This thesis seeks to revisit the Mexican films of the Spanish film director Luis Buñuel in order to show that a concerted focus on space, an important aspect of the films’ narratives that is often intimated by scholars, yet rarely developed, can unlock new philosophical meaning in this rich body of work. Although Buñuel’s Mexican films now enjoy a greater presence in criticism on the director, they are often segregated according to an intra-corpus hierarchy of critical value, effectively creating two sub-strands among the films of this period: independent and commercial. The interdisciplinary approach taken in this thesis unites the two, focusing on a total of nine films from the period. In doing so it moves beyond the tropes most often associated with Buñuel’s cinema – surrealism, Catholicism, a fixation on the bourgeoisie – and the approach most often invoked in analysis of these themes: psychoanalysis. Instead, the thesis takes inspiration from the fields of human geography, anthropology and philosophy, applying these to a close reading of Buñuel’s Mexican films to argue that, ultimately, these films depict a sense of placelessness, overtly or subliminally enacting a search for belonging that forces the viewer to question what it means to be in place.

No description available.

No description available.

The work is centered on the activity of the Vicentinian publisher Gian Dàuli, (p Ugo Giuseppe Nalato) born in Vicenza on December 9, 1894. The intellectual training and the entire professional career of Gian Dàuli were unraveled during the most controversial phases of the first forty years of the twentieth century. Dàuli is best known for being the first of Jack London's translators (1924) and for creating the editorial series 'Writers of the World' (1928). The work, which is the result of systematic archive research, assumes the burden to an in depth evaluation of the professional life of Dàuli. What emerges is that he was not, as IT has been widely affirmed, a confusing publisher, a man of disorder. The catalogues he set up were not only the result of his eccentric genius. To animate the efforts of Dàuli were firm values, passions and ideals pursued during the long stay in England, the European travels, the Great War. Democracy, social reformism, universal brotherhood, solidarity with the disadvantaged classes were elements that oriented the entire career of the publisher. While the Fascist regime increasingly influenced the spaces of freedom, Dàuli introduced European works of great intellectual inspiration in Italy, anticipating the 'decade of translation' and hoping that foreign literature would stimulate Italian writers to overcome academicism and art prose. Publishing was for Dàuli the means to educate people to beauty and to provide them with conceptual instruments for interpreting reality. He was mocked, despised by critics and excluded from the literary associations that counted. He paid a heavy price for his opposition to the Regime; he was viewed with suspicion by the ecclesiastical hierarchy for his humanitarian laicism. Since 1934 he ceased collaborations with luxury publishing houses, and after many catastrophic failures, he became a consultant editor of the Lucchi publishing house, specialized in low cost editions. He died in Milan on December 29, 1945.

The studies reported in this thesis were concerned with children’s developing mastery of the use of certain forms of nominal reference in extended discourse. Particular attention was paid to the use of definite pronouns, nominal substitutes and zero anaphora - both in comprehension and in production. Following a discussion of the theoretical issues involved, and a review of the literature, in the first two chapters, the results of a series of studies investigating children’s use and understanding of these forms of reference are presented. Experiment l(a) looked at 5 and 7 year old children’s comprehension of nominal substitutes using an acting-out task, and this was extended to 3 year olds in Experiment l(b). Experiment 2 was again a comprehension experiment, but included material designed to test 5 and 7 year old children’s comprehension of definite pronouns, as well as nominal substitutes. The next study discussed was designed to investigate children’s earliest use of nominal substitute forms, using diary records kept by parents. The first observations were recorded when the children were aged around 18 months, and they were followed up until they were around 30 months old. The final study reported was a large-scale experimental production study designed to elicit the use of a range of types of discourse anaphora by 5 and 7 year old children and a comparison group of adult subjects. The subjects were shown videorecordings and asked to describe what was happening on the screen, either as the action progressed or subsequently. The videos were prepared using puppets, and were constructed in such a way as to allow for the appropriate use of nominal substitutes, definite pronouns and zero anaphora. The results for nominal substitutes (Experiment 3(a» and for pronouns and zero anaphora (Experiment 3(b» are presented in separate chapters. The thesis concludes with a general discussion of the results of these studies, and the conclusions that can be drawn from them.

No description available.

The translator tasked with providing a metrical (singing) translation of an opera libretto must consider that the opera, as a Gestalt, is ‘other’ than the sum of its individual verbal, musical and mimic-scenic parts and requires the translator to consider how the ‘web of relationships’ (Snell-Hornby, 1995: 450) between them is affected when one part is altered through translation. Translation, in this case, must go beyond copying the original prosody and rhyme schemes, so that the new words fit the notes, and consider the relationship between musical and poetic meaning as well as the resulting dramatic action on stage. As a composer, Richard Wagner was concerned with every thread in the semiotic web of his operas. He wrote the words and the music, provided copious stage directions, was involved with the production of his works, and went as far as building his own theatre at Bayreuth. His lengthy, and at times convoluted, theorising about the synthesis of poetry, music and the scenic-mimetic in his operas, serves as something of a functional blueprint of multimodality. In his 1851 monograph, Oper und Drama (1914a, 1914b), Wagner explains how musico-poetic synthesis is created through Versmelodie (verse-melody), from which melody grows organically, facilitated by the “direct sensory appeal” of alliteration, concision and free rhythm (Stein, 1960: 69). This thesis examines the “nexus of foregrounding” (Peer, 1986: 16) found in Wagner’s Die Walküre and Götterdämmerung and considers how three translations used in performance (Jameson c.1899, Porter 1977, Sams 2006) and my own respond to Wagner’s synthesis of verse and music. It will consider the constraints and influences which shape the translator’s recreation of Wagner’s musico-poetic style. My translation of these two operas from the Ring cycle has been produced for the aim of performance but unlike those of Jameson, Porter and Sams, they prioritize alliterative rhyme as an essential part of the musico-poetic intersemiosis.

In the last two decades, gay and lesbian parenting has emerged as a highly contentious subject in France. The creation of the Pacte Civil de Solidarité in 1999 and the legalization of same-sex marriage and adoption in 2013 testify to the evolution of gay and lesbian parenting from a hidden practice into a public matter. The growing visibility of gay and lesbian parenting has coincided with the emergence of lesbian mothering as a literary theme. While texts portraying lesbian mothers remain small in number, the fact that most were published after 2000 suggests their being on the rise. This thesis engages with this nascent branch of French literature, focusing on ten texts published between 1970 and 2013. It thus encompasses the period from the birth of the modern gay and lesbian movement until the adoption of same-sex marriage in France. It shows how the texts both reflect changes to the family and contribute to political and theoretical debates on gay and lesbian parenting and, more broadly, to the redefining of mothering and family in twentieth- and twenty-first-century France.

Translation quality assessment (TQA) is a controversial area in Translation Studies. Scholars attribute this to the subjective nature of quality, believed to result from the multiplicity of assessment criteria. However, the literature review reveals that translation scholars attribute different reasons to the decreased level of objectivity in current TQA practices. This study hypothesises that although subjectivity in TQA cannot be eliminated, it can be reduced to a more acceptable level if quality assessment adopts the criteria believed by translation scholars to lend more objectivity to the assessment. The most common approaches used in TQA are either based on error analysis or holistic assessment. As both approaches promise to be objective, this study empirically investigates the differences in the applicability of each with regards to the objectivity criteria proposed by specialists in the field. To this end, four Arab Spring presidential speeches selected for the purpose of this study are assessed by both approaches. Contrastive analysis of these speeches is carried out in order to identify how each approach reduces the subjectivity inherent to TQA. Furthermore, the error analysis model employed in this study is adapted from the theory of textuality proposed by Beaugrande and Dressler in 1981. Given that the seven standards in the original model do not encompass all the elements of the source text language (Arabic), amending the original model is necessary. In examining the applicability of the proposed adapted model as one that aids translators and evaluators with the assessment of Arabic-English translations, this study resulted in introducing new criteria of assessment in the standards of cohesion, coherence and informativity. This study also contributes to the field by empirically examining the differences between the outcome of the application of the two main approaches of translation quality assessment, i.e., error analysis approach and holistic approach; and identifying how each method reduces the level of subjectivity to quality assessment.

No description available.