This dissertation examines homo/sexual representation in French and American literature and film from 1977-2001. I use the slash to distinguish between two areas of representation whose relationship forms the object of my comparative analysis. Focusing on narratives featuring sexual encounters between men, I analyze sexual representation as it ranges from reticence to frankness. I consider these same narratives in relation to what I call "homo representation," the interpretation of sexuality in minoritizing terms of identities, communities and politics. I argue that French texts demonstrate a greater frankness in relation to sexual representation; the dominance of a universalist tradition in France, however, inhibits the categorization of these texts and the sexuality they depict as "homosexual" or "gay"---or at least limits the political significance of that categorization. In contrast, I argue that the American texts I consider participate in a minoritized gay literature and subculture that has evolved in response to the greater reticence around sexual representation in the American mainstream. That mainstream, however, proves to be more open to "homo representation" on the levels of both culture and politics. I analyze texts by Renaud Camus, John Rechy, Dominique Fernandez, Edmund White, Cyril Collard, Gregg Araki, Guillaume Dustan, Dennis Cooper, Paul Smaïl, and Samuel R. Delany, situating them in the context of various genres. Applying minoritizing vs. universalizing strategies and normalizing vs. transgressive ones in different ways, these genres include coming out narratives (for which I propose an alternative gay Bildungsroman model), AIDS narratives, "ghetto" narratives, "assimilative" narratives and "queer" narratives. Within my American examples, minoritizing ghetto narratives predominate, establishing alternative community norms that are themselves challenged by more transgressive queer narratives. In my French examples, however, universalizing assimilative narratives are more usual, even as they reserve a surprisingly privileged place for transgressive sexuality in comparison with their more normalizing assimilative counterparts in the United States. I argue that these differences must ultimately be understood in relation to contrasting ways of situating sexuality, literature, and politics within the public and private spheres, even as those configurations continue to evolve in both countries through the 1990s and beyond.

The current study contemplates the relationship between narrative structure and memory in five contemporary Spanish novels. Since the Spanish Transition to Democracy literary critics have been quick to discuss the resurgence of historical memory in narrative. In particular, there has been an abundance of work that seeks to vindicate those who supported the Second Republic during the Spanish Civil War, but whose voices were silenced upon the republic's fall to Franco's army in 1939. Nevertheless, despite the wide critical recognition of a movement to recuperate Spanish historical memory, critics have largely ignored the role played by narrative structure in the construction of said memory during the 1990's and the first decade of the 21st century. Contemplating what Hayden White calls "the content of the form" at the stylistic level as well as at the level of each novel's macrostructure, this study demonstrates that the narrative techniques utilized by Juan Marsé, Manual Rivas, Dulce Chacón, Javier Cercas and Bernardo Atxaga cast a particularly postmodern light onto the darker mnemonic shadows of the Spanish Civil War and Franco's dictatorship. Through a series of typically postmodern mechanisms, such as the use of multiple narrators, mediated texts and constant dialog between varying levels of fiction and metafiction, these narratives transcend mere historic reflection and nostalgia in order to contemplate the subjective nature of the very mnemonic processes through which they are ostensibly created. The narrative structures of the works discussed in this study emphasize the fact that objective truth cannot be attained by means of present, postmodern remembering, much less when said remembering is linguistically mediated through narration. Thus, rather than seeking in vain to recuperate an unascertainable historical truth, these authors create highly structured, though purely esthetic, fictional representations of history, representations whose narrative forms are a prescription for the epistemic ills of the disillusioned, fragmented and uprooted postmodern implicit reader.

Considering Os Grão-Capitães: uma sequência de contos by Jorge de Sena belongs to a literary genre not well studied, led to my motivation to research the elements that make this collection a short story sequence. Sena’s book is, as far as I am aware, the only Portuguese language book titled by its author as a “short story sequence.” Consequently, the present study aims to discuss the theoretical principles of this genre, as well as the structural and thematic elements that render this volume as an integrated collection. Jorge de Sena’s book utilizes various aesthetic elements that enable its conceptualization as an integrated collection of short stories. In this context, I study Sena’s book as a paradigm of the short story sequence genre and analyze the elements of paratextuality, with carceral and desolation imagery within the Estado Novo society, which integrate the different, yet interconnected, stories into one organic whole. Thus, I study how the nine stories comprising this book explore plots that complement each other and provide the collection with a narrative integrity that only the “short story sequence” genre allows.

This dissertation explores the construction and transmission of the concept of authorship in the Italian novella in late-medieval and early modern Italy and England. The notion of authorship during this period undergoes an important shift from medieval conceptions of auctoritas to modern ideas about the role of the author. Tracing the figure of the author through a single genre allows an investigation of the translational mechanisms that affect cross-cultural ideas such as authorship as they move between cultures. This research contributes to knowledge about the formation and translation of cross-cultural concepts as well as to understandings of the role of the author in early modern literature. The literature used to pursue this investigation consists of some of the major and minor works in the genre of the Italian novella in Italy and England. The first chapter establishes the generic and theoretical foundations of both the genre of the Italian novella and medieval ideas about authorship. The first text addressed is the late thirteenth-century anonymous Italian Novellino, which is included in the first chapter as an example of an early novella collection that has some but not all of the characteristics of the developing genre. The subject of the second chapter is the authorial construction of Giovanni Boccaccio in the Decameron, which forms the basis for subsequent research. The third chapter explores how later Italian writers including Francesco Petrarca, Masuccio Salernitano, Matteo Bandello, and Giovanni Battista Giraldi Cinzio modify and expand the Boccaccian models of authorship in their own contributions to the genre. In chapter four, translation comes to the forefront in an examination of how English writers and translators worked with the Italian genre, adapting it for their own purposes. This exploration moves from the work of Geoffrey Chaucer through the major novella collections of the late sixteenth-century and ultimately to the beginnings of "original" English novella production with George Gascoigne and the continuation of the translation tradition with the first complete English translation of Boccaccio's Decameron in 1620. Finally, the fifth chapter unifies a discussion of narrative structure that has proved key in the preceding chapters, exploring how the repetition and recursivity of the texts at hand influences authorial and interpretive constructions.

This dissertation studies the politics of collective identity in the essays of Jesús Colón, Julia Álvarez and Richard Rodriguez. Through their essays I study the different configurations of collective identity (mainly those of Latino people, minorities, diasporic, transnational and national subjects) that these writes evaluate from their social position in the United States. A review of their works reveals important aspects about the problem of identity of a first and second generation of Latinos who try to understand themselves as part of the heterogeneous community in the United States. These three writers focus on the malleability of identity and use it to understand different ideologies and values. In his essays Colón highlights the reality of a subject that is economically marginalized by the historical process of capitalism. In addition, he advocates for the union of transnational workers of the Puerto Rican Diaspora in New York, who face stratification and social isolation. In contrast, Álvarez explores the construction of a diasporic identity that relies on history and on transnationalism. This author places emphasis on her writing as a nation, as a means to reflect and re-write the Dominican transnational identity. Rodriguez, the third essayist I study in this research, promotes the foundation of an American identity and evaluates the ways in which it is obstructed by the practices of communities that identify as minority. The objective of my research is to analyze the development of Latino identity using the models that these authors explore. I rely on their ideas and techniques to study the complicated and conflicting process of the evolution of a collective identity. Throughout the 20th century, these authors developed their own approach to the ideological fragmentation and mestizaje emphasized by postcolonial thought. This fragmentation influences their interpretation of history, ethnic/racial identity, family, language, education, cultural hybridity, representation and nationalism.

Since antiquity western texts have employed representations of consumption to articulate questions of desire and power. Images of eating and drinking serve not only to structure texts but also to question and subvert institutional practices, traditional dichotomies of value, and discourse itself. The primacy of desire is illustrated by a conflation with power that results in a textuality marked by excess. Its two poles are represented by cannibalism and a total refusal to eat; both are forms of absolute desire. Texts dealing with consumption are varied. Theoretical discourse such as Rumohr's Geist der Kochkunst or Brillat-Savarin's Physiologie du gout disrupts traditional notions of genre by equating consumption with discourse. Polysemy and a state of constant metamorphosis are common characteristics of literary texts that concentrate on consumption. Although no unbroken development can be affirmed, earlier works such as Petronius's Satyricon or the Bible emphasize a transcendental aim, while modern ones such as Ror Wolf's Fortsetzung des Berichts stress indeterminacy and the overwhelming presence of death.

This dissertation analyses the role of popular music in contemporary Spanish culture. The eighties were a fascinating period of Spanish history, as the country was making its transition from dictatorship to democracy, and there were high national and international expectations connected to this change. The popular music of this period amply reflects the changes that the new country was undergoing. This study is theoretically grounded in new trends in Cultural Studies which open up and expand what we understand by “Culture” today. In this new theoretical reconfiguration, popular music today plays a predominant function in the conception of the social and cultural space of Spain. Through the study of these songs, we are able to understand this particular historical moment better, and also see how this culture has shaped us today. In the present “age of mechanical reproduction” (using Walter Benjamin's terminology) we are key contributors to Culture, yet we are also shaped by it. Because of this, all processes of cultural production deserve to be examined. The analysis responds to the recent parameters in contemporary Spanish Cultural and Literary Studies, an area which needs more scholarly attention, reflecting as it does current changes in our world. This work seeks to develop and legitimate a previously neglected and ignored area of study, using an interdisciplinary approach, by integrating different disciplines such as Music, Literature, or History.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--New York University, 2007. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 68-10, Section: A, page: 4287. Adviser: Mikhail Iampolski.

Habilitationsschrift--Freie Universität, Berlin, 1967. / Bibliography: p. [258]-288.

Habilitationsschrift--Freie Universität, Berlin, 1967. / Bibliography: p. [258]-288.