Although they have cohabited in India for centuries, critical analyses of contemporary Indian literature and culture often seem to draw a distinction between the "world" of the English language and that of the bhashas (or Indian regional languages) — as though the two are sealed off from each other with no conceivable overlaps. Even sixty-six years after independence, the debate over the contested linguistic terrains of "home" and "world" - and whether these seeming dichotomies are mappable as "Indian"/"non-Indian” or "provincial"/"cosmopolitan" — continue. Through a study of contemporary and modern Indian literary and cultural discourses, I analyse the historical and ideological roles played by English language — the ways in which it has interacted with bhashas, and the importance of the literary representation of English and bhashas in the politics of Indian cultural and linguistic nationalism(s). Along with canonical Indian English writing (such as the works of Vikram Seth, Amitav Ghosh and Salman Rushdie) I analyse bhasha literature (especially Hindi, Bengali and Urdu) as well as Indian literature in translation as my primary texts. My study includes fiction, as well as political documents and life writing (notably those by M. K. Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru). The analysis of Hindi cinema, ranging from films like Mughal-e-Azam (1960) to Ra.One (2011) remains a running thread throughout, for this popular medium encapsulates the Indian linguistic debates in a way that is sometimes complementary and at other times a foil to the literary cultural discourse. In each of my chapters I analyse the mobilisation of language(s) in relation to one of the categories that, in India’s charged socio-political setting, become associated with the question of one’s communal, cultural and/or territorial “identity” — namely nation, religion, and caste and class. Though this is a thesis about language and its cultural representation in postcolonial India, I often flit to events in pre-1947 India in the course of my discussions. This is because some of the cultural moments from the colonial past are either historical precedents to, or prove to be momentous departures from, the events that I focus on in contemporary India. Their significance can therefore not be ignored in any comprehensible analysis of the roles that language has played in India after independence.

Works on semiotic dynamics and language as a complex adaptive system in general has been an important lane of research over the last decade. In this study, the mean-field naming game model developed in the course of the pioneering research programme of Luc Steels and colleagues is modified to include probabilistic word choice based on weighted lists of words, instead of either deterministic or totally random word choice based on (ordered) sets of words. The parameters&rsquo / interaction and this interaction&rsquo / s effect on time of convergence of the system and size of individual lexicons over time are investigated. The classical model is found to be a special case of this proposed model. Additionally, this model has more parameters and a larger state space which provides additional room for tweaking for time- or space-optimization of the convergence process.

Esta pesquisa trata-se de um estudo das aquarelas de Xul Solar, artista argentino do século XX, nas quais o tema representado é a arquitetura. Parte de uma conceituação da arquitetura concebida apenas como imagem, o que a torna, muitas vezes, objeto das Artes Plásticas. Em seqüência, é feita uma síntese das diferentes séries de arquiteturas que o artista pinta ao longo de sua vida, entre as quais, são selecionadas quatro obras como modelos representativos de seus respectivos blocos. Com base nessas obras, procura-se fazer uma análise que considere o contexto em que está inserida cada aquarela e o tema predominante sobre a série, estabelecendo paralelos tanto entre as obras pares como entre obras do artista de outros períodos ou, ainda, entre produções de outros artistas/arquitetos. Assim, o primeiro estudo aborda os edifícios da etapa inicial em que o artista vive na Europa e sua pintura apresenta fortes afinidades com o Expressionismo alemão e a Cadeia de Cristal; o segundo trata de um urbanismo prospectivo a partir da imagem de uma singular cidade que voa, única obra que recebe do artista um posterior texto homônimo e que reflete seu interesse por questões de avanços científicos, mas ainda em paralelo com a espiritualidade sempre presente em sua obra; o terceiro discorre sobre as palafitas, as arquiteturas mais \"factíveis\" de todo o conjunto e que foram pensadas para um lugar específico e de acordo com a geografia local, e, por fim, o quarto estudo discute a questão das línguas artificiais criadas por Xul Solar, a panlengua e o neocriollo, e como esta última é inserida em suas fachadas, conformando suas arquiteturas \"semânticas\". Em síntese, uma arquitetura situada entre a imagem e o texto. / This research concerns a study of the watercolors of Xul Solar, an Argentinean artist of the 20th Century, in which architecture is the theme. It originates from a conception of architecture as only an image, which often turns it into an object of the plastic arts. Following that, a synthesis of the different series of architectural pieces that the artist painted throughout his life is done. Among them, four pieces are selected as representative models of his respective blocks. Based on these pieces, an analysis is attempted considering the context in which each watercolor is placed and the predominant theme of the series. This establishes parallels among both the pair pieces and pieces of the artist of other periods or, still, among the production of other artists/architects. Therefore, the first study approaches the buildings of the initial period in which the artist lived in Europe and his painting presented strong affinities with German Expressionism and the Glass Chain. The second study treats a prospective urbanism from the image of a singular flying city, the only piece that receives a homonymous posterior text by the artist and that reflects his interests in issues of scientific advancements, while still in parallel with the ever-present spirituality in his work. The third study discusses the stilt-houses, the most \"feasible\" architecture in the collection that was considered for a specific place, according to the local geography. Finally, the fourth study discusses the question of artificial languages created by Xul Solar, the panlengua and the neocriollo, and how the last one is inserted in his façades, conforming to his \"semantic\" architectures. In short, it is an architecture situated between the image and the text.

Esta pesquisa trata-se de um estudo das aquarelas de Xul Solar, artista argentino do século XX, nas quais o tema representado é a arquitetura. Parte de uma conceituação da arquitetura concebida apenas como imagem, o que a torna, muitas vezes, objeto das Artes Plásticas. Em seqüência, é feita uma síntese das diferentes séries de arquiteturas que o artista pinta ao longo de sua vida, entre as quais, são selecionadas quatro obras como modelos representativos de seus respectivos blocos. Com base nessas obras, procura-se fazer uma análise que considere o contexto em que está inserida cada aquarela e o tema predominante sobre a série, estabelecendo paralelos tanto entre as obras pares como entre obras do artista de outros períodos ou, ainda, entre produções de outros artistas/arquitetos. Assim, o primeiro estudo aborda os edifícios da etapa inicial em que o artista vive na Europa e sua pintura apresenta fortes afinidades com o Expressionismo alemão e a Cadeia de Cristal; o segundo trata de um urbanismo prospectivo a partir da imagem de uma singular cidade que voa, única obra que recebe do artista um posterior texto homônimo e que reflete seu interesse por questões de avanços científicos, mas ainda em paralelo com a espiritualidade sempre presente em sua obra; o terceiro discorre sobre as palafitas, as arquiteturas mais \"factíveis\" de todo o conjunto e que foram pensadas para um lugar específico e de acordo com a geografia local, e, por fim, o quarto estudo discute a questão das línguas artificiais criadas por Xul Solar, a panlengua e o neocriollo, e como esta última é inserida em suas fachadas, conformando suas arquiteturas \"semânticas\". Em síntese, uma arquitetura situada entre a imagem e o texto. / This research concerns a study of the watercolors of Xul Solar, an Argentinean artist of the 20th Century, in which architecture is the theme. It originates from a conception of architecture as only an image, which often turns it into an object of the plastic arts. Following that, a synthesis of the different series of architectural pieces that the artist painted throughout his life is done. Among them, four pieces are selected as representative models of his respective blocks. Based on these pieces, an analysis is attempted considering the context in which each watercolor is placed and the predominant theme of the series. This establishes parallels among both the pair pieces and pieces of the artist of other periods or, still, among the production of other artists/architects. Therefore, the first study approaches the buildings of the initial period in which the artist lived in Europe and his painting presented strong affinities with German Expressionism and the Glass Chain. The second study treats a prospective urbanism from the image of a singular flying city, the only piece that receives a homonymous posterior text by the artist and that reflects his interests in issues of scientific advancements, while still in parallel with the ever-present spirituality in his work. The third study discusses the stilt-houses, the most \"feasible\" architecture in the collection that was considered for a specific place, according to the local geography. Finally, the fourth study discusses the question of artificial languages created by Xul Solar, the panlengua and the neocriollo, and how the last one is inserted in his façades, conforming to his \"semantic\" architectures. In short, it is an architecture situated between the image and the text.

The PhD thesis "Constructed Languages in Literature" focuses on the phenomenon of consciously designed or drafted languages and their usage in literary texts. The first chapter of the thesis offers reflections on the delimitation of constructed languages, especially from the perspective of the mostly illusory opposition of natural and constructed. It also puts forth the problems of glossolalia and encryption or encoding of a text in a natural language, while suggesting these two ways to create a new utterance should be perceived as possible starting points for language creativity, rather than a completely different phenomenon. The subsequent chapters then turn to individual cases and introduce extensive groups of constructed and virtual languages - animal languages, utopian and dystopian languages, sacred and divine languages and constructed and virtual languages in poetry. In those chapters examples of both elaborated and drafted languages appear, so that the imagination characteristic of each group comes out.

My thesis examines the nature of contemporary fictional narration and explores its relations to other types of narration - mainly texts where educational or informative function prevails over the aesthetic one. The whole work is divided into four parts. The first part is theoretical; it sets up basic areas of interest and names methods, tools and models that will be tested on selected examples from Slavonic literatures. The second part analyses spatial and temporal relations of fictional narrative. Chapter 2.1 treats time and space in a novel mostly from the compositional point of view (based on the example of Sasha Sokolov's A School for Fools), while in the next chapter, focusing on ideational interconnections between literary and social- political utopias, both fictionality and temporality are understood more broadly than mere narrative categories: they serve as certain points of connection between the immanent occurrence of meaning in the "world of text" and its historical background. The third part continues in this direction, only what we mean by context here is not the collective historical background, but an individual sphere of everyday life. Our focus switches to two genres standing on the boundary of literary fiction and non-fiction - personal correspondence and a travel journal (travelogue). The...