<p> Science fiction critics have dueled over definitions of sixteenth-, seventeenth-, and eighteenth-century science fiction, often classifying early science fiction as mere prototype. Chapter One of this thesis examines the myriad definitions of the term &ldquo;science fiction&rdquo; allowing a distinguishable set of literary characteristics for science fiction, fantasy, and science fantasy. Early science fiction authors such as Johannes Kepler, Francis Godwin, Savinien Cyrano De Bergerac, Margaret Cavendish, and Jonathan Swift refashioned the familiar fantasy genre with scientific ideas, establishing a science fantasy genre to frame dangerous and rebellious ideas in a conventional and innocuous structure, the fiction novel. Chapter Two analyzes the science fiction elements present in early science fantasy of Kepler, Godwin, De Bergerac, Cavendish, and Swift as well as the scientific, religious, and political ramifications of science fantasy in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. Chapter Three briefly highlights elements of early science fantasy that influenced twentieth- and twenty-first century science fiction. Early science fantasy not only influenced generations of science fiction writers and scientists, but it also was one of the main forces that legitimized the sciences.</p>

Thèse (M.A.)--Université de Sherbrooke (Canada), 2008. / Titre de l'écran-titre (visionné le 1 février 2007). In ProQuest dissertations and theses. Publié aussi en version papier.

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, 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.

<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>

<p> The purpose of this thesis will be to examine closely James Joyce&rsquo;s <i>Ulysses</i> with respect to Fran&ccedil;ois F&eacute;nelon&rsquo;s <i> The Adventures of Telemachus</i>. Joyce considered <i>The Adventures of Telemachus</i> to be a source of inspiration for Ulysses, but little scholarship considers this. Joyce&rsquo;s fixation on the role of teachers and mentor figures in Stephen&rsquo;s growth and development, serving alternately as cautionary figures, models or adversaries, owes much to F&eacute;nelon&rsquo;s framework for the growth of Telemachus. Close reading of both Joyce&rsquo;s and F&eacute;nelon&rsquo;s work will illuminate the significance of education and mentorship in Joyce&rsquo;s construction of Stephen Dedalus. Leopold Bloom and Stephen&rsquo;s relationship in Joyce&rsquo;s <i>Ulysses</i> closely mirrors that of Mentor and Telemachus as seen in F&eacute;nelon&rsquo;s <i> The Adventures of Telemachus</i>. Through these numerous parallels, we will see that mentorship serves as a better model for Bloom and Stephen&rsquo;s relationship in Ulysses than the more critically prevalent father-son model </p>

After tracing the theo-philosophical roots of the eighteenth-century sentimental sensibility as Laurence Sterne used them in Tristram Shandy, this work examines the antecedents of twentieth-century sentimentalism as they appear in William Butler Yeats's memoir Reveries Over Childhood and Youth, in the first two chapters of James Joyce's novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and in the "Overture" and "Combray" sections of Marcel Proust's novel Swann's Way. This study concentrates on how the focal characters' innate artistic sensibility emerges during their childhoods. Following sentimental patterns, the idealistic central figures are vulnerable to threatening realities that disillusion them. Melancholy accompanies their distress, and they react by wishing to withdraw physically and psychologically from an alienating world to which they feel superior because of their aesthetic sensibilities. These modern works conform to three specific sentimental characteristics that appear in Yeats, Stephen and Marcel. First, they respond spontaneously to sensory stimuli, which lead to associated ideas, often manifest as memories or synaesthesia that the characters elaborate both imaginatively and intellectually. The second sentimental trait is that the action of deeply-detailed scenes is often suspended to reveal characters. And the last sentimental element, which reinforces the Kunstlerroman and Bidungsroman aspects of these works, is that the protagonists turn to language to define both their realities and artistic identities, showing the evolution of sentimental sensibility in these potential writers.

As we gaze into the mirror of literary texts, we often forget that the images projected back at us are verbal constructs that may bear little resemblance to the reality they purport to represent. This is the case with a group of fifteenth-century Spanish texts that denigrate or defend women. We do not witness these women as they really were; instead, we see fictionally embodied projections of the fears and fantasies of both their authors and of the societies in which they were formed. We see how man's relation to woman plays itself out in a constant oscillation between overwhelming attraction and fear of the loss of control over both himself and woman; or, we see women who are so perfect and so willingly subjected to man's control that they will never achieve status as an individual. This dissertation examines three modes of discourse used by these texts to represent women. The misogynist discourse of Alfonso Martínez de Toledo and Luis de Lucena achieves near hallucinatory visions of chaos with its depictions of Woman as Wild Man: the incarnation of every excess and sin that men might dream of but know they cannot indulge in. These creatures destroy the “natural” order of society by defying its control. Attempts to tame them may fail, for only the annointed few are equal to the task. In contrast, the profeminist discourse of Juan Rodríguez del Padrón, Mosón Diego de Valera, Álvaro de Luna, and Fray Martín de Córdoba raises women up to a potential paradise of harmony and respect between the sexes, but below the surface of these portrayals of exemplary wives, widows, and virgins, we see the continuing discourse of male control. Indeed, this control is now tightened, so that even perfect women are tested, to see which will fall. Finally, we come to Teresa de Cartagena, this group's only female voice. Teresa borrows from both male-determined discourses and then subverts them so that she can at last free herself with the very words meant to imprison her and, by extension, all women. men.

Various approaches to the problem of inexplicable body pain exist. According to Elaine Scarry in The Body in Pain, physical pain resists language by returning it to its original state, crying, before language is learned. Pain is projected in crying because suffering has no referent, and thus cannot be given objective reality in words. This viewpoint frames the problem of communicating pain as a struggle between doubt and certitude, and not as an intellectual challenge. Other theorists describe how referents are created to explain the phenomenon. Most theories on physical suffering are rooted in the dualistic conception of mind and body. The body is seen as a complex machine for apprehending reality whereby mind and body are inextricable. The dualist view born of modernity posits reason as the translator of sensation. In this way only an interpretation arrived at through reason—in other words, subjected to the discourses of power—can hold. For our analysis we take these conflicts—the division between human suffering and the rationalizations of it—as our starting point; however, we propose that all interpretations, beyond requiring that pain or disease have a biological, social, religious, philosophical or other justification, entail an ethical approach. This is because all knowledge wishing to do justice to both the physical and spiritual aspects of pain and disease requires an ethos. Only an ethical position that accounts for relationships with the other can interpret and understand suffering. Our study relies on Emmanuel Levinas' theories on alterity and the constitution of the subject. Levinas argues that pain gives alterity its impact. Disease and pain confront us with our own mortality. In that uncertainty, alterity is expressed. In this framework, we consider nineteenth and twentieth century Spanish American and Peninsular texts and how disease and physical pain are represented.

This dissertation analyses the reception of Juan de Mena's Laberinto de Fortuna (1444) in the XV century by Hernán Núñez, and in the XVI century by Francisco Sánchez de las Brozas “ El Brocense.” The study takes into account the motives that made Laberinto de Fortuna one of Spain's most commented works, in a time when the printing press just arrived in the Iberian Peninsula. The “Introduction” examines the advent of the printing press as an instrument that allowed for the creation of a literary canon that had protonationalistic undertones, and it establishes the political tone of the poem, and its peculiarities that differentiate it from the other major literary productions of the XV century. The first chapter, “Mena y su siglo,” presents a study of a century that is crucial for the understanding of Spain's literary creation in the Golden Age, by taking a look into the historical, political, and social aspects that form the intertextuality of Mena's Laberinto de Fortuna. It both takes a look at the role of the reader in the text, and the ability to interpret the signs that form its inner structure. In the second chapter, “Hernán Núñez leyendo a Mena,” the role of the reader is studied as it is documented in Hernán Núñez's commentary to El Laberinto de Fortuna: La Glosa de las Trescientas. In essence, this chapter presents a study of how an author becomes part of a literary canon, and it presents the challenge of concretizing the interpretation of a text from one century to the next. The third chapter, “Las Anotaciones: El Brocense y la edición de 1582,” concludes this study by presenting how the advent of the printing press has evolved from its arrival in Spain, and how books were read, and circulated from one medium to the next.