Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2006. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 67-11, Section: A, page: 4200. Adviser: Silvina Montrul. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 172-180) Available on microfilm from Pro Quest Information and Learning.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Indiana University, Dept. of Spanish and Portuguese, 2006. / "Title from dissertation home page (viewed July 3, 2007)." Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 67-08, Section: A, page: 3003. Adviser: Maryellen Bieder.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Indiana University, Dept. of Theatre and Drama, 2006. / "Title from dissertation home page (viewed July 9, 2007)." Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 67-08, Section: A, page: 2820. Adviser: Roger W. Herzel.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2007. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 69-02, Section: A, page: 0624. Adviser: Andrea Goulet. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 320-337) Available on microfilm from Pro Quest Information and Learning.

Le mouvement féministe des années quatre-vingt a fourni de nouvelles approches analytiques aux littéraires: études des rôles sexuels, des relations hommes/femmes, etc. La littérature policière s'est alors vue, elle aussi, investie par des auteures femmes et des protagonistes féminins qui ont fait entrer la femme dans une littérature qui l'avait jusqu'alors sous-représentée. Pourtant, de telles avancées ne se produisent pas subitement et nous pouvons en déduire que des oeuvres précurseurs existent, oeuvres dans lesquelles l'auteur alloue au personnage féminin un espace narratif dans lequel il peut évoluer et grandir. Sébastien Japrisot, nous le croyons, fait partie de ces auteurs. Les héroïnes de La dame dans l'auto avec des lunettes et un fusil et de Piège pour Cendrillon sont certes des victimes, mais à qui l'auteur a donné certains outils pour s'affirmer et dénoncer. En nous appuyant sur les études féministes en policier ainsi que sur les théories de l'agentivité, nous souhaitons montrer la quête d'agentivité des protagonistes, c'est-à-dire comment ces femmes parviennent à passer d'un état passif à un état agent, et ce malgré leur rôle de victime. Par conséquent, nous pourrons montrer de quelle façon ces deux romans de Japrisot ont participé à ouvrir certaines possibilités dans la représentation d'un nouveau féminin dans la littérature policière.

Gabrielle Wittkop (1920-2002) est l'auteur d'une oeuvre qui n'est ni belle, ni bonne, mais radicalement transgressive et demeurée marginale dans la mesure ou les idéologies et valeurs qui y sont véhiculées refusent de se plier aux exigences de la masse. Son discours, inspire à plusieurs égards par la parole de Sade, ose représenter ouvertement les plus violents des fantasmes à l'abri des clichés et stéréotypes qui entourent habituellement leur représentation. Afin de saisir la portée transgressive des fictions de cet auteur, il est impératif d'exposer les différents mécanismes de remise en question de la doxa qui sous-tendent, selon nous, son oeuvre. À travers l'analyse de trois textes représentatifs, Le sommeil de la raison (2003), La marchande d'enfants (2001) et Le nécrophile (1972), cette thèse vise à dégager, au niveau de la représentation, les enjeux principaux du discours littéraire de Wittkop. Elle mettra en valeur, par le biais d'une étude de la thématique, de l'esthétique et des formes discursives, le rôle de la transgression littéraire comme subversion de la norme. D'un point de vue critique, elle montrera que le discours social se dégageant des fictions de cet auteur révèle l'ensemble des valeurs et idéologèmes inhérents à la société bourgeoise comme signes d'un refoulement pathologique de nos désirs.

What do Salvador Dalí, Federico García Lorca, Val del Omar, Alejandro Jodorowski, Néstor Perlongher, Clarice Lispector, and Octavio Paz have in common? To the naked eye, they seem to feature more differences than similarities: besides the fact that all of them are Ibero-American artists, filmmakers and writers, their birthplaces, origins, generations, styles, and artistic disciplines are quite dissimilar. But there is at least one thing they share: their output was a perfect vehicle to reflect how they were all enthralled by ecstasy, epiphany, illumination, rapture, grace. In Psychology, these events are categorized as “Modified States of Consciousness”, a melting pot that comprises heteroclite mental states like medium trances, ritual possessions, REM states, effects of hallucinogenic substances, orgasm, and so on. The common factor is that in all those cases subjects experience a new way to perceive the world and their self, far away from the one provided by the ordinary state of consciousness. Also, most of them seem to take place in a dimension where rationality is mostly an obstacle. Friedrich Nietzsche certainly believed so, as he associated these irrational events with Dionysus, the god of wine and ritual madness in the classic Greek civilization. The Dionysian cult involved rupturing the bounds of the participants’ self and the collective communion between them as well as with the cosmos. On the other hand, one criterion to distinguish between the experiences that are confusedly grouped in that psychological miscellany is to examine where does it drive us to. There are events that can potentially change our ordinary state of conscience into another that could be described as an illuminated state and could be associated to perceptions of happiness, harmony, and mindfulness. These positive sensations would help explain why, since the dawn of civilization, human beings have used various techniques (such as yoga, ritual dance, the use of narcotics, etc.) in an attempt to recreate the mystical manifestations they previously had lived solely as spontaneous experiences. It must be recognized, though, that ecstatic experiences can be associated not only to a positive dimension, but also to a negative one. Following Nietzschean thesis, Néstor Perlongher (an Argentinean writer who is central to my dissertation) points out that Dionysian experiences can be self-destructive and dangerous, as well as illuminating and liberating. Nietzsche, and Perlongher, contemplate art as the necessary complement of ecstasy, a discipline which can help avoid the negative consequences of these experiences. Salvador Dalí and Octavio Paz (another two authors studied in my dissertation) also link art to ecstasy. Dalí believes in the power of pictorial images to provoke the non-ordinary mental state associated with ecstasy. Nevertheless, Octavio Paz considers poetics one of the best artistic vehicles to express the “instant”, through which a poem breaks the linearity of time while it also creates an “eternal present”. What I exposed above could be considered a sample of what I am doing in my dissertation. I aim to establish a dialogue between diverse “texts” (in the wide sense) and authors in order to delimitate the meaning of the ecstatic phenomenon, as well as their characteristics and particularities. / Romance Languages and Literatures

In my dissertation, I explore the relationship between the material aspects of an editorial artifact and their literary implications for the texts it contains. I show how the interpretation of a text needs to be accompanied by an inquiry into the material conditions of its production, circulation and reception. This study is intended as both an investigation of the material foundations of institutions of literary study and a reflection on some often neglected sides of contemporary theorizations concerning textuality, writing, and media. My purpose is to show a paradigmatic example of the basic coincidence of textual datum and material unit, content and medium, verbal-visual message and physical support. The dissertation is articulated in a theoretical chapter followed by three case studies. In the theoretical introduction, I provide critical reflection on and expressive response to the complex, non-deterministic interplay between cultural constructs and the media within which they are formalized and by which they are formed in the context of medieval Italian literature. First, I briefly outline the theoretical coordinates within which to consider the materiality of textual supports (óstraka, papyry, codices) as a key element for the adequate interpretation of the texts that they preserve. Next, I offer examples of the interdependence between the strictly textual and material characteristics of a literary product. I sketch out the interpretive implications of these connections from the points of view of composition, circulation, and reception. I purposely draw the examples from different textual cultures, mainly classical (Greek and Latin) and medieval (Occitanic and Italian), in order to test the general plausibility of my methodology of inquiry. The first case study is conceived as a thematological inquiry. It offers a catalogue raisonné of the metaphors of the book and book production in the Dantean corpus. It studies, therefore, the description of the materiality of the book at the level of the enunciation. Books are a recursive figure in Dante’s macrotext. The reference to the “libro della mente” in the early canzone “E m’incresce di me sì duramente” prefigures the “libro della memoria” in the incipit of the Vita nova. Moreover, the book is the metaphor for the revelation of the cosmos held together by bond of love (“legato con amore in un volume”) at the climax of Dante’s mystical vision in Paradiso 33. Dante’s entire literary production is inscribed within the metaphorics of the book, which is disseminated in poetically and hermeneutically significant places. In this chapter, I begin by charting Dante’s images of and references to books in his corpus. Basing my analysis on Ernst Robert Curtius’ historical study of the book as symbol, and Hans Blumenberg’s gnoseological articulation of the metaphor of the legibility of the world, I then outline the various semantic realms that the metaphorics of the book entails. On one hand, the hints at the book structure serve as meta-textual elements that guide interpretation, since they convey information on the book format, the typology of expected readership, and the expository order of the text. In sum, these metaphors of books and book production are chiefly concerned with the text’s dramatizing its own problematic creation. For instance, the material elements implied in the address to the reader in Paradiso 10, 22 (“Or ti riman, lettor, sovra ’l tuo banco”) underscore a precise choice of book format (the “libro da banco universitario”) and a specific readership (scholars). On the other hand, the metaphorology of the book (and of the Commedia qua book) entails a more radical cognitive experience, since it signifies the reductio ad unum of scattered entities due to its nature as all-compassing semiotic vehicle. The final step of my analysis is to compare the interpretive indications inferred from references to the materiality of the book embedded in the text with actual renditions of some early witnesses of the Vita nova and Commedia. In the second case study, I explore the editorial and intertextual relations between Giovanni Boccaccio’s autograph of the Teseida and two exemplars of the poem (a manuscript and an incunabulum, both produced in Ferrara in the 1470s and kept at Houghton Library, Cambridge, MA). First, I delineate the complex system of authorial personae that Boccaccio impersonates in the manuscript. Then, I describe how visual and verbal elements in the autograph cooperate to engage the reader in a multi-sensorial aesthetic experience. Next, I investigate to what extent the material configuration of the Ferrara exemplars comply with the hermeneutic guidelines materially embedded by Boccaccio into his autograph as a means of managing the reception and controlling the interpretation of the poem. I outline how these two exemplars reveal the importance of Boccaccio’s editorial project in successfully inscribing his literary production within the canon of authoritative texts. In fact, the rich paratextual apparatus with which Boccaccio furnishes his autograph is the foundation upon which the Teseida grew into a classic and sprouted the proliferation of comments and accretions that surrounded the text of the poem. The third case study focuses on Francesco Petrarca’s Rerum vulgarium fragmenta. Petrarca’s songbook has been a privileged object of analysis for material philology since the publication of the fac-simile of the manuscript that preserves the autograph of the collection (ms. Vat. lat. 3195). The study of the autograph shows Petrarca’s editorial project of associating the poet’s activity with the scribe’s in an ideal coincidence of literary expression and script, text and book, composition and folio. Basing my inquiry on the fac-simile, I argue that the autograph should be considered as an organized form of visual poetry. In fact, this exemplar can be thought of as an entity that systematically conjugates a linguistic/verbal message with an iconic formation. The two are not simply juxtaposed, but rather they coexist in a sort of hypostasis, in which the iconic element affects the linguistic substance. On one hand, the verbal text brings about meanings that are of a linguistic type. On the other hand, it is structured as a medium that conveys meanings that are generally portrayed by the other order of representation (the visual). Therefore, the autograph delineates a project of integration between graphical and linguistic elements, in compliance with the classical and medieval tradition of visual poetry (from Simias’ taechnopagnia and Optatianus’ carmina figurata to the calligraphic production of the Schola Palatina). In the case of Petrarca’s songbook, the iconic element does not imply an apparatus of images, given the extreme essentialism of his editorial endeavors. Instead, it is chiefly limited to the graphic execution of the linguistic sign: its system of majuscules and minuscules, its layout, the regulation of written lines and blank spaces, and the relation between verse and line. I will therefore indicate how the iconic character of the autograph can be interpreted as a series of logical relations between the poetic language and its graphic rendition through writing. My purpose is to show that this series of relations conveys a specific set of visual guidelines that lead the reader through the decoding and interpretation of the text. / Romance Languages and Literatures

How does the book-object in early modernity participate in the representation of scientific knowledge? How was the reader meant to approach the book and to comprehend its contents? This project starts from the contention that scientific knowledge is not a product simply to be deposited into unmarked containers and transmitted unproblematically. On the contrary, the book, whether literary or scientific, actively shapes and invents objects of scientific knowledge. Sensory, affective and cognitive ways in which the reader is expected to approach the book and its contents are implicit in its formatting of text and image, not to mention margins, presentational material and indices. This project draws from literary and natural scientific traditions of the French and Italian Renaissance in order to study how the early-modern book forms and performs scientific knowledge in various ways. Compelling the reader to interrupt his or her reading and to explore the book’s text and images as if they were objects in their own right, the book-object strives to imitate the experience and method of scientific discovery for the early-modern reader. To this end, touch, appetition, and bodily awareness become as important as sight and critical reasoning in a procedural approach and apprehension of knowledge in and of the book-object. An “aesthetics of discovery”, formed by the book and performed by the reader, is implicit in the book’s careful articulations of text and image. / Romance Languages and Literatures

The scientific discoveries and inventions of the early seventeenth century, which include Johannes Kepler’s inverted retinal image, the refinement of lenses, and the invention of the telescope, transformed the status of vision in the acquisition of knowledge, thus modifying the nature of what is known and even challenging how things are known. Rather than focus on philosophical oppositions between seeing and looking, or on artistic practices such as linear perspective or anamorphosis in literature’s engagement with vision, this study privileges instead a dialogue with early modern optics. Deriving a theoretical framework from the scientific debates about vision and its instruments, which brings attention to the historically charged concepts of mediated perception, the visible and the invisible, and natural and mechanical sight, I examine how French and Italian authors in the early seventeenth century engaged with ocular and optical motifs to question the sense of sight and its authority. My corpus describes vision as indispensable to the observation and knowledge of the world, although the texts also expose the vulnerability of the sense of sight to error because of natural limitations or an inability to recognize the true form behind deceitful appearances. As such, they elucidate a crisis of knowledge and representation that characterizes the earlier decades of the seventeenth century. Based on the dynamics between the eye and visual aids as they appear in the scientific community, I identify two distinct visual modes in the literary texts, which correspond to the natural eye and the instrumentalized one, assisted and enhanced by a lens. The authors considered here, which include Béroalde de Verville, Traiano Boccalini, Agrippa d’Aubigné, and the writers involved in the polemics around Giambattista Marino’s L’Adone and Pierre Corneille’s Le Cid, present the two visual modes as existing in tension, which I define as “baroque vision.” The analyses of the literary texts demonstrate how the integration of lenses, be it through explicit references to optical devices or through more abstract portrayals that parallel the operations of the eye and the instrument, becomes emblematic of other concerns, from debates regarding discontent about dissimulation to discussions of poetic practice. / Romance Languages and Literatures