This thesis investigates the literary fantastic in Italy from the late nineteenth century to the second half of the twentieth century. The purpose is to analyse the way in which the fantastic functions in a story—its ʻmechanicsʼ—and to see how the fantastic evolved structurally over the first century of its existence in Italy. This investigation is carried out by the development of a new theoretical methodology together with the close reading of a selection of texts from four key Italian authors of fantastic literature. The thesis is divided into six chapters. The first chapter is a historical overview of the emergence of the fantastic in Italy in the late nineteenth century up to the second half of the twentieth century; it examines the obstacles the fantastic has faced and some of the thematic and structural characteristics of texts which emerge. The second chapter is a literature review of the theoretical models used to analyse and understand the fantastic, followed by an outline of a new model, entitled Different Mimetics, which looks at the internal logic of the fantastic. In the following four chapters Different Mimetics is applied to the study of a selection of fantastic texts by four authors. Chapter three focuses on Ugo Tarchetti, and shows that his stories are defined by coexistence and coincidence in both historical and thematic terms. Chapter four demonstrates how Giovanni Papini reverses the mechanics one might expect, and how his stories are structured as internal narratives. Chapter five looks at how Dino Buzzatiʼs stories are characterised by instability and stretched narrative paradigms; and finally, chapter six looks at how Italo Calvinoʼs narratives focus on world creation and paradox and how they question the stability of narrative paradigms.

Que signifie repenser l’Histoire littéraire et l’Histoire du roman comme Histoire culturelle ? Le point de départ de notre questionnement sur les formes de représentation adoptées par l’Histoire littéraire porte sur la doxa critique selon laquelle il existe une relation génétique entre l’épopée et le roman, dont la source se trouve dans ce qu’il est convenu de voir comme le texte fondateur de la littérature, l’épopée d’Homère et celui de la théorie littéraire, la Poétique d’Aristote. Si l’épopée homérique est une œuvre de la tradition orale, quelle est sa relation avec le roman, issu, lui, de la scripturalité et de l’émergence de la prose ? Si les récits en prose narrative de fiction apparaissent dans des civilisations sans épopée, quelle est la condition nécessaire pour leur émergence ? Si, de plus, l’apparition d’une prose narrative de fiction est précédée de plusieurs siècles de celle d’une historiographie et que ce phénomène se répète aussi bien dans la Grèce classique qu’au Moyen Âge européen, ou encore en Chine, quelle est la condition nécessaire pour l’essor du roman ? Nous présentons ici l’ébauche d’une Histoire alternative des origines du roman dans la Weltliteratur, en relation avec l’émergence de la scripturalité et la prose et l’essor de l’historiographie À la croisée de plusieurs disciplines académiques, notamment entre les sciences humaines et sociales, notre recherche fait appel d’une part à la théorie et à l’Histoire de la littérature, d’autre part à l’Histoire de l’historiographie, ainsi qu’à la théorie et la philosophie de l’Histoire. / Is it possible to rethink Literary History and in particular the History of the Novel as Cultural History which seeks to differentiate between an historical object and it’s representation? Considering the critical doxa, according to which, there exists a genetic link between epics and the novel, leads to one of Western thinking’s most stubborn myths. If epics, and particularly Homer’s, is seen as the novel’s ascendant , although it belongs to oral tradition, how does it explain the fact that as Ancient civilizations as Egypt or China or Israel developed sophisticated prose narratives without having epics? Moreover, if Western literary history refers to Aristotle’s Poetics as it’s foundational text, although by the time it was written, fictional prose didn’t exist yet, and was only to develop a few centuries later, shouldn’t we seek for the missing link between the oral tradition and the rise of the novel? As against this hegemonic and unhistorical representation that considers the novel genre as a Western invention, and as opposed to the historical circumstances that gave birth to the novel, we consider that the key to understanding this phenomenon lies in the emergence of literacy and prose. Indeed, in all civilizations that developed fictional prose writing, it was systematically preceded, not by epics, but by historiography. Our PHD dissertation presents an alternative History of the novel, whose angle is intercultural and interdisciplinary, aiming at recreating a new chronology of the emergence of the novel as a an inevitable historical genre in world’s literature.

Cervantes' Don Quixote (1605, 1615) is one of the most significant works of European literature. In the 20th century, the two-part novel became one of the fundamental texts for literary and cultural theorists, on which they based their theoretical studies on writing, literature, and culture in general. But do external theoretical views agree with a specific literary history? The diploma thesis presents three selected interpretations of Don Quixote (by V. Shklovsky, M. Bakhtin, and M. Foucault), which are compared with the findings from Spanish studies and with the novel in the original. At the same time, the reading of theoretical works should not be primarily revisionist; the thesis has a comparative character, and the aim is to express the relation between external and internal views of Cervantes' novel.

This diploma thesis deals with the possibilities of using graphic novel in German language teaching (teaching German as a foreign language). The main premise of this thesis is that graphic novel, as a multimodal medium and a phenomenon of current literature, has a wide potential for the German (and other foreign languages) classroom. The goal of the thesis is to design a didactic material respecting the specific qualities of graphic novel and drawing upon its potential. The first chapter serves as an introduction, exploring graphic novel as a medium, as a phenomenon of current literature and as a pedagogical tool. The term is defined and put into context. In the second chapter, the method of a review study is employed to explore how graphic novel is used in the foreign language classroom. The systematic review has shown that it is possible to use graphic novel as a tool for achieving the objectives of foreign language teaching and learning - the language aims (through vocabulary acquistition, reading skills development and creative writing) as well as the cognitive and formative aims (through the development of literacies, cultural and historical awareness, intercultural competence and citizienship). Moreover, graphic novel proved to be positive influence on motivation. The third chapter uses the...