Often debates over literary meaning can get swept up into larger discussions about social significance, political responsibilities, identity struggles and deification of cultural objects. Literary meaning becomes, in these deliberations, not just a theoretical entity but a powerful social force. All of these queries, however, inasmuch as the literary enterprise is a part of human interaction, are dependent on the brute fact of communication. Any notion of literary meaning must ultimately rest upon a concept of meaning that explains, or attempts to explain, how communication is possible. This, in turn, leads down the dark path into human psychology and the relationships of our minds to the world around us. This thesis will attempt to explore various viewpoints about the connections between thought, language, and literature and to argue that these connections necessitate more attention than has been paid to them by literary theorists.

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The Italian literature which came to life in the Eighties broke with the tradition of the preceding period during which fiction was but a fertile ground for social criticism. Furthermore, the new literary scene came to be dominated mainly by unknown young writers, who had come of age in a decisively new and modern social setting in Italy. / This thesis aims at presenting the writers that make up most of the "Giovane Narrativa" of the Eighties. It also presents the main aspects of the social and economic development in Italy after the war and their relevance to this generation of young writers.

The study of popular music has experienced an astonishing growth in the past two and a half decades; however, the detailed analysis of musical texts has lagged far behind other areas, such as the sociology of the youth audience and analysis of the visual components of music video. This thesis undertakes a survey of recent approaches to popular music at the textual level, before examining the construction of an individual song, the Beach Boys' 1964 recording of "All Summer Long". While many parameters affecting the creation of the cultural significance of the text in question are discussed, ultimately the exegesis serves to problematize larger issues in scholarly work on popular music, particularly the dominance of the paradigms of rupture, rebellion, and authenticity in relation to the historiography and criticism of the formation known as "rock".

In the 1790s, the English Jacobin novelists became vital participants in the fiery debates over natural and civil rights. Energized by the success of the American Revolution and inspired by the calls for l'egalite, la liberte, la surete, and la propriete in France, the Jacobin authors contributed their narratives to the British campaigns for reform of parliament and extension of the franchise. In this dissertation, I argue that the Jacobin novel furnishes crucial insights into the development of a theory of juridical rights in the late eighteenth century. Working in the early modern traditions of contract theory, writers such as Thomas Holcroft, Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin embraced the concept of inalienable natural rights. In their novels, they identified the critical role property played in determining the individual's relationship to the law, and they celebrated the emergence of a new kind of citizen distinguished by economic independence, inalienable rights and political agency. But they also offered an important critique of contractarian thought. The Jacobins' narratives revealed the exclusion of certain segments of the population from participation in government formed by contract. Their analyses of the origins of political authority and the constitution of the legal subject render the Jacobin novel a critical component of the history of juridical rights.

This thesis uses the concept of pleasure as it has been applied to cultural artefacts in order to give a description of various characteristics of the soap opera genre. The concept of pleasure is applied to soap opera narrative, characters, visual style and viewing attitudes. Three soap operas, The Young and the Restless, General Hospital, and Another World, are described in detail according to these various types of pleasures. The Young and the Restless is a soap that relies largely on visual pleasures and melodrama. General Hospital's strongest pleasures are related to its character development and use of humour. Another World, the most traditional of the three soaps, is best at stimulating the pleasures associated with talk. Through analysis of viewer commentary supplied by letters sent to Soap Opera Weekly and Soap Opera Update and Nielsen ratings, it can be concluded that the pleasures that most soap opera viewers seem to value the most are related to visual style, romance and a delicate balance between realistic characters and fantasy in narrative.

The cantigas de amor, de amigo, de escarnio, and de maldecir are poetic compositions written between 1200 and 1350 which form a literary school commonly referred to as Galician-Portuguese. The troubadours who refine these compositions do not limit themselves to composing cantigas of only one genre. They write cantigas of all types. For thematic and formal purposes, the common practice is to divide the cantigas into four genres. These divisions are not always very clear. / Because they were in touch with all sorts of cantigas, the poets included in their poems characteristics which blended from one genre to another. This may or may not have been done intentionally. Critics later studied these cantigas. They found that cantigas of one genre shared peculiarities common to cantigas of other genres, but they did not explore further into this trait. This study analyzes characteristics found commonly in one genre of cantiga and, as well, by placing together those cantigas with related attributes, it establishes the overlapping that takes place between the cantigas of different genres.