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This dissertation explores why, even after nine years of studying the English language, graduates in the Punjab emerge with very deficient English. An examination of the currently prescribed syllabuses for the Secondary, Intermediate and Degree stages reveals that they are based on out-dated concepts of language teaching. They not only provide impoverished language content but fail to take into consideration the learners' actual needs. They are exclusively based on translation and 'dead language' techniques. Moreover, the examinations allow memorized answers to set questions which are repeated year after year. This dissertation examines the theoretical bases for a specification of a new syllabus. It considers the background of psychology, psycholinguistics, ELT theories and methodologies, and syllabus design, and attempts to develop a pragmatic approach toward the teaching of English in the Punjab. New syllabuses need to be proposed for all three stages of English language study. In this dissertation a proposed specification for the Intermediate stage is outlined, which, if adopted would function as a model for other stages. The specification is for a multi-dimensional syllabus, combining the benefits of both communicative and structuralist approaches, and taking full account of the needs of the particular learners involved and of the local context of education.

In this dissertation, I have analyzed the migrant experience of Chinese immigrants in North America through their representation in literature and photography. Each of its three chapters focuses on three major ethnic issues affecting the lives and identity of Chinese immigrants and their offspring in North America: the first concerns the ways in which occupation, home, and family affect the destinies of Chinese immigrants; the second deals with the role of language in the lives of Chinese immigrants and the career of Chinese migrant writers; the third addresses stereotypes about Chinese immigrants and their offspring and the redefinition of their identity. In this interdisciplinary study, literature inspires us to picture verbally Chinese immigrants struggles under the discriminatory laws and prejudices of society, and their search for respect and equal rights. As for the medium of photography, it provides ample visual evidence that reinforces and complements the literary representations of them. I have chosen to study the literary works by Frank Chin, Maxine Hong Kingston, Qiu Xiaolong, Ha Jin, Fae Myenne Ng, David Henry Hwang, Li-Young Lee, Wayson Choy, and Ying Chen. All of them are pivotal figures and explorers of contemporary Chinese ethnic literature in the United States and Canada. Their work offers a multifaceted history of the Chinese immigrants in North America from the late nineteenth century to the present. Along with the study of Chinese American photographers, Mary Tape, Benjamen Chinn, Corky Lee, and Wing Young Huie, I have added a discussion of the work of two American photographers, Arnold Genthe and George Grantham Bain. The contrasting views that emerge help to illuminate the processes of stereotyping as well as identity construction. The work of the Americans focuses on the immigrants Chineseness, while that of the Chinese Americans seeks to present Chinese immigrant life and the fight for equality from within the Chinese American community. My discussion of the work of these writers and photographers will bring further attention to the difficulties and the challenges facing the Chinese ethnic group in North America.

This dissertation seeks to contribute to the understanding of the formation of collective memory of State violence in Argentina, Chile, and Mexico. By comparing these three cases, I pursue to discern how citizens can challenge the silence and amnesia that the groups in power want to impose on society after a period of State terrorism. In order to examine the process of formation of collective memory, this dissertation highlights two important figures from which citizens have been able to build counter-hegemonic narratives, that is, los exiliados and los desaparecidos. I will highlight how they become lenses through which citizens can construct the memory of State repression. They become the evidence of the repression that the State wants to conceal, and have the potential of becoming important symbolic figures, and sources of knowledge, from which society can challenge silence and oblivion about State terrorism. The unfolding of the objectives and arguments of this dissertation are based on the analysis of literary texts from Argentina, Chile, and Mexico; and on photography of Argentinian and Mexican photographers. I draw on performance studies, anthropological approaches to ritual, and literary criticism to examine how citizens create counter-hegemonic narratives of State repression, and how they incorporate them in the collective memory of their societies.

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In La Communauté desoeuvrée (1983) French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy describes how a community is creating by bringing its members together under a collective identity. The invention of myths, such as the myth of racial superiority and the mythic revolutionary community, functions to sustain the hegemonic dominance wielded in Haiti by the United States and later by François Duvalier, the Porfiriato and its aftermath in Mexico, and white society in the United States Deep South. These myths often engender policies founded in the inhospitable treatment of those who are deemed lesser or other. Nancys conception of being singular plural posits that our exposure to the other remedies the mythic community, because such a configuration requires the perpetual exposure of the self to others, which maintains the fluidity of interpersonal relations and in turn keeps the community future-oriented. Jacques Derridas De la grammatologie (1967), Force de loi (1990), and Politiques de lamitié (1994) offer a reconceptualization of the political implications of subjectivity, community, and responsibility allows us to identify individual behaviors that can foster the development of a democracy to come and which also align with Nancys re-inscription of community. This project examines how the mythic community is portrayed in René Depestres Le Mât de cocagne and Un arc-en-ciel pour lOccident chrétien, Mariano Azuelas Los de abajo, Carlos Fuentess La región más transparente del aire and Gringo viejo, and Ernest Gainess A Gathering of Old Men and A Lesson Before Dying. The authors representations of racial disharmony, marginalization, and violence function as a critique of colonialism, the mythic multicultural American community, and of imperialist capitalist hegemonic patriarchy to paraphrase bell hookss term. This project explores how the reverence for certain myths is linked to a rigid conception of hegemonic masculinity in which manhood is synonymous with domination. Thus, it is necessary to identify the conditions that marginalized men cultivate to achieve masculine subjectivity, and how patriarchal hegemonic masculinity may be challenged by new formulations of masculinities, which may allow such marginalized men to resist totalitarian powers and foster the sort of communal existence founded upon peace and tolerance of the Other.

This dissertation analyzes the role that female ghosts play in recuperating memory and filling the gaps of official history in the following four contemporary novels: Erna Brodbers Louisiana (1994), Zoé Valdéss Te di la vida entera (1996), Sandra Cisneross Caramelo: or, Puro Cuento (2002), and Maryse Condés Victoire, les saveurs et les mots: récit (2006). The ghosts in these novels disrupt a linear temporality and present a matriarchal mode of remembering, leading readers to reconsider the past outside of the dominant historical discourse. In this way, the novels become alternative histories that oppose the monologic historical paradigm and recuperate marginalized voices silenced by History with a capital H. The novels trouble the boundary between truth and fiction, asking the reader to consider the moral value of art. The reader is obliged to relinquish certain assumptions about history and its creation and processes in order to understand how fiction can be an alternative history. My introduction explores the historical paradigm that these novels destabilize, including a Hegelian concept of history that is based on reason. The introduction also sets up the feminist methodology that drives my analysis and presents the geographic scope of my dissertation. Chapter One explores the tradition of the ghost in the literature of the Americas, especially how ghosts confront traumatic pasts and destabilize a linear temporality. In Chapter Two I analyze Brodbers Louisiana, which employs two female ghosts to resist hegemonic historical discourse via spirit possession. In the third chapter I discuss ghosts affective nature in Valdéss Te di la vida entera and Cisneross Caramelo. The spirit narrators in these novels recreate memory via nostalgia and the affective nature of music. Chapter Four explores imaginations role in filling the gaps of history through an analysis of Condés Victoire, whose narrator is haunted by the ghost of her grandmother and compelled to reconstruct her history. My conclusion draws out the specific similarities between the four novels and further explores the way in which these novels not only use the ghost figure to comment on the past, but also employ it to initiate healing within individual relationships between women.

Love, lust, and power are themes that fill the pages of literature, are enacted upon the silver screen, and presented on stage. Such themes evoke courtship and the places where courtship occurs, such as the garden, balcony, and tower. Each of these settings has unique spatial dynamics, as well as distinctive representational and symbolic significance. A woman, while present in such places, uses both physical and metaphorical spatial dynamics to create a source of power and control over a man who courts her. By regulating the amount of space between them, she rules her body; in ruling her body, she determines her own fate. As the amount of vertical space between a woman and her suitor increases, so too does her control over her own body and destiny. When the authors presented in this study create a space in which a woman can make her own choices, such creators transgress societal norms, but, in order to escape censorship, they must provide a punishment for such a womans behavior, and that punitive measure often involves either actual or metaphorical death. These authors are, in fact, writing subversive material without the appearance of doing so. By combining theoretical elements from sociology, psychoanalysis, and feminist studies, I analyze the ways in which women use spatial dynamics to transgress societal mores and carve out areas of power for themselves. Although such transgressive women are found in patriarchal societies all over the world, I chose works from Europe, America, and Latin America that were both representative of the motifs explored in this study and well-known within their respective national traditions. I begin each chapter with a parent text from which later works borrowed, and in order to demonstrate the prevalence of these places in texts, the works chosen derive from different genres written over the last five and a half centuries.