Designed as an introduction to some concerns of the postmodern moment--a moment which demands an awareness of 'being-within' language as well as a particular historical, social, and cultural framework--this text reads selected contemporary theory and contemporary fiction as a means of interrogating their shared discursive space. Neither is privileged over the other: the theory is not used to explicate the fiction, and the fiction is not presented as proof of the theory. Neither is the site of Truth; rather, the theory and the fiction use varying narrative strategies to express similar critiques and concerns of the postmodern moment. Poststructuralism's use (and critique) of the tenets of structuralism is introduced in a chapter which reads Italo Calvino's "A Sign in Space" as a fabulous tale which discovers and then dismantles the Saussurean understanding of linguistic signs. The deconstruction of the linguistic sign continues in a larger critique of representation in the following chapter, which brings together J. M. Coetzee's novel, Foe, and Jacques Derrida's essays, "Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences" and "Differance," to discuss the shift from a mimetic confidence in the referentiality of language to an awareness of the unstable function performed by any semiotic sign. The subject is then looked at as an historically specific construct, and in its relationship to power, with Michel Foucault's essay "The Subject and Power" and Michel Tournier's novel Friday providing the primary texts. The following chapter uses Roland Barthes' essay "From Work to Text" and Foe and Friday as a means of discussing intertextuality. The final chapter brings the theoretical tools gathered thus far to the discussion of history within the postmodern moment. The counter-memory of three novels (Christa Wolf's Cassandra, Timothy Findley's Famous Last Words, and Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children), each an example of 'historiographic metafiction', is highlighted, along with Michel Foucault's essay, "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History."

The purpose of this study is twofold: to explore the social and linguistic factors that influence the variable application of some phonological processes of Central Asturian, and to test the hypothesis that establishes a relation between the structure of society and the hierarchical structure of phonological segments. This hypothesis predicts that processes that operate at a higher level in the segmental structure will be socially less acceptable than processes that affect the segmental structure at a lower level. Chapter one outlines the socio-historical circumstances that have led to the present linguistic situation of Asturias. It describes the origins of Asturian and Castilian, the two languages in contact in the area, and the relation between these languages up to the present day. The most representative characteristics of the pronunciation of Central Asturian are also presented in this chapter. In chapter two, the treatment of post-nuclear stop and nasal segments, and the processes that affect stressed and unstressed vowels in Asturian, are interpreted within the theoretical framework provided by autosegmental phonology. The processes that affect stop segments are viewed as processes triggered by sonority restrictions of the Asturian syllable. All processes operate on a structure in which segmental features are hierarchically organized by delinking and spreading features, plus some language-specific default rules. The third chapter presents the results of a sociolinguistic study conducted in the industrial city of Langreo, in Central Asturias. This study employs the methodology developed in quantitative sociolinguistic studies. Speech data from the city of Langreo were obtained in a series of recorded interviews conducted by the author with a representative sample of residents. The results of the variational analysis determine the actual degree of use of Asturian features among the different sectors of the population, and address questions of the status and stability of the local language. The results partially support the hypothesis that there is a relation between the segmental structure and the structure of society.

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.

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.

This dissertation describes in-depth, using participant's words, experiences of undergraduate college writers. The study was undertaken in an attempt to understand from a student perspective what it is like to write in one's major course of study and throughout the university curriculum. There were seven students, representing different academic majors at a large university. Each were interviewed in a series of three open-ended interviews totaling four and one-half hours. Key questions followed Seidman's (1987) protocol for phenomenological in-depth interviewing: What was writing like for you before college? What is writing like for you now? And, What does your writing mean to you? Interviews were recorded and transcribed verbatim, Three participant's transcripts were edited into profiles of the individual writers while other interviews were used to illumine themes common to all the participants. Insights from this study suggest students are "practitioners" and possess a certain "practitioner-expertise" in being student writers. This practitioner knowledge reveals student experiences are more complex than indicated by previous research. Among these complexities are students' interactions with their instructors, and their own procrastination, which produce tension about writing. Forms of this tension are explored in the histories and current experiences of different students. These experiences indicated that when student writing is perceived as a "task" which must be completed simply to comply with a course requirement, there is a tendency to approach writing in a formulaic way, with little attention paid to the writing processes. On the other hand, the participants expressed that writing is a positive experience at times when they are consciously aware it has contributed to their learning in a subject-area or when it has aided them in their personal growth. The study indicates writing in college is often shaped by the bureaucratic enterprise of grading and sorting students. Recommendations include making teacher-student interactions consultative and personable, teachers and administrators stronger advocates for smaller class size, and giving students choices of instructional approaches to writing so individual needs as writers are being met in composition courses and across the curriculum.