Yánez del Pozo: Yo declaro con franqueza (1986). In shifting my attention to the small voice of history (Guha), I try to present the problematic relationship between the Marxist concept of class subject and these narratives of identity, highlighting the local agency and ethnic identities within contending emancipatory political projects in Ecuador.

This dissertation concerns the production of a political language in Colombia and Mexico during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. I argue that this new political language emerged and was made intelligible through a rhetoric and vocabulary of national regeneration: the task of giving new life (regenerating) to national populations becomes the common ground of political debate. My objects of study are the political essays and literary texts that were essential for producing and solidifying the idea of regeneration in two national contexts. Colombia and Mexico make a striking comparison in this regard. On the one hand, they represent a political dichotomy during the late nineteenth century: while Colombia was passing through an ascendant and newly aggressive conservativism, Mexico was embarking upon a long period of official liberalism that still reigns hegemonic today. And yet on the other hand, these political-historical contexts meet on the common ground of regeneration. It is illustrative to note that between the most reactionary conservatives in Colombia and the most radical liberals in Mexico, both shared a common thesis regarding their capacity to make vigorous a national society perceived to be in decay: both literally took a vocabulary of regeneration as their own. In Colombia, politician-writers such as Rafael Núñez (1888) and Miguel Antonio Caro (1886) would summarize their political task to the nation as nothing less than the choice between regeneration or catastrophe. More explicitly literary writers, such as José Asunción Silva (1896 [1925]) took up the language of regeneration as a mode of social critique. In the political middle, the intellectuals in and around the more centrist Díaz regime (Ignacio Altamirano [1888], Justo Sierra [1885; 1900]) would recur constantly in their treatises, essays and novels to tropes of social regeneration. Precisely through a comparison of these two casesat once divergent and convergentthis project will yield insight into larger relations between cultural production and nation-state consolidation throughout Latin America during a momentous historical period whose political reformations still resonate today.

This study is an exploration of the Cuban Revolution and Cuban poetry to illustrate the debate that revolutionary movements that evolve, develop and remain under the ideological umbrella of modernity do not achieve the open-inclusive and pluralistic society that they seek to establish. This is due to modernitys own desire for development and progress, which reduces the revolutionary movements efforts to limiting and exclusionary spacial/temporal parameters. This impossibility for a truly pluralistic society emerges also from modernitys inherent short reach and manipulation of memory. Through managing long and short memory, modernity seeks national unity under the premise that anything prior to the revolutionary movement was bad and that the only hope is in a future that only the revolution can provide. An in depth analysis of Cuban poetry written during the first two decades after the 1959 Revolution shows the impossibility of achieving a fully pluralist society that doesnt negate the co-existence of other cosmologies and cultural identities within that same society, and that doesnt disallow their membership into the national project. The unfolding of the characteristics of two opposing poetry styles that emerged during the 1960s and 1970s will serve as the basis for this illustration and analysis. The two styles in question are Colloquialism, a free verse style promoted by the state as the preferred way to write poetry; and Tojosismo, a more metric rhyme verse that followed traditional styles, developed outside the limits of the center of power and excluded from it. The research determines how these two styles of poetry differed in form, and also in the extension of their memories, jumpstarting from the controversies behind the centrality of Colloquialism and the marginality of Tojosismo. The study is a contextualization of Cubas poetry through this countrys social and political history, placing emphasis on the cultural policies established by Fidel Castro post the 1959 Revolution and the impact of such policies on the free production of poetry in the new revolutionary society.

Mi dissertation is based on literary and epistemological core problems surrounding the discovery and conquest of America. The discovery of America occurred during a very specific period of history, a moment of passage between the Middle Ages and Early Modernity, a historical in-between during which unique changes started to develop. Those changes made possible the rise and consolidation of a new hermeneutical space, a space of interpretation, of negotiation and configuration of entirely different historical and cultural formations: precisely, the constitution of the West as a cultural, epistemological and geopolitical space. Those changes transformed the way in which knowledge of the world -imaginary and even cartographical- was materialized. To be specific, they gave birth to Eurocentric Modernity. These topics imply a series of profound problems such as a transformation in the perception of reality, and consequently, the necessity of new narrative and discursive forms capable of constructing and reinforcing the reality of colonial encounters. In an environment characterized as colonization, narration and therefore writing are two of the main devices used to fulfill and understand the world. For the Chroniclers, was necessary to create a new way to write the world and about the world, and one of the modes for achieving this would be using a new mimetic imagination. The work of early chroniclers, such as Christopher Columbus, Bernardino de Sahagún, Bartolomé de Las Casas, Lope de Aguirre and Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, helps me to explore this particular narration of the world, and, most importantly, the way such narratives helped to construct the occidental imaginary and Eurocentric Modernity. I study the conflictive constitution of new cultural hermeneutic spaces, the phenomenon of narrative pact by which important processes of othering and representation take place, constituting an other culture in terms of discourse and rhetorical exchange. I show how the other is not simply excluded but subdued and subsume by being given a voice and an ambiguous place of enunciation, often even an in-between place conceived of as a metaphorical space, heterogeneous, possible and unstable that produces an alternative mimesis as well as a contaminated modernity.