<p> La litt&eacute;rature et le cin&eacute;ma sur l'&eacute;migration d&eacute;crivent principalement les personnages migrants irr&eacute;guliers comme des damn&eacute;s n'ayant aucune place dans un monde globalis&eacute;. Nonobstant cela, les &laquo; harragas &raquo; s&rsquo;empressent de &laquo; br&ucirc;ler &raquo; leur identit&eacute; sur des bateaux minuscules et surcharg&eacute;s, dans des p&eacute;riples mortels, et all&eacute;goriquement compar&eacute;s &agrave; une qu&ecirc;te d'initiation. Ce faisant, ils s'efforcent d'exister en traversant silencieusement des fronti&egrave;res &eacute;motionnelles, psychologiques et physiques. Par cons&eacute;quent, &agrave; travers des romans et des films contemporains d'Afrique du Nord et de l'Ouest sur l'immigration irr&eacute;guli&egrave;re, je montre que le confinement dans un processus silencieux est en r&eacute;alit&eacute; un signe de r&eacute;sistance des migrants africains francophones sans papiers. </p><p> Ma dissertation s'articule autour de quatre parties principales, &agrave; savoir un chapitre pr&eacute;liminaire sur les perspectives th&eacute;oriques, et trois autres chapitres sur le franchissement des fronti&egrave;res comme un voyage initiatique, le silence en contexte d&rsquo;&eacute;migration irr&eacute;guli&egrave;re et le lien entre immigration et r&eacute;sistance. </p><p> Dans ma recherche, je me r&eacute;f&egrave;re aux concepts de silence et de r&eacute;sistance pour explorer divers aspects du franchissement ill&eacute;gal des fronti&egrave;res et ses cons&eacute;quences. En particulier, je me focalise sur les corps des &laquo; clandestins &raquo;, qui transmettent un message m&ecirc;me s'ils s'av&egrave;rent souvent &ecirc;tre des cadavres. Dans ce processus, je m'appuie sur le Monomythe de Joseph Campbell, notamment les &eacute;tapes du voyage du h&eacute;ros, les id&eacute;es de Mbembe sur le postcolonialisme et les th&eacute;ories sur le silence d&eacute;velopp&eacute;es par Van den Heuvel, de la Motte, Hanus &amp; Nazarova et Le Breton. J'utilise aussi la th&eacute;orie de James Scott sur les formes de r&eacute;sistance au quotidien, et je parle du concept d'initiation tel que d&eacute;fini par des th&eacute;oriciens comme Amadou Ou&eacute;draogo. </p><p> En fin de compte, le &laquo; br&ucirc;lage &raquo; des fronti&egrave;res dans les productions litt&eacute;raires pourrait &ecirc;tre analys&eacute; comme un acte silencieux de survie et de r&eacute;sistance des personnages africains postcoloniaux qui cherchent &agrave; changer leur image de perdants, m&ecirc;me s'ils font face &agrave; un monde occidental qui, graduellement, ferme ses fronti&egrave;res et se pr&eacute;sente comme une &laquo; forteresse. &raquo;</p><p>

<p> The detective or crime novel is most often categorized as popular fiction and stands out as a genre that is difficult to classify because it differs from the realistic novel. My study that aims to scrutinize the Francophone African detective novel that deals with the immigrant experience is twofold. First, I underline the originality of a novel that blends crime and immigration, and second, I point to the social and anthropological features of such novels. As a matter of fact, my dissertation analyzes the intersection between criminality and transhumance in order to shed light on Africa&mdash;where immigrants depart from&mdash;and Europe, especially France, where their lives sit stranded between necessity and expense. This work also examines how immigrants&rsquo; deaths are not considered homicides that deserve a police investigation. Building on theories from Cultural Studies such as sociology, political philosophy and textual analysis, I contend that authors such as Bolya Baenga, Achille Ngoye and Jean-Roger Essomba offer fiction that ultimately raise the question of the value of African lives at a moment when these very lives are considered unworthy of hospitality and cast out of society. The novels analyzed in this work suggest that postcolonial African States and their European counterparts share a responsibility in the reduction of immigrant&rsquo;s lives to irrelevant lives, sanctionable by death.</p><p>

Students are human beings; they, like all of us, make mistakes. In the language classroom, these mistakes may be written, spoken, and even thought. How, if, when, under what conditions and to what degree these errors are treated is of current concern in research regarding language acquisition. In their metaanalysis of interactional feedback, Mackey and Goo (2007) report that the utilization of feedback is beneficial and find evidence that feedback within the context of a focus on form environment is also facilitative of acquisition, echoing Norris and Ortega’s (2000) positive findings regarding focus on form research. Thus, the role of feedback has found a somewhat limited, very informative and equally persuasive niche in current theory building and research. There is lack of research specifically addressing the role and effects of forms of feedback, other than recasts, namely prompts, in the second language classroom where the focus in on language use as a means of communication rather than the objectification of it. This context employs focus on form, a brief pedagogical intervention that momentarily shifts the focus of the class from meaning to linguistic form (See Long, 1991). Because prompts withhold correct forms (Lyster, 2004; Lyster & Saito, 2010), encourage students to simultaneously notice and self-correct (Lyster & Ranta, 1997), and push modified, student-generated output (de Bot, 1996; Lyster & Izquierdo, 2009; Lyster & Saito, 2010; Swain & Lapkin, 1995), they may be theoretically more appropriate for a focus on form context. This study examines this role in its function and efficacy comparing an implicit prompt, the clarification request, with an explicit prompt, metalinguistic feedback on students’ spoken errors in the use of a very complex target structure, the subjunctive in nominal clauses in Spanish. Efficacy of the feedback is measured through successful student uptake, that is, whether or not students are able to self-repair as a result of the intervention and then through development operationalized as mean gains in a pre-test/post-test design. Statistical significance is shown for uptake with metalinguistic feedback only, however no development is shown as a result of any feedback due to the target structure’s acquisition complexity.

This dissertation examines the relationship between the researcher's assessment and students' perceptions of both out-of-class contact and oral proficiency in a study abroad context. The participants of two University of Massachusetts Amherst programs in Spain were investigated in the summer and fall of 2002. Self-report surveys of out-of-class contact were administered to these students, focusing on prior experience with Spanish, as well as interactive and noninteractive contact in Spanish and English during the sojourn abroad. In addition, students' self-evaluations of their oral proficiency levels were compared to the researcher's ratings, determined through oral interviews following the ACTFL OPI protocol. Finally, students kept language journals while abroad in order to continually reflect on a series of introspective questions about language and learning opportunities. In a follow-up to the main study, five students who studied abroad a second time in the spring of 2003 also responded to a series of questions about their approach to learning abroad, comparing their two University of Massachusetts Amherst program experiences. The results of and responses to these instruments permit the researcher to gauge how students perceived the contributions of out-of-class contact to their oral proficiency levels and their overall learning process. In addition to fostering awareness and encouraging active learning on the part of participants, this project and its findings should enable future program planners to more effectively prepare students to maximize opportunities for interaction while abroad.

This thesis develops a model of Spanish intonation designed to account for all possible melodic contours of the language, from a phonetic and phonological point of view. The principles and methods used are mostly derived from the Pierrehumbert (1980) theory of English intonation. The empirical foundation for the model is based on the fundamental frequency contour, which is considered to be the phonetic representation of the underlying tonal structure. The underlying representation consists of sequences of only two tones, High and Low, which conform two tonal categories: pitch accents and boundary tones. These are considered to be on a separate autosegmental tier from the syllables and other suprasegmental elements. A set of rules associate the tones to the texts according to the stress patterns. By means of these elements and principles the phonological organization of some recurrent intonational patterns in Spanish is described, and a repertoire of pitch accents is proposed. The notation used is abstract, as only underlying units and their alignment to the text is represented. This analysis also accounts for the important intonational distinctions that occur between Spanish dialects. It is shown here that the most important differences can be described in terms of underlying tones. This suggests that these differences are not only phonetic but also phonological in nature.

Jose Maria Merino (La Coruna 1941) is one of the most notable novelists in Spain's contemporary literary panorama. His narrative work consists, as of now, of six novels and two collections of short stories. Jose Maria Merino belongs to the second moment of the "Generation of 68" proposed by the critic Santos Sanz Villanueva, a moment characterized by the interest in storytelling and by the transgression of the imperatives of the two major novelistic tendencies existing until the middle Seventies: social realism and experimentalism. This is the first in depth study of the works of Jose Maria Merino. After reviewing the characteristics of the Spanish novel during the Seventies and Eighties, I analyze the narratives of our author using three broad areas: space, time and subject. In all of them the literary mechanisms aimed at correcting the everyday notions of those three categories stand out. With metafiction and the fantastic as predominant directions, all cases have mechanisms that favor the production of stories; be it the privileged role that the physical environments play in the genesis of the narrated events, the reflections on the plot and the plotting of lives and fictions, or the large number of "mestizos," "aindiados," "indianos" and of characters composed of dream and vigil, past and present or reality and literature. The scenes of recognition many times guide the dissolution of the subjects, who need fictions to recompose themselves as completed entities. Merino's fiction, also "mestiza," mixes elements of the classic novel with some experimentalist notions, always with the freedom of invention and the interest in storytelling as the only imperatives to be followed.

<p>Abstract In the fall of 2005, France experienced the most important series of riots in its recent history. The unrest lasted for three weeks and expanded from the Paris suburbs or ?banlieues? to some three hundred towns in the entire country. However, the expansion effect was the result of forces at play between the rioters, the government, and the media. The ?event? became a spectacle that staged an asymmetrical communication between these three actors, opening a space for ?play.? The riot can be seen as a play in three acts: first; the tragedy in Clichy, the subsequent Paris Suburbs burning, and finally a performance of the absurd, erupting in the provinces. Through the play element, this dissertation explores what the public sphere and the ?paper riot? circled around but did not address fully. The notion of ?jeu? in French translates to play and game in English (in their multiple forms). Thus, this work examines the nature of these forms of play. It reveals the political game as mostly a linguistic one and that of the media as a play on images. In that process, the fusion of politics with the media offered an official version of the riots, a spectacular one. The play of the rioters took shape in the ?contagion? effect that made the riots national. When television channels realized their broadcast of the unrest had a role to play in the spreading of the unrest, they soon realized the irony and the limitations of their role. For the rioters though, play did not oppose the political, but quite the opposite: it equaled resistance for a brief moment. While the majority of the audience understood some of the hardship that the youth in the ?banlieues? experiences on a daily basis, overall it did not understand the rioters? acts, burning cars, gymnasiums and schools in their own neighborhoods. In that sense, the spectacle brought attention on the treatment of visible minorities in France but it failed to decipher their means of expression. Resume A l?automne 2005, la France a connu la serie d?emeutes la plus importante de ses banlieues. A l?origine, la mort de deux adolescents de Clichy-sous-Bois poursuivis par la police a declenche trois semaines de violences en region parisienne d?abord, puis en province. Toutefois, la gestion politique des emeutes ainsi que les representations mediatiques des violences ont joue un role dans l?expansion des emeutes et ce qui a fait < l?evenement >. Dans cet entrelacs d?echanges s?est tisse l?espace d?un jeu ephemere qui a mis en scene la communication asymetrique de ses acteurs et le dialogue de sourd qui sevit entre les institutions francaises et la banlieue. Tel un theatre de rue, l?emeute a pris la forme d?une piece en trois actes : la tragedie a Clichy, suivie d?une phase francilienne pour culminer avec une performance de l?absurde en province. Les trois acteurs de l?emeute ont forme le jeu politique, de nature linguistique, le jeu mediatique, un jeu d?images et enfin le jeu des emeutiers. En effet, afin de repondre a un jeu perdu d?avance, les emeutiers ont developpe un jeu dans l?expansion des emeutes a l?echelle nationale. Entre nihilisme et emancipation, entre phase ludique et acte de resistance, le jeu ne s?oppose ni au serieux, ni au politique. Au contraire, cette these demontre la nature politique du jeu. Pourtant, si l?opinion publique a pu reconnaitre l?existence d?un malaise profond vecu et partage par la jeunesse des quartiers, dans l?ensemble elle n?a pas compris et approuve le mode d?expression des emeutiers. Dans ce sens, le spectacle a bien mis en lumiere l?urgence d?une remise en cause du traitement des minorites visibles en France, toutefois il n?a pas su decrypter le mode operatoire des emeutiers.

<p> In less than a decade since the onset of the global economic crisis, more than 2 million people have left Spain in search of work and the possibility of a livable existence. Many of these economic exiles are young and highly qualified, leading some to classify this exodus as a brain drain. Lingering labor market instability and growing mistrust in Spain&rsquo;s political system portend a challenging future for members of the so-called &ldquo;lost generation,&rdquo; both at home and abroad. Meanwhile, many questions remain about the lasting effects and repercussions of the crisis and massive departure of young Spaniards. </p><p> In response, the recession and ensuing surge in emigration have been popular themes of economic, demographic and sociological research in recent years; however, the cultural productions representative of this group remain relatively unstudied. The current investigation focuses on a selection of documentary films and fictional literature that portray the experiences of these highly qualified migrants. Through close analysis of these works, narrative patterns and trends appeared. These literary and audiovisual texts manifest the dialectical tensions of exile literature theorized by Sophia McClennen as well as the complex nostalgias of Svetlana Boym. They also reject and redefine the generational terms imposed upon them, express diasporic solidarity and call for political involvement and collective action. The rhetorical undercurrents at work in these constructions of individual and group identity suggest the emergence of an archetypal narrative of the new Spanish migrant. The cultural negotiations implicit in this narrative seem to confirm that sweeping but gradual societal changes are taking effect, even beyond Spain's borders.</p>

<p> <i>Condolences to All of You</i> assembles various poems whose creation spans the period between late 2011 and late 2014, with the vast majority formed during the latter half of that time. Included are conceptual poems of a visual or ideological nature, narrative poems exploring adolescence and ecology, and lyrical examinations of the crisis of mortality in the twenty-first century. Many of these darkly humorous poems obscure distinctions between elegy, eulogy, epitaph and celebration, while pleading for the imagination's affirmation in a human era of purported existential certainty. The essay preceding the poems debates their roles and merits among the flailing despair of twentieth century literary criticism, and puts forth a guide to formal and content-driven motives for the mechanics of the poems themselves. </p>

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.