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This thesis explores the presence of canonical texts in the Hellenistic period beyond individual reading habits. It utilises the interpersonal context of the symposium to understand the place and significance of literature as a social phenomenon. Methodologically, it combines art and text, synthesising literature which represents, and literature visualised and depicted at, Hellenistic symposia. My over-arching argument is not simply that the post-classical symposium persists, contrary to much scholarship which represents it as dead or as vain re-enactments. Rather, I claim that studying the Hellenistic symposium exposes the social mechanisms which ensured that a Greek literary past remained relevant even in the Hellenistic world. Chapter One discusses the historical shift from the Archaic and Classical symposium to the Hellenistic symposium, and defends the latter’s often-questioned existence. It also theorises a new approach for handling images and texts related to the Hellenistic symposium. the subsequent chapters offer case studies showing the utility of this approach. Chapter Two considers the reception of the Phaeacians in relation to the symposium and Chapter Three looks at the theatrical tradition. Chapter Four focuses on Callimachus’ Iambi and the Letter of Aristeas, texts which in different ways have the symposium as a structuring principle and are concerned with the literary past. The aim is to highlight how the argument obtains even when the symposium is an imagined, textual one. The Conclusion advances the thesis in two ways. First, it extends my argument beyond the Hellenistic period with a short study of the visual and verbal reception of the comic poet Menander at Late Antique symposia. Second, its theorises the greater significance of studying the literary past and the Hellenistic symposia for a wider conception of how literary reception works.

Anne, Lady Bacon (c.1S2B-1610) is chiefly remembered as the translator of several important religious texts and as the mother of Francis and Anthony Bacon. This thesis seeks to re-evaluate her fulfilment of her role as a mother, translator and religious patron through an examination of her correspondence and an assessment of her published works. In doing so it demonstrates that Anne was adept at utilising epistolary conventions in order to achieve her politico-religious aims, and was far more capable at negotiating complex webs of power than has hitherto been acknowledged. Over one hundred of her letters survive, most of which are written to Anthony between the 1592 and 1596, and only a few of which have been published. I have transcribed all these extant letters, and through a close analysis of their content and material construction I offer an outline of her epistolary habits, and demonstrate how her letter-writing practice was influenced by the practical elements of sixteenth-century epistolary culture. I describe the factors that influenced Anne's relationship with her sons, and analyse how both parties performed or neglected their duties. The second half of my thesis focuses on Anne's religious patronage. I describe the iconographic significance of the female translator, and examine Anne's contribution to the nascent Protestant literary culture. Faced with a political climate that was becoming increasingly hostile to expressions of nonconformity, I look at how Anne harnessed other means by which to support the puritan cause, and assess the extent to which she directed the religious tenor of her local parishes.

The purpose of this paper was to define and discuss the early Mormon women's newspaper, Woman's Exponent, and its editors in developing a literary culture among Mormon women. Woman's Exponent served as the primary source of research to show through its literature that the women of Utah were encouraged to express themselves freely, and present their way of life to a world that held a grossly distorted view of them. The Exponent provided the forum for skilled writers to polish their craft, and new writers to develop their talents. The literary influence of the Exponent encouraged the women writers to publish individual volumes of poetry, biography, and histories. The writers acknowledged the Woman's Exponent as their platform for expression, their window-on-the-world. It faithfully recorded their history and served as the cradle for literary culture among the mormon women.

This thesis studies the interaction between language, people and culture in England in the century either side of 1300 by analysing the use of French in three Middle English texts: Laȝamon's Brut, Kyng Alisaunder, and Handlyng Synne. I explore the ways in which these texts exploit the sociocultural implications of French elements to negotiate the expression of collective identity, and consider what that suggests about the texts' audiences. This exploration also provides insights into the sociolinguistic relation between English and French. Specifically, I add to recent work on multilingualism within texts by providing a more systematic approach than has been adopted hitherto. Since this period saw the largest influx of French-derived vocabulary in English, evaluating the use of French elements requires consideration of the extent to which that vocabulary had become integrated in English. This aspect has not so far been included in studies of multilingualism in texts, and in approaching it this thesis brings together previous work on loanwords to offer a systematic methodology. Chapters 2 to 4 treat the lexis of the individual texts. Study of the broader context of the French elements in chapter 5 shows that they are distributed evenly across the texts and the majority are introduced independently of the source texts. Those that were carried over from the source texts were not adopted into Middle English more generally. Appeal to a specific register better explains the appearance of clusters. Chapter 6 concludes that the implications of the French elements in these texts centre on the negotiation of social and cultural identity. No clear support was found for the use or avoidance of French elements to express ethnic or religious identity in these texts. The style of both versions of Laȝamon's Brut was confirmed to be the result of redactors' choices and not the state of the language as a whole, since most French-derived words in either version were apparently well integrated by 1300. On a larger scale, the amount of well-integrated lexis of French origin in Handlyng Synne demonstrates the extent to which French-derived vocabulary had become accessible as early as 1300. Lastly, the atypical, specialised French elements in Kyng Alisaunder are best explained by supposing its initial audience included those with extensive knowledge of French. This supports the hypothesis of continuity of audience between French and Middle English literary culture.

My PhD is a study of the politically charged literary and visual works that have emerged in response to escalating violence in contemporary Mexico. Providing close, comparative readings of fictional, theoretical and documentary works by critically-acclaimed authors Jorge Volpi, Cristina Rivera Garza, Mario Bellatin and Juan Pablo Villalobos, and award-winning filmmakers Carlos Reygadas, Amat Escalante and Natalia Almada, my chapters examine explicit and oblique cultural engagements with topics such as the political assassinations of the 1990s, the dispossession brought on by the neoliberal restructuring of the economy, and the violence prompted by the so-called ‘War on Drugs’. The cultural texts I examine share a concern with visualising and deconstructing the close relationship between death and power that marks the contemporary political terrain. I contend that narrative has become a critical site of cultural contestation, and discuss the ways in which experiments with the assemblage and frustration of narrative intertwine with issues related to visuality, embodiment and the nonhuman. Through my discussion of these themes, I trace out the ways in which cultural texts frequently employ narrative strategies that are rooted in dispersal, displacement and loss when engaging with destructive power. These strategies, I argue, pose urgent questions about the interrelation of violence and aesthetics, speak to critical shifts in the relationship between culture and the nation-state, and are marshalled to launch tentative appeals to forms of politics and ethics that work through spaces of shared dispossession. My thesis offers an innovative framework through which to theorise these cultural processes by reframing the notion of ‘excess’, a foundational concept in scholarship on death and power that has seen a resurgence in contemporary political philosophy. In dialogue with authors such as Georges Bataille, Achille Mbembe, Adriana Cavarero, Roberto Esposito, Michel Foucault and Jacques Rancière, and with close reference to the ‘necropolitical’ theory and cultural texts authored in Mexico, I posit excess as an analytical term that can encompass both reflexive critiques of spectacular violence and latent forms of resistance to this violence that proceed through loss and displacement.

The broad aim of this thesis is to demonstrate that the Victorian letter is more than the sum of its parts. By focusing on the archival collection of a gentry family from Derbyshire, it asserts that the material remains of a nineteenth-century letter are as important as the words and, as such, have a valuable contribution to make to the understanding of letters and letter writing culture of the period. Furthermore, throughout it is demonstrated that the nineteenth-century familial letter was important as an emotional and material object to both the reader and the sender but, as yet, is an undervalued tool in historical research. It argues against the dominant historical trend to read only the text of letters, and in so doing offers a model that can be adopted and adapted to investigate the nineteenth-century letter. The thesis applies James Daybell’s argument that, in order to understand an early modern manuscript, the historian must be directed both to the physical characteristics as well as to the social contexts of its composition, delivery, reception and latterly its archiving. By taking a case study approach, this thesis examines the unpublished nineteenth-century letters of the Turbutt family collection. Each chapter focusses on a particular aspect of letter writing which affords a greater understanding of the nineteenth-century letter as literary culture as well as material culture. Taking this approach uncovers a wide range of uses for the familiar letter and demonstrates that the letter was vital to the nineteenth-century Turbutt women of the Ogston estate. It is demonstrated that the Turbutt women used letters to perform their role as gentry women, to navigate courtship and the emotional and relational divide, and also determine how the letter writer used the material properties to their advantage and, if so, did the material and literary qualities of letters converge to further this. In so doing this thesis bridges the gap between text and materiality, two areas that have tended to be treated separately and, as such, it contributes to the scholarship of letter writing in the nineteenth century as both literary culture and material culture and also to the letter writing culture of nineteenth-century gentry women.

This thesis deals with the phenomenon of the book as crucial means of communication of the author (of the artistic and non-artistic) text with the reader. The material object book is examined in detail as a product, goods and object of the aesthetic interest. The work focuses primarily on the following questions: What is happening with the text from the moment of the manuscript submission to the publisher until the moment when is held in reader's hands for the first time? What subjects, institutions or interests are entering (or may enter) the game during the production, distribution and sale of the book and what is their particular role? What is the form and function of graphical and peritextual components of the book? All questions are answered in regard to the current state of Czech literary culture.

Cette recherche porte sur l’enseignement de la littérature dans un cursus universitaire de français langue étrangère. Elle questionne la notion de culture littéraire à travers les « canons littéraires », les littératures « mineures » selon la terminologie de G. Deleuze, et leur contextualisation d’une part, et, d’autre part, à travers la mise en place de pratiques enseignantes visant sa transmission / construction. Cette recherche étant ancrée dans les sciences humaines par ses champs d’étude – la littérature et la didactique – et étant, par conséquent, relativement subjective, nous avons choisi d’étudier un cas particulier, celui dans lequel nos questions sont apparues, afin de mettre en évidence ses spécificités mais aussi des traits généralisables ou, du moins, ouvrant des pistes de réflexions transposables dans d’autres contextes. Pour effectuer cette étude, nous avons privilégié une approche inductive et compréhensive et nous avons opté pour une méthode mixte ou une triangulation permettant le croisement de différentes données dans le but d’avoir une vision globale de la situation en termes de pratiques, de potentiels et de limites. Les résultats obtenus dans ce contexte ouvrent un champ de possibles pour penser une didactique du FLE adaptée à un enseignement littéraire en milieu universitaire. / This research focuses on teaching literature at a university-level French language department. It questions the concept of literary culture through the concepts of “literary canon”, “minor” literature, following G. Deleuze’s terminology, and their contextualization on the one hand, and on the other, through the implementation of teaching practices aiming at transmitting / building it. This research, rooted in human sciences because of its fields of study – literature and didactics – and as a consequence, being relatively subjective, is focused on a specific case, the one where our questions first emerged from: the French department at Birzeit University in Palestine. This approach allows us to enhance the specificities of this context while drawing at the same time some features that could be generalized, or at least that could open some opportunities for transferable reflections on other contexts. In conducting this study an inductive and comprehensive approach has been favored. A mixed-method approach or triangulation was used, allowing us to cross-compare data in order to get a more global view of the situation in terms of practice, potential and limits. The results obtained in this context then open new horizons to think adapted French as a foreign language didactics to literary teaching/learning in an academic context.

Submitted by (lucia.rodrigues@ufrpe.br) on 2016-06-15T14:06:50Z No. of bitstreams: 1 Juarlyson Jhones Santos de Souza.pdf: 1902687 bytes, checksum: 72a8e86565eccc214fb8c2dda65d0663 (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2016-06-15T14:06:50Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Juarlyson Jhones Santos de Souza.pdf: 1902687 bytes, checksum: 72a8e86565eccc214fb8c2dda65d0663 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2015-03-30 / Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior - CAPES / This paper aspires to historisize the forms of the transmition of literary culture in Portuguese America during the second half of the XVI century, through the trajectory of the scholar Bento Teixeira. The difusion of the written and literary culture occurred at the time through the Jesuits School, first institution that was responsable to educate and form the scholars in the colonial society. Those schools pass by a organization during the five hundred years, period when the jesuits was just iniciating their education activties in Portuguese Amercia. However, part of that literary culture was transmited in the time society for other ways outside that institution. The transmition was made basically through individuals like Bento Teixeira, a scholar that once was a student in the Jesuit School and acquired his graduation in this intitution. With the knowledge he acquired, Bento promoted several literary practices in a circle of judaizers, and also in the time society. In the judaizer’s circle he made biblical translations from the latin, and oral readings of the bible, with the other groups, he taught them the written tecnology and latin grammar. With this we aim to built our analisys through the life trajectory of this Bento Teixeira, based, mostly in the documentation ensemble that arises from the Holy Office of the Inquisition- denunciations, confessions and criminal cases- also in jesuit documents and reports from XVI and XVII chroniclers. Through the trajectory of Bento Teixeira we intend to analyses the cultural practices that could define, in the specific context of XVI century, some subjects as scholars or man of letters. / Este trabalho tem como objetivo historicizar as formas de transmissão da cultura letrada na América portuguesa durante a segunda metade do século XVI, através da trajetória do letrado Bento Teixeira. A difusão da cultura escrita e letrada ocorria por meio dos Colégios Jesuítas, principais instituições responsáveis pela formação de letrados na sociedade colonial. Tais Colégios se encontravam em processo de estruturação durante os Quinhentos, seu momento inicial. Contudo, aspectos desta cultura letrada foram difundidos na sociedade da época através de um âmbito alternativo ao destas instituições formativas. A mediação exercida por sujeitos como Bento Teixeira, um letrado que obteve formação nos Colégios Jesuítas da Colônia, promoveu uma irradiação de práticas letradas em círculos de judaizantes, por meio de traduções bíblicas do latim e de leitura oralizada, e na sociedade de uma forma geral, a partir do seu ensino leigo da tecnologia escrita e da gramática latina. Utilizamos como recurso a trajetória de vida para construirmos este trabalho, com base principalmente na documentação inquisitorial – entre denúncias, confissões e processos –, na documentação jesuítica e no relato de cronistas dos séculos XVI e XVII. Através da trajetória de Bento Teixeira, pretendemos analisar as práticas culturais que poderiam definir os sujeitos como homens de letras no contexto específico do século XVI.