In an attempt to widen interpretations, this study first explores the myths associated with Friedrich von Hardenberg, commonly known as Novalis, which have resulted in the neglect of material interpretations of his works. After an introduction to Hardenberg's theory of the Self and Karl Marx's theory of alienation, an analysis of Hardenberg's most widely read work, Heinrich von Afterdingen, demonstrates how Hardenberg was as concerned with the material and the social relations among human beings and their labor as he was with their spiritual endeavors. The self-development of Heinrich, the main character in Afterdingen, is chronicled in this study with special attention given to his material existence as well as the material existence of the people he encounters. This study demonstrates that Afterdingen can be read as a handbook for the development of the Self according to the theories of Hardenberg and Marx, in which the Self cannot favor the spiritual realm, or inner existence, at the expense of its material and social relations. Rather, these two spheres are both important for full self-development.

The literary works of Heinrich von Kleist (17771811) have long been an important influence on thinkers and writers interested and engaged in the German cultural tradition, particularly due to the enigmatic and highly problematic nature of his narrative approach. In recent years, however, there has been a notable surge of interest in Kleists works, which has led to the production of several articles, papers, and even entire conference panels dedicated to the investigation of his oeuvre from various angles. Why does Kleist still fascinate his readers so much, and what is it about his texts that allow for such a large and varied body of interpretation? In this thesis, I will argue that it is crucial to examine closely the interface of text and reader when analyzing Kleists novellas, specifically "Die Marquise von O" and "Das Erdbeben in Chili." I will then attempt to establish a link between Kleists unique reaction to the philosophical debates concerning epistemology and aesthetics that were taking place during his short lifetime and the experience of the reader when confronting Kleists texts. I will examine these questions first with the aid of narratology and reader-response theory, particularly by examining the issues of closure and focalization in the two narratives. Furthermore, I will illustrate how a narratological/reader-response approach to Kleists work can also inform a feminist critical approach and, likewise, how a feminist analysis can complement the former. In the final chapter, I will conduct a feminist analysis, focusing on both form and content in the two novellas to show how Kleists work both structurally and thematically challenges male Enlightenment values such as order and logic. These analyses ultimately illustrate how Kleist displaced the philosophical questions with which he was grappling into the realm of the text-reader interface, thus emulating and illuminating with this relationship the selfs quest for knowledge and meaning in the world.

This study investigated the relationship between students self-reported perceptions of their learning experiences and outcomes on measures of oral fluency, grammar, vocabulary, pronunciation, communicative ability and cognitive ability. Specifically, the study analyzed the correlation between activities in the classroom, in the social realm, and in the home environments with outcomes from measures Spanish acquisition. In addition, diary analysis was conducted to investigate which environment seemed most relevant to the learners during the semester. The participants in this study were 37 college students learning Spanish in two contexts: at home (AH) in a university in Colorado, and study abroad (SA) in Alicante, Spain. The results of four companion studies that investigated linguistic gain were correlated with the student perception scores produced through diary analysis. These analyses were conducted in order to understand relationships between students reports of their activities during the semester and changes in their overall Spanish acquisition. The results indicated that differences existed between the AH and SA groups in terms of which environment seemed to be most relevant. While the AH group discussed classroom activities to the greatest extent, the SA group talked most about their experiences with Spanish in the social environment. In addition, while several measures of fluency, grammatical ability, and vocabulary acquisition were related to the home and social environments for the SA group, the AH group data showed relationships between the classroom environment and those measures. Very few relationships were noted between communicative ability, vocabulary and cognitive measures and the perception scores. However, two especially noteworthy relationships were found. For the AH group, the positive classroom environment was related to better attention control, and the negative classroom environment was related to reduced ability to control attention in the target language. It was concluded that differences between the two contexts were evident. While the AH learners were minimally exposed to native speakers outside the classroom, the SA group enjoyed a great deal of exposure. This contact, however, was generally only related to gains in their ability to communicate orally, and may have actually negatively affected learners ability to produce grammatical forms.

The dissertation examines a body of narratives related to the literary and film representations of Eva Perón, the most crucial female figure of the populist Argentine imaginary. The defining feature of the corpus goes from the publication of La razón de mi vida, in 1951, to 2003, when Daniel Herrendorf published Evita, la loca de la casa. The dissertation focuses on populism as a particular inflection in the modernization process in Argentina, as it is studied by Ernesto Laclau, among others. In this sense, it examines the reverberative effects that the presence of Eva Perón caused in the paternalistic and homophobic Argentine society during the 1950s and after that, in a process that allowed her to become an ideological, political and aesthetic icon in the nationalistic culture. The different images of Eva Perón in literature and film are read as a cultural metaphor that crosses the last fifty years in Argentina. The issues that were expressed through her life became permanent points of reference and were later used in the articulation of other ideological and cultural concerns, lending themselves easily to other formulations. In this way, the figure of Eva Perón has developed into a cultural reference point that has the ability to engender different meanings in different contexts. The hypothesis of the dissertation is that these representations can be read as allegories of the different social, political and cultural moments in the modernization process in Argentina. In this sense, these narratives can be articulated in the symbolic sphere with an imaginary where modernity, gender and populism interweave at different levels. To analyze the representation of Eva Perón from its beginning and to follow it in its trajectory, allows us to uncover the reasons behind the creation of her rich symbolic value. The objective of the dissertation is to address the following questions: How was Eva Perón depicted in Argentine literature and film during the period 19512003? What factors are at the origins of those modes of representation? What place can we assign to these representations in relation to the modernization process in Argentina?

Our study starts with an analysis of two nineteenth century foundational novels from Puerto Rico (La Peregrinación de Bayoán, 1863) and Cuba (Amistad Funesta, 1885), and continues with an analysis of the literary work produced by twentieth Century Cuban and Puerto Rican female authors (Luisa Capetillo, Mariblanca Sabas Alomá, Nancy Morejón, Ana Lydia Vega, Achy Obejas, Frances Negrón-Muntaner, and Mayra Santos-Febres). Through a comparative approach focused on the diverse representations of gender, sexuality, Caribbeanness, and nation, we have studied the similarities and differences among these female writers literary projects, as well as the continuities/discontinuities of their own projects in regards to the geo-cultural and biopolitical imaginaries developed by their literary predecessors, Eugenio María de Hostos and José Martí, respectively. This comparative and critical analysis addresses three specific questions and concerns: to study how the geo-cultural and political imaginaries represented in these two novels have been designed under the image of a single and unified fraternal and virile political body which excludes women from the social, and/or those bodies or sexualities which threaten to fragment the ideal construction of a unified and homogeneous civil society, and which obstruct the literary representation of the ideal virile subject, leader of the national emancipatory cause. to examine how the above-mentioned female writers have challenged such politico-patriarchal configurations, which have in turn, established the hegemonic cultural landscape for each country and for the Caribbean region in relation to the discourses of sexual preference and economy (the heterosexual family), race (racial mixing/mestizaje or whitening/blanqueamiento), and geography (insularism, Caribbeanness/ Antillanismo, or Americanness/ Nuestroamericanismo). to analyze how the challenge to these modernizing norms (heterosexist, phallocentric and pro-transculturation) opens the way towards new alliances amongst the peoples of the Caribbean islands and their Diasporas, based on a spirit of solidarity and an affective search for the Other. These critical projects allow us to imagine the Caribbean as a culturally flexible region, and as a more equal, just, and open society, founded upon a new minoritarian ethics capable of resisting and deconstructing the effects of coloniality of power, already present in anticolonial XIXth century literature.

The dissertation explores cultural representations of the new Latin American city that has emerged since the waning of national-popular development and the advent of neoliberal globalization. The discussion focuses on Buenos Aires, São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, and Mexico City in the 1980s and 1990s. The main argument is that, with the withering of the modern city and its narratives, new (post-civil and post-national) subjectivities have emerged, and that cultural cartographies of the city can help us to better grasp these new configurations. The first chapter, A Totality Made of Fragments, examines the construction of the image of the city in Modernist culture as an allegory for the totalizing and integrating impulse of the nation in the work of Fuentes, Sábato, and Vargas Llosa. The second chapter, Walking in the City, explores the relationship between walking in the city and writing about the city in Rubem Fonsecas and Clarice Lispectors texts on Rio de Janeiro, focusing on these texts critique of literature and literacy. The third chapter, Public Spaces and Urban Geographies of Civility, enages uses and figurations of public spaces as sites for the expression of civil society. By reference to Poniatowskas chronicle-testimonio about the student massacre at Tlatelolco in 1968 and Eltits novel about Santiago de Chile under dictatorship in the 1980s, this chapter offers a critique of the normative ideologies of civil society and public space. The fourth chapter, Homosexual Desire and Urban Territories, examines a novel by Zapata (1979) and an ethnographic study by Perlongher (1987) in order to map out how cartographies of queer desire in Mexico City and São Paulo disrupt public spaces drive towards closure and universality. The fifth and final chapter, Deterritorialization and the Limits of the City, concentrates on neoliberal globalization in the 1990s in Buenos Aires. It combines analyses of cultural theory, fiction, and film in order to show the emergence emergence of new, post-national subjectivities that are reshaping the city in ways that depart radically from Modernisms drive towards integration, citizenship, and national culture.

EL NEGOCIO DE LA MEMORIA: ESCRITURA Y SUJETO AUTOBIOGRAFICO EN LA LITERATURA DE LENGUA ESPAÑOLA (1970-2005) Elver Sergio Ramírez Franco, PhD University of Pittsburgh, 2005 This dissertation examines one of the most dynamic fields of recent literary production in Spanish language: autobiographical discourse. It focuses on the notions of subjectivity, identity, temporality, truth, gender, race, ideology, image, memory, body, eroticism and ideology as represented in the symbolic space of the autobiographical discourse of ten key authors (Reinaldo Arenas, Jorge Luis Borges, José Donoso, Salvador Elizondo, Gabriel García Márquez, Margo Glantz, Juan Goytisolo, Pablo Neruda, Severo Sarduy, Mario Vargas Llosa) of twentieth century literary tradition in Spanish/Latin American Literature. The theoretical perspective of this work is postructuralist. The dissertation consists of 4 chapters. The first one provides the frame for the analysis and defines concepts such as subjectivity, identity, temporality, representation, memory, vraisemblance and truth. It incorporates concepts proposed by Walter Benjamin, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Paul de Man, James Olney, Paul Ricoeur, and Gayatri Spivak in order to map these categories. The second chapter studies the relationship between autobiography and image, and autobiography and representational techniques. This chapter pays attention to the narratological strategies with which the authors, who are at the same time the narrators and the main characters of their texts, re-create their image through their writing. The third chapter explores the connections between body, erotic exclusions, power relations and homoerotic writing (Homographesis) as the social constitution of identity through and against- those inscriptions as the components of social identity. This chapter focuses on three writers: Reinaldo Arenas, Juan Goytisolo, and Severo Sarduy The last chapter attempts to show the underlying phallocentric ideology which operates in the process of subjectification of straight writers, and the complex negotiations of identity during a period marked by the emergence of a global society, tele-technology and simulacrum. The results are summarized in the final conclusions.

The main objective of this study is to determine the impact of immigration interpreters on the testimony of Spanish-English bilingually conducted hearings in one U.S. immigration court. Specifically, I analyze the performance of nine immigration interpreters. I identify the precise linguistic strategies they employ when interpreting and, using conversational and other discourse analytical approaches, determine how they become active members of the proceedings. The immigration hearings I observed took place in one Federal immigration courtroom located in a large northeastern city. This research shows the extent to which interpreters play a pivotal role in controlling courtroom discourseconstructing courtroom reality and either mitigating or magnifying the culpability of defendants through a variety of linguistic mechanisms: a) inaccurate lexical choice, b) the use of source language rather than target language words and phrases, c) the use of definitions and calques, d) the improper addition or deletion of repair mechanisms and of hesitation forms such as pauses and fillers, and e) the addition of polite forms of address to convey solidarity, to adhere to Hispanic cultural norms, and to avoid face threatening acts. This study shows that the linguistic power interpreters wield exerts a coercive force, particularly on witnesses and defendants, and that such linguistic coerciveness on the part of interpreters influences other participants in the judicial proceeding. In this study, both judges and attorneys are shown to have been influenced by the lexical choices of interpreters. Finally, I show that the intrusiveness of interpreters changes the pragmatic force intended by the speakers, which constitutes a violation of the ethical standards set for interpreters in the United States by such authorities as the Federal Judicial Center.

This dissertation examines some canonical Central American autobiographical works of the 20th Century. The authors studied include Rubén Darío, Rafael Arévalo Martínez, Froylán Turcios, José Coronel Urtecho, César Brañas, Eunice Odio, Roque Dalton, Miguel Mármol and Rigoberta Menchú. The dissertation maintains that autobiographical writing always interpellates the Others story and that this interpellation is based in the need to incorporate into modern discourse the social sectors considered pre-modern. Indigenous people, peasants, women, artisans and workers, oral or illiterate cultures, represent a zone of autobiographical fear and desire. These combined impulses are connected to some cultural peculiarities of the Central American region: mainly, the way in which the rhetoric and practice of Liberalism is adapted by the regional elites from the end of 19th Century onward. After a general overview offered in Chapter 1, this dissertation is divided in three parts that correspond to three different cultural epochsModernismo (Chapters 2, 3, 4), Vanguardia (Chapters 5 and 6), and Postvanguardia y testimonio (Chapters 7 y 8). In Modernista autobiography the class-racial-ethnic Other appears as something that haunts the traditional, representing both an object of fear and a limit to a Eurocentric concept of modernity. In contrast, the Vanguardista autobiography emphasized its desire of the Other. This general desires for incorporate the (national) Other is linked to the foundational /nationalist emphasis that the avant-garde showed in Central America. However, Liberalism never incorporated fully the utopian social models of the Vanguardistas. Due to the crisis of both the Liberal rhetoric and Vanguardista cultural projects, during the 1960s and 1980s the aesthetic-ideological project of the Vanguardia suffered a radicalization. One of the main outcomes was the popularization of testimonio, which has become the most analyzed form of Central American autobiographical writing today. In testimonio the Other and his/her cultural model (basically, orality) and the Gemeinschaft of rural community become embodied as a counter-hegemonic voice that seeks to interpellate the cultural models of the lettered city and modernity from a subaltern location.

Mi mamá es cuatro pies: A study of the use of calques in Hondurans and Salvadorans in Southern Louisiana Keywords: calques, language proficiency, bilingual, lexical borrowing, arrival age In this study, I explored calques among Hondurans and Salvadorans in Southern Louisiana. The study has a total of twenty-four Spanish-English bilinguals separated into three groups based upon their age of arrival to the United States. Similar to but modified from that of Silva-Corvalán (1996), group I, is comprised of participants who arrived to the United States after the age nineteen. The participants in group II immigrated to the United States between the ages of eleven and eighteen, while the participants in group III were born in the United States or immigrated to the United States before the age of ten. The following research questions motivated this study: 1. Is there a difference in the frequency of calque use among the three arrival groups? 2. Is there a difference in calquing frequency between sequential and simultaneous bilinguals? 3. Does dominant language significantly influence calque frequency? (i.e., English dominant, Spanish dominant or dominant in both) 4. How do the social factors contribute to the frequency of calque use? 5. How do the linguistic variables of the collocation of calque, the word prior to calque and the word after the calque contribute to the use of calques? In this study each participant completed two tasks; t an open-ended sociolinguistic interview and a question-answer activity. An analysis using Goldvarb X was performed and the social factors that condition the use of calques are age, formal instruction in English, socioeconomic status, and dominant language and the linguistic factors of word class of the word prior to the calque, collocation, and word class of the calque affect calque frequency. It was also discovered that the participants who moved to the U.S between the ages of eleven and eighteen produced the most calques, while those who moved to the U.S after the age of nineteen produced the least.