The purpose of this study is to explore literary representations of the human subject in the work of Alain Robbe-Grillet (1922–2008) and Marguerite Duras (1914–1996), and to do so using a modified, updated version of Peter Brooks’s influential theorization of plot in terms of desire. Both ‘subject’ and ‘representation’ will receive critical attention; in particular, the relation of ‘subject’ to ‘character’ will be explored. Post-Cartesian traditions tend to ground definitions of the subject in particular concepts of its relation to knowledge. As far as Descartes’s shadow extends, the individual is seen as coherent, self-aware and exercising freedom of choice. Throughout the nineteenth century, theories of social and medical determinism reflected in Realism and Naturalism posed new challenges to the belief that individuals are self-determining; but whilst they eroded certain assumptions concerning subjecthood in this way, they did not pose radical questions concerning the ability of art accurately to represent the relation of the individual to the (social) world. The assumptions underlying the writing of novels remained rooted in a concept of literature as mimesis. The classic nineteenth-century realist novel aspired to offer a plausible representation or imitation of the real world and, in spite of subsequent radical movements including the nouveau roman, it has left an enduring legacy. The 1950s and 1960s were a time of self-conscious experimentation with the novel: when Robbe-Grillet, Duras and others were writing their most celebrated works, the anti-realist novel – the nouveau roman – with its radical break from conventionally mimetic storytelling was only just beginning to develop a set of conventions and descriptions. Roland Barthes confidently proclaimed the ‘death of the author’ and celebrated the ‘birth of the reader’. During and after the nouveau roman movement, Robbe-Grillet and Duras attempt very different writing experiments, but there are clear parallels to be made. In Pour un nouveau roman, Robbe-Grillet initially presents his work as breaking with realism and mimesis, and ultimately concerned with (self-reflexive) ‘écriture’ alone. Accordingly, he claims that his works cannot be read in terms of their ‘representation’ of the world, or related to conventional notions of character; he seems to distance himself, in particular, from readings that assume a coherent, analysable ‘psychology’ in the (post-Cartesian) character. Similarly, Duras has often been assimilated with the nouveau roman movement, as she is held to write experimentally from the early 1950s in ways that subvert and challenge the traditional, male-authored novels of the literary canon as it was constituted in mid-twentieth-century France. Indeed, she has been held up as a rare example of écriture féminine. Peter Brooks’s argument that plot is driven (as if) by desire is a valid and exciting one that allows narratology and psychoanalysis to be brought into conjunction. But the desire he invokes is (stereotypically) ‘masculine’, being the desire of a male subject for a (passive) female object; and he allows this ‘plot of desire’, which might be termed ‘desire in the masculine’, a normative status. Using close readings of Robbe-Grillet and Duras, this thesis modifies Brooks’s thesis by asking what a plot of ‘female’ desire might be, besides a softened or more passive version of the ‘male’ plot. This allows us to reassess each writer’s break with traditional notions of representation and subject by reviewing their writing practice in terms of desire. In spite of his claims in Pour un nouveau roman, Robbe-Grillet clings tenaciously to a ‘masculine’ plot throughout his writing; and whilst Duras initially deploys a similar structure, she increasingly problematises it, though without breaking from it altogether, and so offers possibilities for representing desire ‘in the feminine’.

This thesis addresses, amongst other issues, the phenomenon of the professional development and teacher training of the University Portuguese language teachers in England. Nowadays society needs a new profile of teacher who is capable of facing various challenges. These are essentially related to technologies and new knowledge, according to the European Higher Education Area. Therefore, the focus of our study is directed to the training of the University Portuguese Language Teachers at the English universities, in particular at the University of Nottingham (developing a case study) in order to contribute for a reflection of their needs of training and preparation for their job. We also seek for the students’ opinion on this subject and we try to understand the context of a society clearly dominated by a culture of monolonguism and resistence to the learning of foreign languages. For this reason, and because the number of investigations on the subject is scarce, this is a contribution to reflect on the main aspects to take into consideration in the preparation of training for this specific professionals.

This study reviews a series of theoretical models and educational experiences, in order to examine how some of the claims made in the existing literature regarding the role of IT - mainly computer technologies - in writing instruction play out in the case of Italian as a Foreign Language (IFL). With this purpose in mind, this study examines a specific context - three IFL modules taught at the University of Warwick - and uses relevant teaching and learning experiences as a case-study and data sample. By using qualitative analysis supported by some quantitative methodologies, this study triangulates data from questionnaires, semi-structured interviews, focus-groups, field notes, classroom observation rubrics, as well as classroom artefacts, including online resources and educational software used over the course of the academic years 2004-2005 and 2005-2006. The data collected is filtered through a tripartite framework - learning/instructional environment, IFL tutors, and IFL students - designed to address the need expressed in the literature for analysis of multiple dimensions in complex interactions (Abbott, 1997; Athanases and Heath, 1995; Ramanathan and Atkinson, 1999; Snyder, 1997). The salient themes which emerge from the study are the critical roles of IFL tutors' and IFL students' expectations as well as the framework of values underlying these, along with particular features of information technologies themselves, in shaping participants' experiences and practices with respect to IT and writing, sometimes in unanticipated ways. Finally, the study considers the ways in which the results of the present research support, contradict, or expand existing literature, especially in relation to a number of specific factors, such as: the type of IT used in writing instruction; the physical configurations of IT-enhanced classrooms; and students' as well as tutors' approaches to learning and teaching IFL writing with and without technology. While the present work, like many other studies in the field of SLA and L2 writing, does not provide complete answer to the complex questions of language learning, it highlights the importance of both the instructional environment as well as the participants' framework of values. Only then, IT will be able to potentially enhance language instruction and become an integral component of learning. This research raises new questions, providing the basis for further research in the area of SLA theory and pedagogy.

The purpose of the present research is to investigate the presence of Dante in four authors of the twentieth century and to discuss in what ways these authors contribute to our perception of Dante. This study begins with the analysis of Primo Levi’s reaction to Dante, and the first two chapters deal respectively with Levi’s troubled relationship with the monumentality of Dante in Levi’s personal culture and with the modern writer’s attempts at rejecting that very monumentality. In the third and fourth chapters, the focus is on the inclusion of Dante within Edoardo Sanguineti’s poetry, and on the issue of ideologically oriented exploitation of Dante both in Sanguineti’s novels and plays and in his critical analyses of the Comedy. The following chapters are about the presence of Dante in Samuel Beckett and Seamus Heaney. In Beckett, a network of Dantean inclusions shows how Dante’s presence can be fertile, controversial, and yet apparently discarded. The last chapter discusses Seamus Heaney’s Dantisms and especially the question of translation as both a technical and a cultural issue. The result is the perception of a vital Dantean presence, which generates approaches and revalidations in spite of its apparent distance and of its cultural diversity.

This thesis examines reader responses to Catalan identity through the reception of two Catalan novels in translation: Stone in a Landslide by Maria Barbal and For a Sack of Bones by Lluís- Anton Baulenas. Drawing on theories from Descriptive Translation Studies and cultural and sociological approaches to translation, it examines how representations of Catalan culture and identity are subject to influence from different agents at each stage of the translation and reception process. The thesis explores three areas: the role of translation within Catalan culture in the promotion of Catalan identity; the way in which this role is relevant to the translation process itself within the target culture; and finally whether the objectives of this role are achieved within the target market. This study offers a new approach to the study of the reader within Translation Studies, using blogs, online reviews and reading groups in order to gain access to real reader responses to translated literature and offers a methodology by which the study of the representation of culture through translation may be explored. The results of this study have relevance not only to translation research and practice, but also to translation policy, particularly for minority cultures.

The study presented in this thesis focuses on teacher-student talk-in-interaction in three Italian classes for beginners taught by two teachers, one British and one Italian, in two British universities. The aims of the study are to: (1) investigate the views of language and of language teaching/learning that informed the teachers‟ practice; (2) identify the cultural worlds and images of Italian-ness constructed through the classroom talk; (3) examine the different identities the teachers assumed as they discussed language and culture. The research combines ethnographically-informed classroom observation, video-recording of classroom interaction with discourse analysis. It is guided by poststructuralist thinking and by Kramsch‟s (1993:9) vision of language teaching/learning as “social practice that is at the boundary of two or more cultures”. It reveals similarities in the composition of the classes. Both included international students and both teachers drew on the diverse funds of linguistic and cultural knowledge represented in their classes, creating „third places‟ for language teaching/learning. The research also reveals differences between the teachers – in their views of language, their representation of Italian „culture‟ and in the classroom identities they assumed. These differences are explained with reference to the teachers‟ linguistic and cultural backgrounds and their professional biographies.

This thesis focuses on the keyword sospiro (‘sigh’) in the poetry of Guido Cavalcanti. It reads this word in relation to the lyric poetry of Occitania and Italy, and medical literature related to lovesickness. It approaches Cavalcanti’s work in this way in order to avoid the distortion of a Dantean lens, as part of a trend since the anniverary of his death in 2000 towards considering Cavalcanti’s work on its own terms. Inspired by Raymond Williams’ Keywords, this thesis looks beyond the familiar presence of sospiro in lyric poetry, revealing a word acting as a locus of innovative expression. It finds that while the sigh is generally regarded as a literary commonplace, it can in fact tell us much about the society and culture in which it is used. Sospiro is then traced in medical literature, charting its evolution as a symptom of the disease of lovesickness. Against this backdrop, a reading of sospiro in Cavalcanti’s poetry is given which argues for the need to listen to both the lyric and medical contexts when interpreting the role of this word. As such, this thesis offers a consideration of these two contexts in parallel, through sospiro, for the first time.

Perlmutter (1971)'s seminal work on clitics has set much of the research model for ensuing studies. Despite enormous changes in linguistic theory over the intervening period, models in which clitic order is determined on the basis of grammatical person remains a key ingredient of most analyses. A key tenet of the current proposal is that clitic-forms may perform more than one syntactic function, reflected in their position within an elaborated series of feature projections including heads, not only for VP argument referents but also non-argumental datives and nominative actors. Surface clitic patterns are merely sequential spell-outs of this structure. There is no need for clitic re-ordering at a morphological or syntactic level. The proposed model requires no complex exclusion or conversion mechanisms nor sophisticated syntactic processes, whilst being iconic and, therefore, learnable without the need for prior knowledge e.g. Universal Grammar constraints. The model has no need of lexicalized units, treating all clusters as purely compositional sequences directly interpretable from context. Giving each 'case' its own position leads to a simple and coherent model readily applicable across Romance. The work addresses 1-/2-/3-/4-clitic clusters in French, Italian, Spanish, Occitan, Catalan, and Romanian in their various dialect forms, whilst briefly illustrating many other Romance dialects.

This thesis considers the post-war œuvre of Louise Weiss through the analytical framework of the travel narrative. The primary sources for this study comprise the substantial number of previously unexamined journal articles, photographic collections, monographs, and short documentaries which Weiss wrote following her journeys throughout Asia, North America, Africa, and the Middle East in the twenty-five years after the Second World War. Previously defined by her early career as a journalist, her lifelong advocacy for peace, and her campaigns for women’s suffrage during the interwar period, this study positions Weiss in a new narrative – that of post-war travel writer with a desire to discover a moral code that would mitigate the turbulence and fragility she perceived in the twentieth century. The analysis of this considerable body of source material is approached through the themes of spirituality, myth, and power. These themes, which emerge organically from Weiss's multi-media post-war œuvre, offer a fresh perspective on the French post-war travel narrative and allow a new understanding of both the traveller’s gaze and the notion of displacement.

This study proposes a methodology that combines techniques from corpus linguistics with theory from the Discourse-Historical Approach (DHA) to Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA). The methodology is demonstrated using a corpus comprising transcripts of Hugo Chávez’s television programme, Aló Presidente, broadcast between January 2002 and June 2007. In this thesis, I identify a number of criticisms of CDA and suggest that corpus linguistics can be used to reduce the principle risks: over-/under-interpretation of data and ensuring that the examples used are representative. I then present a methodology designed to minimise these effects, based upon a hypothesis that semantic fields are used more frequently in periods when they are topical, and therefore one can isolate instances which were produced at times of change. I use the Aló Presidente corpus to present a detailed description of three such semantic fields and then adopt the concept of discourse strategies from the DHA to demonstrate how Chávez’s framing of the topics changes with time. This leads to a set of conclusions which seek to answer the research question: How is life in Venezuela framed as having changed under Chávez’s Presidency by reference to his Aló Presidente television programme during the period 2002-2007?