This dissertation offers an ecocritical reading of Italo Calvino’s Fiabe italiane, a collection of traditional oral tales published by Einaudi in 1956, and argues that the two-hundred folktales function as a repository of ecological motifs, showing the relationship between humans and the environment as not necessarily exploitative, but rather as a relationship of coexistence and entanglement. The dissertation shows that the critical language that Calvino uses, influenced by a long tradition of folklore studies, rests on two key metaphors to express belonging in a political and national community: rootedness and groundedness. Through the reading of several tales, I show that the folktales themselves actually reveal a fabulist ecology concerned much more with entanglement and enmeshment with the natural landscape, and offer imaginative tools to recover, at the time of the Anthropocene, an enchanted view of the environment. In the first chapter, I argue that the morphology of the folktale that Calvino draws from the Russian formalist Vladimir Propp rests on a conception of the folktale as a plant that can be dissected with the same tools used by a botanist. I show how observations that Calvino makes about tales of metamorphosis of women into plants betray an investment in rootedness as a metaphor for belonging in a political and national community. Drawing from material ecocriticism, I argue that plants, rather than signposts for stasis and belonging, can be read as signs of mixture, coexistence, and symbiosis with the environment. I also argue that the frequent metamorphosis of female characters into plants points toward a trans-corporeal conception of subjectivity. In the second chapter, I show how Calvino contradictorily engages with the legacy of the Brothers Grimm, for whom the forest stands as a metaphor of the lost unity of the German nation. Through a close reading of “Hansel and Gretel,” and Calvino’s rewriting of this tale, “Pulcino,” I show that forests, be they material or fictional, can also be read as environments that preserve an agrarian ecology of subsistence, populated by othered figures such as witches and ogres that depend on a non-exploitative relationship with the environment of the forest. This ecology is preserved in Calvino’s own Marcovaldo, a collection of modern urban fairy-tales that he authored in the same period. Ultimately, I conceive of trees as markers of deep time and connectors between human and geological history. In the third chapter, I turn to the second metaphor identified by my project, groundedness. I briefly reconstruct the cultural milieu in which Calvino operated, and the development of postwar folklore studies after the publication of Antonio Gramsci’s Quaderni del carcere. Therefore, I examine the “Observations on Folklore,” showing how much of Gramsci’s theoretical language engages metaphorically with geology. Calvino himself is indebted to this idea of stratification. His folktales, especially “Cola Pesce,” then become a site where human history and geologic time intersect, and many stories function as repositories of folk knowledge about the telluric landscape of Southern Italy and about the porosity of humans and stones. In the conclusion, I offer an overview of the material and I consider Calvino’s revisiting, in the 1970s, of his earlier folkloric work and how his thoughts on storytelling and belonging evolve in the course of two decade, arguing that they constitute a literary ecology.

Die Arbeit befaßt sich mit den Formen des nicht natürlichen Todes und weiteren rechtsmedizinischen Sachverhalten wie Leichenerscheinungen, Scheintod, Identifizierung von Personen und Leichen, Selbstverstümmelungen und Spuren von Tätern und Opfern in den deutschen Volksmärchen. Rechtsmedizinische Zusammenhänge von Ursache und Wirkung werden nach ihrer Gültigkeit im Märchen hinterfragt. Wie werden beispielsweise Gewaltwirkungen auf äußere Erscheinungsbilder betroffener Märchenfiguren, Tötungsgeschehen und Tatwerkzeuge dargestellt? Inwiefern entsprechen Schilderungen der Tatbestände und ihre Bewertung im Märchen auch historischem Rechtsverständnis? Was unterliegt den epischen Gesetzen des Märchens? Für die rechtsmedizinische Fragestellung nach den Verletzungsspuren am Getöteten, dem Tötungsgeschehen und den Tatwerkzeugen sind die Märchen als Quelle des Volkswissens nur begrenzt verwertbar. Zum Beispiel sind keine Wunden, innere Blutungen oder kleinere Verletzungen nach Gewalteinwirkung beschrieben. Es wurden nahezu alle klassischen Todesarten wie Ertrinken, Vergiften, Verbrennen, Verhungern, Erhängen, Erfrieren, Selbsttötung und Tod durch scharfe und stumpfe Gewalt im Märchen vorgefunden und betreffende Textstellen unter Benutzung der "historisch-geographischen Methode" regional verglichen. Zusammenhänge von Ursache und Wirkung konnten jedoch nicht im Sinne einer rechtsmedizinischen Rekonstruktion des zum Tode führenden Geschehens nach heutigen Maßstäben aufgestellt werden. Das Märchen als Volksüberlieferung kennt keinen historisch konkreten Zeitbezug. Mit der zeitlich und regional variierenden Wiedergabe des Erzählstoffes fließen neue Motive und anderes Wissen mit ein. Daraus ergab sich für die Arbeit eine zurückhaltende Aufstellung von Vergleichen des rechtshistorischen Alltags und der geschilderten Märchenwirklichkeit. Der nicht natürliche Tod konnte bei der rechtsmedizinischen Untersuchung nicht unabhängig von seinem Zusammenhang im Märchen betrachtet werden. Er ist im Märchen oft ein Mittel, entsprechend den Moralvorstellungen Gerechtigkeit herzustellen, aber auch die Protagonisten von ihrem positiven Weg abzubringen. Seine sozialisierende Funktion in der Märchengesellschaft kann nicht übersehen werden. / This thesis reports about the types of the non-natural death and further issues of legal medicine in the German folk tales such as the sure signs of dead bodies, appearently dead people, identification of persons and corpses, mutilation of its own and traces of perpetrators and victims. Do forensic correlations between cause and effect appear in the fairy tales? How do fairy tales describe the violent effects to the concerned figures? outward appearance, the killing event and the tools of crime? How does the facts of the cases? description and their valuation in the fairy tales correspond to the historical comprehension of the rights? The folk tales are only of restricted use as a source of general knowledge for the forensic issue of the injury traces on a dead body, of the killing event or of the tools of crime. For example, there are not described any wounds, internal bleedings or smaller injuries after violence. Nearly all classical causes of non-natural death are found in the fairy tales: drowning, freezing to death, hanging, burning to death, poisoning, dying of starvation, suicid and death by sharp and blunt force. There could not be shown any correlations between cause and effect in the sense of a killing event?s forensic reconstruction after today's standards. The folk tales as an oral tradition are not exactly related to a certain historical period. With each new performance a story was influenced by new motivs or knowledge. For that reason the comparison between fairy tales and historical reality of everyday life is very restrained. The non-natural death as a forensic fact can only be interpretated in ist function in the folk tales. By means of the non-natural death the fairy tales? characters are doing justice corresponding to their moral ideas, but positive figures can also be pushed away from their good ways. The non-natural death? socializing function in the fairy tales? society is evident.

Cette thèse a pour objectif de montrer un des impacts de l'esclavage sur l'histoire des peuples africains et leurs descendants. Comment ce fait a pu façonner la vie spirituelle des diasporas des Amériques, et en particulier du Brésil, et de quelle manière ces différentes populations ont su dialoguer entre elles, mais aussi s'approprier et transformer les valeurs culturelles des peuples qui les ont soumis. Tout en s'adaptant à ces nouveaux contextes, elles ont préservé leurs mémoires spirituelles en créant des intermédiaires cultuels comme l'entité du Seja Hundê, Candomblé jeje de Bahia, le vudum Lebabimibome, qui fusionne le singe et le Messager des religions ancestrales fon et yorouba Eshu-Legba. Par l'adoption de cette nouvelle manifestation religieuse, elles ont également su recycler l'image utilisée par les colonisateurs à l'encontre des Africains, associé à des singes et décrit comme un chaînon manquant entre l'homme et l'animal, ainsi des individus ont pu échapper à l'esclavage en refusant l'usage de parole. Aussi, par la ruse des singes des contes populaires, l'histoire sociale des esclaves et des libres subalternes vivant dans cette société est racontée ce qui constitue une archive de l'époque. / This dissertation aims to show how the enslavement of African peoples on the African continent and in the Americas has deeply influenced the spiritual and intellectual lives of Africans both on the continent and in the diaspora, particularly in Brazil. African peoples learned from the beginning how to dialogue with other Africans ethnicities and how to assess the cultural values being imposed by those people who dominated them. They could transform those values to their needs. Also they managed to safeguard their ancestral spiritual heritage, creating a vudu, known as Lebabimibome, merged with the Messenger of the Fon/Yoruba religion Eshu-Legba, and with a monkey. In this way they wittingly illustrated the European idea that Africans were the missing link between men and monkeys. Some Africans strategically accepted this image and used it to escape slavery by refusing to use spoken words in their relationship with Europeans and Native Americans. By using the monkey's guile, as described in these animal tales, the oral tradition could integrate the hermeneutical aspect of Eshu-Legba to translate the social history of the enslaved and subaltern peoples within these fables which function as archives in Brazilian society. / O objetivo desta tese é de demonstrar um dos impactos da escravidão na historia de povos africanos e afrodescendentes, de como este fato marcou a vida espiritual e intelectual das diasporas nas Américas, e da brasileira em especial Também, teatamos mostrar como estas populações souberam dialogar primeiramente entre elas e em seguida apropriar-se e transformar e transformar os valores culturais dos povos que os subjugaram Ao mesmo tempo que adaptavam aos novos contextos, estas populações souberam preservar suas memorias espirituais e conseguiram criar intermediarios sagrados como aquele do Seja Hundê, Candomblé Jeje da Bahia, o vudum Lebabimibome, hibrido do Messageiro das religiões ancestrais fon e ioruba Exu-Legba e de um macaco Pela adoção desta nova manifestação religiosa, esses povos souberam estrategicament reciclar ao mesmo tempo uma velha idéia construida pelos colonizadores sobre os africanos, que os associavam aos macacos, que eles eram o elo que ligava o homem ao animal, mas para poder escapar à escravidão certos grupos africanos utilizaram a mimica como meio de comunicação com os estrangeiros; por outro lado pelas artimanhas dos macacos dos contos populares, a vida social dos escravos e dos livres subalternos desta sociedade é também contada, transformando-os em arquivos de suas épocas

A feminist examination of the life of the Afrikaans poet Ingrid Jonker is preceded by a look at the conventional literary biography with its unique dual nature: scientific enquiry combined with the art of storytelling, which is aptly called “fiction under oath” (Gutiérrez 1992: 49). Subsequently, an overview of the theoretical basis of feminist ideology and literary approaches is presented with the emphasis on the psychoanalytical point of departure, which views women’s marginalized position as social instead of biological in origin, and therefore as changeable. Biography owes its important place in contemporary women’s writing to the fact that it documents the history and experience of women in the patriarchal system. Feminist biographers, influenced by Postmodernism, force the genre from its traditionally linear form and narrow focus on a famous, usually male subject. The result is a more fluid, cyclical portrayal of (usually) influential women, shedding more light on the social, domestic and personal spheres. Because this kind of biography does not claim to be authoritative, the biographer’s personal contribution and her methods are made explicit. The intuitive and experimental nature of feminist biography makes it suitable for an intertextual and even interdisciplinary approach. Jonker’s life is analysed against the background of a folk tale, The Red Shoes, which is an allegory for the sacrifice of the instinctive creative self or archetypal “wildish woman”. Ancient myths, which narratives of almost every culture share, are seen as responsible for the tenacious survival of the patriarchy through time, social change, and across cultural boundaries. For this reason, feminists see the creation of new myths or infusing old myths with new meaning as the key to women’s emancipation. Against this background, the following subtexts also act as shaping elements in the Ingrid Jonker biography: · The concept of a person’s life “script” unfolding according to repetitive messages laid down in the unconscious by authority figures; · The “conspiracy” between a biographee and her biographers in forming her public image; and · Six archetypes in the Jungian idiom that characterise a person’s journey to spiritual maturity, Examined with these subtexts in mind, Ingrid Jonker’s life story unfolds as follows: A poet in conflict with her time and “abandoned” by her parents, is displaced in pre-adolescence from a unstructured rural milieu where her instinctive creativity was allowed to develop freely, to a highly structured, limiting and artificial urban environment. She seems prophetically destined for a tragic end. Her obsession with death is fed by an inability to have meaningful relationships and to adjust to society’s double standards. Ever the victim of imagined or real betrayal, she joins the ranks of other female artists who follow the same destructive archetypal pattern. She is spurred on not only by her own feral recklessness, but also by other artists who are inspired by her flirtation with death. Upcoming generations are mesmerised by her “moth around a flame” life and, like children, ask time and again for the disastrous though darkly romantic story with its mythical proportions, which turned Jonker into an icon. In doing so, they manage their own collectively unconscious fear of the annihilation of death. The Red Shoes links with Kristeva’s distinction between semiotic and symbolic language. The former is non-rational, intuitive and signifies the maternal whereas the latter represents language that is masculine, rational, linear and therefore patriarchal and logocentric. / Dissertation (MA (Afrikaans))--University of Pretoria, 2005. / Afrikaans / unrestricted

Les Yokai sont les créatures mythiques qui tapissent le folklore japonais. Bien qu’on traduise souvent le mot Yokai par « monstre », ils ne sont pas toujours méchants. En fait, un même Yokai peut être à la fois bon ou mauvais – leur personnalité est changeante selon les histoires. Je me demande alors si le contexte historique peut expliquer ces changements caractériels. J’observe donc lors de mon étude trois différents Yokai (Kappa, Tanuki et Tengu) dans les contes de trois ères historiques japonaises différentes afin de voir s’il y a vraiment un lien – et à l’inverse, voir s’il est possible de dater un conte de par le comportement du Yokai qui y figure. / Yokais are mythical creatures found in Japanese folklore. This word is often translated with “monster”, however this does not mean that they are always evil. In fact, one same creature can be both good and bad – their personalities vary depending on the tale. I am thus wondering if historical context can explain these characteristic changes. Therefore, I will here study the behaviour of three different Yokais (Kappa, Tanuki and Tengu) in tales of three different Japanese eras to see if there is indeed a connection – and also the other way around, to see if it would be possible to date a tale based on its Yokais’ behaviour.