Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of California, Irvine, 2007. / (UMI)AAI3271310. Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 68-07, Section: A, page: 2965. Adviser: Ellen Burt.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Indiana University, Depts. of Comparative Literature and Germanic Studies, 2009. / Title from PDF t.p. (viewed on Jul 14, 2010). Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 70-12, Section: A, page: 4669. Adviser: William W. Rasch.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Indiana University, Dept. of Spanish and Portuguese, 2009. / Title from PDF t.p. (viewed on Jul 15, 2010). Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 70-12, Section: A, page: 4699. Adviser: Maryellen Bieder.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Indiana University, Dept. of English and the Dept. of Comparative Literature, 2005. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 67-01, Section: A, page: 0177. Advisers: Andrew H. Miller; Oscar Kenshur. "Title from dissertation home page (viewed Dec. 11, 2006)."

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Indiana University, Department of Spanish and Portuguese, 2009. / Title from PDF t.p. (viewed on Jul 7, 2010). Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 70-10, Section: A, page: 3848. Advisers: Consuelo Lopez-Morillas; Juan Carlos Conde.

In a field such as literature, the sense of belonging to a time, a history, a culture, a society or a social class, among other things, inevitably influences the creation of a text---even if it's only done unconsciously. Thus, writing isn't done in a vacuum. By extension, in translation, the context in which the translator exists also tints the text with the reality that the transfer from a source language to a target language is done. Starting with the assumption that the different political, social and cultural contexts surrounding the translation of Albert Camus' L'Etranger influenced the translation and retranslation of the book in Spanish, I will demonstrate and interpret the differences between three Spanish versions of the novel. The first translation was completed in Argentina, in 1949, while Spain was under Franco's dictatorship. Deemed immoral by Franco's regime, its publication was censored in Spain for several years before finally being authorized in 1958---a year after Albert Camus received the Nobel Prize of Literature. A retranslation of the book was completed in 1999 as Spain was marking almost a quarter of a century of democratic rule. More precisely, I will first compare extracts from the first Spanish translation of L'Etranger---done in Argentina by Bonifacio del Carril---with the revised version of that same translation, which was authorized and published in Spain in 1958. My objective for this comparison will be to illustrate the nature of translation by attempting to verify the hypothesis according to which the revised translation of 1958 reflects corrections aimed at actualizing the translation of 1949 in order to more accurately comply with the vocabulary and syntax used in Spain. I will then see how these chosen extracts differ between the first Spanish translation (original version of 1949 and revised version of 1958) and the retranslation done by Jose Angel Valente in 1999, considering that one translation was done during the dictatorship and subject to censorship, while the other was done under a democratic Spain.

<p> My dissertation shows how two women writers, Marie NDiaye and Bessora articulate the <i>experience</i> of being black in France, while, at the same time affirming the French Republican tenet that racial identification does violence to individuals, communities, and the nation itself. Despite their similar backgrounds, despite the fact that they reside in the same country, and that they write about a similar cast of characters in a similar milieu, Bessora and NDiaye are not typically seen as belonging to a shared literary category or tradition. NDiaye is categorized as a "French" author and Bessora as "Francophone." Although their novels might not be found in the same section of a French bookstore, when considered together, their works create a dialogue on race in today's France that cannot be overlooked.</p><p> In chapter one I focus on NDiaye's 1999 novella <i>La Naufrag&eacute;e </i>. This work combines art and fiction, featuring paintings by English artist Joseph Mallord William Turner, most notably The Slave Ship (1840). In this chapter, I show how the narrator, a meilnaid, functions as an allegory for racial mixing. Drawing on Walter Benjamin's ideas on allegory, I demonstrate how the novella links the author's own non-white body to the historical bodies of human chattel drowned in the Middle Passage. This novella challenges the notion that France can ever be blind to race, given its history of chattel slavery.</p><p> Paradoxically, it is through allegory that NDiaye demonstrates the real violence and pain inflicted on the black body by the ideology of race-blindness. I build on these ideas in chapter two, examining the effects that the particular allegorical significance of the black body has on black subjects. Here I uncover a powerful intertextual thread running through NDiaye's 2012 novel <i> Ladivine</i>. Though NDiaye's understanding of race is undeniably French, she looks to the United States, to the Harlem Rennaissance and the passing novel to articulate the experience of being both black and entirely culturally French. I explore the dissociative effect produced when an individual, who sees herself as "universal," i.e. French like "everyone else," inhabits a nonwhite body. I extended my analysis beyond <i>Ladivine</i> to touch on <i>Rosie Carpe</i> (2001) and <i>Trois Femmes Puissantes </i> (2009). My analysis of these works reveals the ways in which French universalism is, paradoxically, geographically conscripted. The historical realities of slavery and of colonialism continue to impact the ways in which black bodies are seen in the metropole and in Overseas Departments, and profoundly influence the ways in which black subjects conceive of themselves.</p><p> In Chapter three I turned to Bessora, analyzing her first two novels, <i> 53 cm</i> (1999) and <i>Les taches d'encre</i> (2000). Bessora wrote both of these while pursuing a doctorate in anthropology. However, current scholarship tends to interpret her literary output as standing in direct conflict with her academic pursuits;that her novels, so rich in satire and pastiche, serve to reject or simply "write back" against the fields she was studying at the time. These analyses assume a necessarily conflictual relationship between black writers and the social sciences. I argue that in the tradition of many French anthropologists and authors before her, Bessora should be seen as both a literary author and a social scientist. By handing the tools of anthropological analysis to characters of color in these novels, Bessora does not invalidate a social scientific way of viewing the world; rather, she universalizes the anthropological gaze. She combines postmodern and anthropological narrative techniques to critique the way that race is constructed in France; she exposes the ways in which Republican values work to reinforce nationalism and white supremacy, and fall short of their universalist ambitions.</p><p> Chapter four builds on the ideas established in chapter three by comparing Bessora's dissertation, "M&eacute;mories P&eacute;troli&egrave;res au Gabon," (2002) with her novel <i>Petroleum</i> (2004), on the same subject. As an author of Gabonese descent who was raised and educated primarily in Europe, Bessora offers a complex insider/outsider perspective on her father's country (a country that was also her home for ten years), its history, and its memories of colonization. Reading these two texts side by side reveals both the interdependency between literature and the social sciences in both Bessora's fiction and in the French literary scene more generally. She writes from a vexed position of privilege, for which she has not yet fully accounted. Bessora's own stance towards universalism, her post-national identity which ironically gathers up identitarian labels and categories, obfuscates a more fraught relationship to the national history of Gabon, and to French neo-colonialism there.</p><p>

This dissertation studies the sociopolitical place of poetry in Transatlantic Hispanic culture within different crises of the public realm in the wake of the Spanish Civil War. It locates a tradition of authors who question autonomy as “integrity” or “wholeness” and who produce “broken”, “unfinished”, “absent” and “unimaginable” poems. The investigation of this trope helps discover how literature understands itself in relation to war, concentration camps, dictatorship, and post-dictatorship. Authors include: César Vallejo, María Zambrano, Max Aub, Gabriel Ferrater, and Roberto Bolaño. / Romance Languages and Literatures

Umorismo as Luigi Pirandello defines it is distinct from the general body of literary material meant to invoke laughter. It consciously turns rhetorical convention on its head: it creates unexpected oppositions through conscious and careful use of certain types of language in contexts where it is not expected. The aim of my study is to offer readers new ways to approach Giovanni Boccaccio’s lesser-known works as fundamentally humorous texts, among other things, and to observe how they are crafted and what sets them apart from other works to which one might compare them. I argue that Boccaccio created the Amorosa visione, the Teseida delle nozze di Emilia, the Elegia di Madonna Fiammetta, and the De mulieribus claris with a sense of umorismo, that is to say, by playing with the conventions that each book’s respective genre invokes and then subverting expectations set up by those conventions. I examine each of these four works in its own chapter, with special attention to authorial voice, fictionality, narrative strategies, and intertextual practices. I rely chiefly on close readings of the texts themselves, in the original language first and foremost, and I attempt to draw out the humor that I see in the way they have been composed, often a result of play between their content and their structure and style. Ultimately, the umorismo in these works is, as Pirandello would agree it should be, not immediately evident: it takes patience and close reading to uncover. Boccaccio is staunchly in favor of critical and persistent reading as a necessary value that all poetry and fiction should require. His treatise in the Genealogia deorum gentilium on how readers should interact with books explicitly promotes the sort of reading required to perceive and parse the umorismo within his texts. / Romance Languages and Literatures

Repenting Roguery: Penance in the Spanish Picaresque Novel and the Arabic and Hebrew Maqāma, investigates the significance of conversion narratives and penitential elements in the Spanish picaresque novels Vida de Guzmán de Alfarache (1599 and 1604) by Mateo Alemán and El guitón Onofre (circa 1606) by Gregorio González as well as Juan Ruiz’s Libro de buen amor (1330 and 1343) and El lazarillo de Tormes (1554), the Arabic maqāmāt of al-Ḥarīrī of Basra (circa 1100), and Ibn al-Ashtarkūwī al-Saraqusṭī (1126-1138), and the Hebrew maqāmāt of Yehudah al-Ḥarizi (circa 1220) and Isaac Ibn Sahula (1281-1284). In exploring the ways in which Christian, Muslim, and Jewish authors from medieval and early modern Iberia represent the repentance of a rogue, my study not only sheds light on the important commonalities that these religious and literary traditions share, but also illuminates the particular questions that these picaresque and proto-picaresque texts raise within their respective religious, political and cultural milieux. The ambiguity that characterizes the conversion narrative of a seemingly irredeemable rogue, I argue, provides these medieval and early modern writers with an ideal framework to address pressing problems such as controversies regarding free will and predestination, the legitimacy of claims to religious and political authority, and the understanding of social and religious marginality. / Comparative Literature