A relatively modern genre, the literature of the absurd includes those works of drama, poetry and prose which have in common the theme that the human condition is illogical and without purpose. Having such a world-view, the characters of absurd literature attempt to create programs for investing existence with a modicum of meaning, whether it be simple hedonism, comic detachment or some form of social commitment. The works of Kafka, Camus, Sartre and Hemingway exemplify this struggle. / For various reasons, the concerns of living in a world without satisfying existential foundations find frequent and pervasive expression in the twentieth century; however, it is also clear that these concerns are not unique to modern literature. In fact, the notion of the absurd has had a continuing, albeit erratic, development since at least the Greek Heroic Age. The Heroic Code of Homer's Iliad is an ancient paradigm created to generate order in an otherwise preposterous and untenable world. One also finds similar concerns expressed in On the Nature of the Universe, Hamlet and Candide, all recognized masterpieces of the Western literary tradition. Delineating the theme of the absurd in each of these four works demonstrates a long-established preoccupation with the concerns characterizing the literature of the absurd in our century. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 48-03, Section: A, page: 0645. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1986.

Fictional narrative can be viewed as a communication between a sender and a receiver. In any narrative related by an overt speaker (or writer), "I," we can identify three sender-receiver pairs: narrator and narratee, implied author and implied reader, real author and real reader. While real author and real reader do communicate in a sense, they do so through their implied counterparts. Both the implied author/implied reader and the narrator/narratee pairs are immanent to the narrative text. The implied author and reader can be thought of as structures made up of the various perspectives of the text as a whole while the narrator and the narratee each provides one of these perspectives. By examining, within the context of narrative as communication, the roles and functions of narrator and narratee and their relationship to each other, the structures of implied author and implied reader become more clearly discernible. / The present study is an examination of the perspectives of the overt "I" narrator who tells his own story to a directly addressed "you" narratee and of how they structure the role of the implied reader. The first chapter is a survey and synthesis of the recent work of narratologists such as Genette, Bal, Chatman, and Prince on the concepts of narrator and narratee. It includes a discussion of Iser's conception of the implied reader as a textual structure made up of various perspective, including those of narrator, fictitious reader (narratee), characters and plot. In the type of self-conscious first person narration chosen for this study we see that the perspectives of narrator and narratee are the most dominant in the structure of the implied reader's role. / The following three chapters examine the narrator/narratee roles and relationships in John Barth's The Floating Opera, Albert Camus' The Fall, and Gunter Grass' Cat and Mouse. Each employs a self-conscious "I" narrator of questionable reliability who tells his story to an explicitly addressed "you." Barth's Todd Andrews, adopting the role of "author," addresses a "reader, " whose response to the fictionalized account of his past Todd carefully tries to direct by frequent interruptive commentary. For Todd, this unnamed "reader" comes to take the place of his long dead father. Camus' Jean-Baptiste Clamence, by confessing the ignominies of his past, attempts to persuade an unheard interlocutor to his vision of the world and to an answering confession of duplicity and guilt. Here there is no pretense of authorship. Clamence speaks with no apparent mediation to, and in response to, a companion who occupies the same fictional space in the here and now of the narrating situation. Grass' Pilenz, who purports to write the story of Joachim Mahlke, appears to address himself to several narratees, including the perhaps-dead Mahlke who is the subject of his story. Mahlke, described as "he" in the story, is addressed as "you" in the discourse. An examination of this unusual narrator/narratee relationship reveals that Pilenz's narration is as much his story as it is Mahlke's. / The narrator/narratee relationships in the Barth, Camus, and Grass narratives break or stretch conventions of narrating established by the traditional realistic novel, thereby forcing the reader, in his role as implied reader, to take special note of the narrating act or discourse. In each of these narratives, the discourse becomes a story in its own right, a story in which the narratee's presence is essential to the narrator's attempt to order his past. Thus, the perspective of the narratee must be recognized as pivotal in the structure of the implied reader's role in these first person narratives. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 42-01, Section: A, page: 0205. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1981.

Seventeenth and eighteenth-century French writers on Louisiana produced a wealth of propaganda on the colony known as Louisiana. This literature contained extensive descriptions of the colony's environment, peoples, and history. Stated within this literature were French plans for building a new society in Louisiana. French writers on Louisiana intended to improve upon the Ancien Regime French society which had proven unsatisfactory, violent, and inadequate in the eyes of many of its members. Despite their plans to remake their society in a better form in Louisiana, the French writers failed in their endeavors to construct a non-violent community in the territory. The reason for this failure was the fact that the Louisiana French showed definite destructive proclivities in their social construction. The Louisiana French believed that the sacrifice of the natural environment and of non-white peoples living in the colony was acceptable if made for the greater good of the civilization they tried to build. The French in Louisiana exploited the environment and destroyed Native American culture and African-American freedom in their pursuit of social-construction. The decision to exploit the landscape and the peoples of Louisiana resulted in a society that was violent, much like Ancien Regime France, as seen by the revolts and conspiracies that resulted from European policy in the region. The French writers and other philosophes revealed this violence in their records of the history of the colony and their anti-imperialist literature / acase@tulane.edu

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Jose Angel Valente is unique among Spain's contemporary poets because of his singular dedication to the process of poetic creation. His work emphasizes the importance of regenerating the essential, original and vital capacity of language For Valente, the poetic, creative act, is a process of discovery, a way to acquire knowledge of man's existence and of universal principles. He assigns the reader an active role that is as creative as the poet's. Valente usually writes enigmatic, perplexing poems that acquire wider meaning through indirect reference to sources outside the text. These poems function like a code or system which permits the reader to view them not just as autonomous entities, organic wholes, but as intertextual constructs. The reader frequently has to perform rapid, unanticipated aesthetic 'adjustments' when confronting Valente's texts Valente's own preoccupation with the creative process especially that undertaken by the mystics, compels him to venture into linguistic spaces where he finds the greatest tension between unspoken and spoken content. Valente's concept of poetic creation brings to mind the kabbalist's perception of Scripture as an inexhaustible well. Just as the texts of the Kabbalah, Valente's work seek the cooperation of the reader who is already disposed to create a hermeneutics in order to discover meanings by himself/herself The object of this dissertation is to bring into the foreground Valente's theory of the creative process, his idea of writing as a constant movement of inquiry and experimentation. This study emphasizes the interconnections that exist between Valente's work and mysticism. This dissertation explores how poetic, erotic, and mystic elements appear in his poetry like three manifestations of a single, identical experience. This study also examines the influence on Valente's work of surrealism and of the aesthetics of other arts, particularly painting and music and their connection to Valente's idea of the poetic process / acase@tulane.edu

The Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) has been treated frequently in literary as well as in historical studies. However, scholarly work on the songs of the Spanish Civil War has lagged behind literary studies. This dissertation examines the songs of the Spanish Civil War and explores the dialectical relationship between history and popular lyrics within a social and literary framework. An understanding of the function of the popular war song contributes to our comprehension of the importance of popular poetry among certain social groups or classes of Spanish society during the 1930's The present work, using as examples some 100 songs, analyzes them according to their context, function, and themes. In each chapter I explore the historical and literary antecedents of the Spanish Civil War song as historical document and as popular literature The first chapter of this study focuses on the interrelationships of literature and popular song in Spain. The primary emphasis is on the place of musical lyrics in the history and development of Spanish poetry. This chapter also analyzes the song's poetic structure and style at the lexico-semantic and linguistic levels and it provides as well an introduction to their ideological content The next four chapters form the body of the thesis. The first two chapters discuss the theme of the two Spains, which Menendez Pidal has identified as 'conservative' and 'progressive,' and which have characterized Spain throughout its history. These chapters explore the ideological bases that inspired both sides, the Republicans and the Nationalists, and their representation within the Civil War song The final two chapters center exclusively on the religious question and on the meaning of death in the war song. These two subjects, with deep roots in Spanish life and literature, are of fundamental importance to the poetry of the song I conclude by suggesting that in the popular song of the Spanish Civil War we see the problematic interaction of two literary discourses, one critical and the other fictional, with both dependant on the historical period in which they developed / acase@tulane.edu

The Esope, written around 1170 by Marie de France represents not only the first literary work by a French woman fabulist, but also the first collection of fables written in the vernacular in Western Europe. Scholars have paid some attention to the sources of the first forty fables of the Esope, believed to be ultimately derived from the Romulus Nilantii, but have tended to neglect those of the second half of Marie's collection, and particularly the ones drawn from Eastern fables and folklore. While acknowledging the influence of the Latin fable tradition on the Esope, in this dissertation I put forth and provide evidence for the theory that Marie de France followed a second model: the fable tradition of Indian origin which reached Europe through the Arabs Karl Warnke's valuable essay 'Die Quellen des Esope der Marie de France', published in the year 1900 in Festgabe fur Hermann Suchier, is the only scholarly attempt to unravel the sources of Marie's fables, including the non-Aesopic ones. His work is relatively comprehensive, in that it summarizes the variants of every fable and refers to analogies and parallels, but it does not offer any in-depth analysis. Moreover, since the publication of his essay, almost a century ago, several ancient Sumerian, Akkadian, Egyptian, Indian, Jewish, and Arabic texts have come to light, thanks to the efforts of folklorists in various parts of the world. These texts and recorded tales provide new insights into the entire domain of fable-literature, including Marie's collection In this dissertation I intend to expand upon the work of Warnke. The omission of fables outside the Greco-Latin tradition from any study of the sources of Marie's work would result in an incomplete, distorted picture and the conclusions arrived at thereby would be misleading and fallacious. A thorough investigation of Marie's sources will prove that the Esope is not only indebted to Eastern literature and folklore but also occupies a significant position in the history of the dissemination of the tales to Europe / acase@tulane.edu

With the publication by Maurice Parturier between 1941 and 1964 of the complete letters of Prosper Merimee--which number more than 5,000--a correspondence rivaling that of Voltaire in depth, beauty, wit, and especially style was revealed in its fullness. In these letters Merimee, who served both as Inspector of Historical Monuments and senator, and was an intimate of the court, observed the personages and events of the Second Empire and often expressed his feelings and judgments on them to a number of close friends. This thesis surveys his views on several important historical and political figures glimpsed or discussed in the letters, including Napoleon III; Count Alexandre Walewski; Emile Ollivier; Victor Hugo; Adolphe Thiers; Achille Fould; Charles Auguste, Duc de Morny; Edouard Drouyn de Lhuys; Eugene Rouher; Victor Fialin de Persigny and Jules Baroche. Such a survey is intended as a scholarly aid for students of his correspondence and literary works, as well as those doing research in nineteenth-century French history The study of the individual figures is preceded by a background chapter that sets forth and evaluates Merimee's political views, which are visible throughout the letters. Acquaintance with these views is essential for a proper assessment of his judgments on his contemporaries. It becomes clear, from examination of his correspondence, that he was both anticlerical and conservative; he thought the parliamentary system unsuited to France. Although he was not a creative political theorist, he did develop his own understanding of governance and in particular of the authoritarian regime that he believed suitable for his nation. He proposed notably a code of political conduct that he wanted to see followed, based on courtesy, orderliness, and fairness. He viewed such a code as pragmatic, a means of achieving stability and longevity in government. These political views did not, however, prevent him from giving perceptive and balanced appreciations of those who did not share his assumptions about government. Whether he was regaling his friends with caricatures or lamenting the fate of France in the hands of unwise statesmen, Merimee, the honnete homme, made a plea for statesmen loyal to the regime, behaving in accordance with common courtesy / acase@tulane.edu

The works studied in this dissertation have a formal concern which exhibits a textual hierarchy dominating the poetic expression: they are objective expressions in which form prevails and obscures any subjective statement. This fact separates both works from the preceding literary movements, Symbolism and Modernism, and relates them to Russian Formalism at the beginning of the XXth century. The relationship to Formalism is based on the idea that the reality of the poetic work is formed principally by language, and it is governed by internal and external functions which give it autonomy The first chapter analyses the concept of 'logos' in both books. Juan Ramon Jimenez and Alberto Caeiro abandon the notion of 'Absolute Truth' and consider the poetic work like a self-contained dynamic form which develops through rhythmic structures. This allows us to equate poetry with logos, since the former is an object with its own identity, and different from the idea of writing as copy, play, and death, which define the logocentric text The second chapter analyses the independence of the poetic work through the image of 'Nature,' as a space defined by language In the third chapter, the doubling of the poetic voice shows the rational character of both books, as it depersonalizes the text and exposes the duality that characterizes the speaking subject. The subsequent dichotomy created in both works is not metaphysical, philosophical or psychological, but is the result of the language formation process The metaliterary aspect that constitutes both texts is studied in the last chapter through their connections with Formalism, and through the analysis of the contradictions within both works, produced in the course of poetic image formation. These points reveal that Juan Ramon Jimenez's concept of 'naked poetry,' and Alberto Caeiro's 'natural expression' are related to the idea that creativity is a formal change within a literary tradition and not a subjective expression in search of a transcendental reality / acase@tulane.edu

As the XIXth Century began its last decade, several Spanish novelists of the 'Generacion del 68', displeased with the technical and ideological limitations imposed by the experimental method advocated by naturalism, introduced new ways of exploring human reality in its totality. While they still borrowed many of the techniques introduced by naturalism, these novelists searched for new ways to express those individual and social realities which lay beyond the realm of the senses and of deduction (reason). Influenced also by the growing spiritualism, characteristic of the fin de siecle mentality, these authors explored and interpreted in their novels the religious sentiment of their society. In particular they examined the question of faith, its interpretation and its concrete effects on the life of society This study examines eleven novels of Palacio Valdes, Pardo Bazan, Luis Coloma, Leopoldo Alas and Perez Galdos which, from 1890 to 1899, deal with faith and unbelief, either as the basic conflict, or as the ideology which permeates it. After an overview on faith in general, faith in the Judaeo-Christian tradition, its development in the Church and its philosophical and theological interpretations in the XIXth century, each of the novels is first presented and then its particular interpretation is compared to the theology and official pronouncements of the Catholic Church, from Vatican I and Pope Leo XIII The study illustrates that these Spanish novelists, genuinely preoccupied with the state of society, presented their views on faith according to their own orthodox and/or heterodox convictions. Each denounced abuses and suggested ways in which religious and non-religious faith can be an asset in the restoration of society's traditional values. Each offered a new vision to society at the threshold of the XXth Century / acase@tulane.edu