The Spanish Civil War, from 1936 until 1939, continues to inform not only the way Spaniards imagine themselves historically, but how they represent themselves contemporaneously, especially in creative works. The outcome of the war involved the installation of a fascist dictatorship led by Francisco Franco, one which extolled the virtues of Spanish tradition while violently suppressing resistant cultural voices. This suppression led to a lapse in cultural memory, one that compels Spanish authors to continue writing about this period and its aftermath. In this translation, a selection of four Spanish authors (Rafael Marín, Eduardo Vaquerizo, Javier Negrete, and Santiago Eximeno) from the collection Franco. An Alternative History re-imagine the outcome of the war, utilizing the genre of alternative history. More particularly, these stories are examples of uchronia, which are concerned specifically with alternative timelines of the world in which we live. As the title suggests, this collection seeks to reclaim control over the reign of Franco, and to re-situate it in such a way that any lingering cultural trauma regarding the war might be explored and understood. While these authors are not survivors of the war themselves, the contemporary publication of these stories demonstrates the continued importance of this event in the Spanish cultural imagination.

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The aim of Text and Reader is to find a critical approach that links a novel's form to its socio-cultural context, and to apply this approach to four contemporary novels by an English, an American, an Argentinian, and a Flemish novelist. The first chapter of Text and Reader sketches a communicative approach to the novel, and combines elements from reception aesthetics, speech act theory, and frame analysis. The basis of this communicative approach is the aesthetic response theory of Wolfgang Iser. Iser analyses a literary work of art as entering into a dialogue with its period norms via its repertoire--and specifically via its repertorial negations--and as guiding its reader's experiences through the effects it achieves by its use of narrative strategies--and specifically of strategical blanks. As Iser's definition of these blanks--discontinuity between narrative perspectives--and his description of how, in specific instances, these blanks guide the reader's experiences is rather vague it is suggested that speech act theory as applied to literature both by literary and linguistic theoreticians, and Erving Goffman's "frame analysis" might contribute toward refining Iser's notions. Specifically, it is argued that a reader has certain conventional speech act and frame expectation with regard to a novel, and that anything problematizing these expectations leads to Iser's "discontinuity" and hence functions as a blank. Separate chapters apply the approach sketched in the first chapter to John Fowles's The French Lieutenant's Woman, John Barth's Letters, Julio Cortazar's Libro de Manuel, and Louis Paul Boon's De Kapellekensbaan. The communicative approach enables us to reconstruct the communicative interchange taking place between the texts and their period readers and to determine how these readers are guided in their reading experience by the blanks that follow from the problematic aspects of each of these novels. The relationship the novels establish with their period audience combined with their repertoire give us insight into the dialectic each novel conducts with its society. The particular form of each novel--its repertoire and strategies combined and interrelated--is determined by the particular effects its author wants his work to achieve in the mind of his period readers: the form of The French Lieutenant's Woman, Letters, Libro de Manuel, and De Kappellekensbaan directly issues from the attitudes Fowles, Barth, Cortazar, and Boon want their readers to adopt vis-a-vis their society as a result of their reading experience. Although in Text and Reader applied exclusively to four contemporary novels, the communicative approach advocated in this study also offers the possibility of studying changes in repertoire and technique as they manifest themselves over longer periods of the genre's history as directly issuing from changes in the socio-cultural context because it investigates the particular form a novel takes as correlative to that novel's communicative function.

This is a study of the problem of "natural history" (as opposed to eschatological history) in Adorno's philosophy. Part I presents the emergence of natural history, since the Reformation, as it constituted the problems with which Adorno's philosophy, particularly his aesthetics, is concerned. In Chapter I, Luther is seen to have produced a solution to natural history, the internalization of transcendance that, ironically, potentiated natural history. The key inheritance of German thought from the age of Luther is summarized as the transformation of secunda natura, the Greek doctrine of the perfectability of nature, into second nature, the natural-historical phenomenon of the appearance of society as a model of an irrevocably fallen first nature. Chapters II through V present the attempts of Kant, Hegel, Marx, and Benjamin to solve the constellation of problems bequeathed by the Reformation. Each of these efforts involved a reappropriation of the Greek tradition. The success of each of these philosophies is measured by its ability to reconceive a secunda natura. The specification of the limits of each solution--the aporia of its conception of a secunda natura--is left in each chapter to Adorno. Part II is a collection of essays treating various aspects of the problem of natural history in Adorno's work in such a way that they, cumulatively more than hierarchically, present his solution to the problem of natural history. These essays, composing Chapters VI through IX, are built around Adorno's lecture of 1932, "The Idea of Natural-History." They document the origin of Adorno's concern with the problem in his earliest writings; the explicit emergence of the theme of natural history in his 1932 lecture; the relation of the problem of natural history to his style; his response to the historiography of natural history, i.e. historicism; and his conception of the possibility of a secunda natura through art and immanent criticism.

The purpose of this study is to discover how the female vampire in Delmira Agustini's poem "El vampiro" differs in comparison to her literary predecessors found in the works of Poe, Baudelaire, Darío, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Christina Rossetti, and Charlotte Brontë. Chapter 1 is a study of the atmosphere, setting, plot, character, structure, theme, symbolism, voice, and overall emotional impact of the poem. In addition, visual references to the paintings Vampire and The Vampire by Edvard Munch and Philip Burne-Jones, respectively, and literary references to Bram Stoker's Dracula are made as well. For example, Munch's Vampire and Agustini's "El vampiro" exemplify the New Woman-change that was taking hold of the domestic, public, and art spheres in societies of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Due to these changing societal circumstances, both works illustrate the resulting sense of a curious unease by setting their subjects in a position of unfamiliar power and within an atmosphere infused with a distinctive, new kind of fear, where Munch's Vampire expresses man's fear of the female and Agustini's "El vampiro" expresses a female's fear of the female – that is, the female's fear of self. Chapter 2 surveys the portrait if the female vampire drawn in Poe's short stories "Berenice", "Morella," and "Ligeia" and Darío's "Thanatopía" alongside the poems "Le Vampire" and "Les Metamorphoses de Vampire" by Baudelaire and Rossetti's Body's Beauty, a work consisting of both a painting and a poem. Within these works, I believe it is the male narrator's identity – not that of the female – which concerns the author. In contrast, through this fantastical creature, Agustini expresses her anxiety about a cultural reality that she would otherwise be unable to communicate if writing in a realistic fashion. Finally, Chapter 3 is a study of Christina Rossetti's poem Goblin Market and Charlotte Brontë's novel Jane Eyre in comparison to Agustini's "El vampiro". The changes presented within these works in regards to the female vampire demonstrate the various levels of progression toward emancipation in the role of women from the mid-nineteenth century to the early twentieth century. Having rewritten the image of the female vampire through a female point of view, Agustini created a transition between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This transitional characterization of Agustini's vampire marks the evolution of woman from powerless to powerful and rewrites the inhuman character of the female vampire into a human character more representative of the turn of the twentieth century and today. / A Thesis Submitted to the Department of Modern Languages and Linguistics in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts. / Spring Semester, 2009. / March 5, 2009. / "El vampiro", Delmira Agustini, Female Vampire / Includes bibliographical references. / Delia Poey, Professor Directing Thesis; Brenda Cappuccio, Committee Member; Roberto G. Fernández, Committee Member.

This dissertation intends to study the ways whereby contemporary Iberian poetry moves (in the double sense of emotionally touching and politically mobilizing), and therefore can potentially produce, different models of sociality within the context of the 2008 financial crisis in Portugal and Spain. For that sake, it draws from the relatively recent affective turn in Cultural Studies, resulting in an approach characterized by an understanding of emotions as practices. Contrary to traditional psychoanalytic perspectives, where emotions are considered inner states and/or properties of the subject, Affect theory studies emotions as a liminal, relational production: the result from the interaction of bodies with their environment, as well as between themselves. This approach has important implications for literary criticism, as it involves addressing literary texts from their very material dimension. Therefore, and apart from paying attention to its meaning, the key question would be what these texts do: what are their effects and how they impress, corporeal and intellectually, on their readers. Issues of agency and subject-object distinction need to be reconsidered once we acknowledge that the literary text acts upon the reader and transforms him/her. The project is structured in four chapters. The first one focuses in poetic texts which, be it through traditional formats or newer devices, work, following Germán Labrador's terminology, as spaces of action. These texts, poems from Antonio Orihuela, Filipa Leal, Pablo García Casado or Golgona Anghel, would be affective mediators, able to provide the reader with politically mobilizing narratives and myths. It is possible to identify voices, narratives or scenes that describe or reflect situations with which the reader empathizes, and that are able to move her to the point of changing a state of fear, disappointment or apathy by another of mobilizing indignation. The second chapter is dedicated to those poetics centered in a re-elaboration of language for subversive purposes. Following the premise that a new world cannot be thought using the old language of oppression, these poetics would strive to overcome the currently mainstream prosaic realism. In this part I will analyze works from María Salgado, Enrique Falcón and Antonio Méndez Rubio together with the Portuguese hypermedia poet Rui Torres; these authors distance themselves from figurative poetics and embrace openness and indetermination, experimenting with various avant-garde means and elements. In a third chapter, I pay attention to poets and MCs who shift between traditional formats and other material or virtual spatialities for their works, ranging from weblog literature to street walls or hip-hop performances, which entail new restrictions and opportunities. Among others, I study the work of Alberto Basterrechea, also known as neorrabioso (a mock self-definition that means "new enraged"). neorrabioso employs an aphoristic, inflammatory writing with a colloquial and ludic characteristic mark: his brevity is, among other factors, a consequence of the fact that he clandestinely paints his poems in the streets of Madrid. This will of regaining the public sphere for and by poetry is framed in the activities of the 15-M movement, with which neorrabioso shares a project of renewing language in order to counteract institutional newspeak. The last chapter studies, in an affective key, ecologist discourses in committed poetry. It will take Jorge Riechmann as its central figure, but will also consider other authors such as Rui Lage or Fernando Aguiar. Thanks to their relational quality, emotions and affects like shame or empathy (fundamental for the construction of a sense of community) have worked as dams for human ambitions, particularly in a competitive and individualistic culture such as the Western. Thus, in this chapter I analyze poems susceptible of rousing affects that function as limits: affects that, for instance, contribute to raise awareness that economic growth as an ends to itself is a self-destructive fiction, incompatible with nature's finiteness, of which human beings are an inseparable part. / A Dissertation submitted to the Department of Modern Languages and Linguistics in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. / Fall Semester 2015. / November 30, 2015. / Affect and Emotion Studies, Cultural Politics, Iberian Contemporary Poetry, Social Activism / Includes bibliographical references. / Enrique Álvarez, Professor Directing Dissertation; Robinson Herrera, University Representative; Juan Carlos Galeano, Committee Member; Delia Poey, Committee Member; Peggy Sharpe, Committee Member.

0 / Elena Shabliy / archives@tulane.edu

In order to lay a foundation for the comparative study of narrative voices and tenses in novel and film, I have chosen to single out what are considered exclusively novelistic structures--first-person narration, action recounted in retrospect, past tenses and especially the imperfect tense--and to investigate how they have been or could be constructed in filmic terms. I proceed by considering the project for transposing Proust's (')A la recherche du temps perdu to the screen, since these specifically literary structures are essential to the novel, and because Pinter's adaptation of it into film form offers concrete solutions for creating filmic equivalents of them. I first examine why these narrative structures are more easily formulated in novel than in film, and why they have long been considered outside the scope of filmic narration. I then explore the ways in which film, long thought to be "non-narrated" and in the "present tense," might construct its own equivalent of a first-person narrator recounting in the past tense. I find that although a filmic narrator will not say "I" the way the narrator of a novel does, it is possible to disrupt the illusion of continuity and presentness, and to create in film a "space of narration." Filmmakers like Bresson and Godard are important examples and the cinematic use of verbal language and of voice-over is explored. After a discussion of the specifically literary aspects of Proustian narration and the ways filmic equivalents of them can be constructed, an analysis of The Proust Screenplay reveals that Pinter develops a "first-person hero" and a scenario for a "narrated film," in a particularly Pinteresque way, with a sparing use of verbal language, and an important use of the non-verbal materials of film.

The aim of this dissertation is to investigate the intertextual relations between the composite symbolism of ancient Chinese stonelore and the literary stone imageries presented in three classic Chinese novels--Water Margin, The Journey to the West, and Dream of the Red Chamber. The purpose of this project is not only to acknowledge the essentially folkloric character of the stone imageries embodied in the three literary texts, but to study the modification and accretion of the stone symbol in the process of its development into a literary theme.