Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2008. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 69-11, Section: A, page: 4325. Adviser: Karen L. Fresco. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 319-339) Available on microfilm from Pro Quest Information and Learning.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Indiana University, Dept. of Spanish and Portuguese, 2005. / Title from PDF t.p. (viewed Dec. 3, 2008). Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 66-03, Section: A, page: 0828. Chair: Catherine Larson.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Indiana University, Dept. of Comparative Literature, 2009. / Title from PDF t.p. (viewed on Jul 15, 2010). Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 70-12, Section: A, page: 4669. Adviser: David Hertz.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Indiana University, Dept. of Spanish and Portuguese, 2006. / "Title from dissertation home page (viewed July 16, 2007)." Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 67-10, Section: A, page: 3815. Adviser: Kathleen A. Myers.

This study examines and explains the politically, ecclesiastically and socially motivated perceptions of Joan of Arc by the French and the British focusing on late medieval and early Renaissance depictions. Joan was tried by the British in France. Even so, she had a text-book British heresy trial according to the precedent set during John Badby's trial in 1401. Equally importantly, close examination of fifteenth century French texts shows French ambivalence towards, diminution of and, in some cases, complete rejection of Joan and her role in French history. Indeed, the British perceptions about the Maid are the only perspectives on Joan that remained constant through the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Our modern perceptions of Joan of Arc seem fairly stable. Yet what became evident during the research for this project is that this stability is a recent development we have simply inherited Napoleon's view of the Maid of Orléans. Throughout the Middle Ages and Renaissance, the British characterized Joan of Arc as a witch and a great threat to their political well-being. British ideas about Joan of Arc, however negative and contrary they may seem to our modern ideas about her, are the only ideas that remained constant during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.

Matrixial reading is a new methodology for literary criticism that emphasizes the ethical relevance of literature. Adhering to an interdisciplinary approach, I adopt feminist artist and psychoanalyst Bracha Ettinger's paradigm of subjectivity-as-encounter, based on the maternal/late pre-natal infant relation, to refigure reading relations. Analyzing selected texts, I show how readers are invited to form an ethical covenant based on matrixial, as opposed to phallic, relations. I discuss exile and the foreign in Dany Laferrière's novels; Marguerite Duras' work provokes an epistemological reflection on ignorance; with Nancy Huston I demonstrate the role of reading in healing trauma.

Aphoristic thoughts must be distinguished from their articulation in aphorisms, for they are found in all other genres of discourse as well. Within these discourses they present non-discursive points, i.e. points where the mind interrupts the linear progression of the text in order to stop and contemplate a momentary end of thinking. This study seeks to isolate the thought from thinking. It does so in a series of reflections on German, French and English aphoristic texts. These reflections explore a viable alternative to the contextualist paradigms of literary criticism, history, and philosophy. Instead of reintegrating the isolated thought in an extended historical narrative or critical argument, this method seeks to respond to it with another thought. The "context" of the thinker's thought is not a genre, a literal text, or field of inquiry, but a world that is only rarely textual in a literal sense. Unlike the disciplines to which most serious reflection is devoted, the aphoristic utterance makes sense outside a formal discipline. One motif around which the independent sections of this study are arranged are Goethe's and Nietzsche's thoughtful wanderer, exposed to the elements outside. Another is Nietzsche's gay or cheerful science, in which ultimately nihilistic ideals like certainty, consistency and truth are diagnosed, treated with and replaced by the wit, partiality and idiosyncracy of the aphorist. In addition, the study discusses aspects of the scholarship, addresses the problem of the aphoristic collection, and attempts an inventory of aphoristic ends.

This dissertation discusses Anna Banti's Artemisia, Roberto Rossellini's Paisà, Ingeborg Bachmann short story “Simultan,” Helma Sanders-Brahms' Deutschland, bleiche Mutter and Alain Resnais' Hiroshima mon amour. The novels and films addressed all create a condition of epistemological crisis; they present the spectator or reader with a landscape of rubble, both literal and figurative, in which all existing structures have been erased. There are no stable epistemological certainties left, only provisional configurations that are always threatening to collapse once more into the debris, history is defined by slippage and displacement. Bachmann and Resnais, in particular, explore the trace and echo of “history,” and the rupture of temporal stability; for them, history shares the structure of language, ruled by metonymy and slippage, always exceeding any stable framework. These self-referentially split and fractured narratives present us with a universe in which everything is in flux. If “history” is “broken” by definition, so too are subjectivity, gender and desire: rupture and splitting are their constitutive elements. In Rossellini's films, especially, heterosexual masculinity has lost any claim to “authenticity” and has become purely performative, a phantasm of opera, theater, film, even puppet shows. The male subject is constituted both as spectacle and obsessive spectator, with voyeurism and scopophlia the only possible forms of desire. The lacuna of desire left by the collapse of the heterosexual male subject is partly filled by the scopophilic appetites of the cinematic spectator: we see ourselves, and our own deviant desire, constantly represented on screen.

Entitled “Reassessing the Theatre of the Absurd: Parabolic Drama and the Question of Absurdity,” my dissertation interrogates the conventional idea that the Theatre of the Absurd contemplates the purposelessness of life by re-examining some of the major plays of Beckett, Ionesco, Genet and Pinter. I suggest that the plays of the Theatre of the Absurd are, instead, ethical texts that contemplate how life can be made meaningful. I argue that Martin Esslin’s 1961 characterization of such work as “absurd” does not take into account a fully informed reading of Camus, and thus Esslin’s reading does not see the extent to which meaningfulness is fundamental to such cultural productions. Therefore, I push for a re-reading of these plays and playwrights that allows for decidedly meaning-making conclusions. Using an up-to-date understanding of Camus’ philosophy as a theoretical frame, I engage with the long history of Theatre of the Absurd criticism, performance histories and reviews, the genre of the parable, philosophy and performance studies. My dissertation, ultimately, argues against a strictly absurd reading and, instead, positions such work within the larger realm of ethics (in the general vein of Camus).

In 1639, a law prohibiting women any head covering; veil, mantilla, manto for example, is promulgated for the fifth time in the Iberian Peninsula under the penalty of losing the garment, and subsequently incurring more severe punishments. Regardless of these edicts this social practice continued. My dissertation investigates the cultural representation of these covered women (tapadas) in Spain and the New World in a vast array of early modern literary, historical and legal documents (plays, prose, and regal laws, etc.). Overall, critics associate the use of the veil in the Spanish territories with religious tendencies and overlook the social component of women using the veil to simply explain it as a mere fashion practice. In my dissertation, I argue that it is more than just a garment; the veil was used by women to make political statements, thereby challenging the restrictive gender and identity boundaries of their epoch. A critical analysis of early modern historical and legal peninsular texts and close-readings of Golden Age literary works, together with colonial cultural productions, allow me to identify patterns in how the tapadas were represented both artistically and culturally. Accordingly, my project attempts to reassess the significance of the tapadas in Hispanic culture for 350 years and demonstrate how their resilience to stop using the veil publicly is symptomatic of the absolutist monarchy inefficiencies in imposing social control. I move away from the tendency to investigate works including tapadas exclusively, and I conclude by reconstructing more accurately their cultural impact on the social dynamics in Spain as well as the New World.