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published_or_final_version / abstract / English Studies / Master / Master of Arts

published_or_final_version / Chinese Language and Literature / Master / Master of Arts

The Historia de la Nueva Mexico, by Gaspar Perez de Villagra, has been one of the less studied epic poems in Hispanic American literary criticism. The purpose of this study is to show the text's literary characteristics and justify its inclusion within the tradition of Ariosto's romanzi, which was earlier followed by La Araucana, paradigm of the epic discourse in Hispanic America. The analysis borrows from a structuralist-narratologic methodology developed in the works of Gerard Genette, Felix Martinez Bonatti, Cedomil Goic and Julia Kristeva. The study begins with the analysis of the different definitions of 'epic genre' from Aristotle and Horatio to the twentieth century and the theories of Genette about architextuality. Once establishing the definitions, the study proceeds to differentiate between the two generic variants: the romance and the epic. The purpose here is to show that the principles of textual disposition applied by epic authors of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in Hispanic America belong to the romance, and this gives the discourse a very distinct structural physiognomy. A comparative analysis of some of the best known epic poems in Hispanic America show their structural singularity, as well as their inclusion within Ariosto's tradition. The texts analyzed are: Arauco domado, Peregrino indiano, Puren indomito, Argentina y Conquista del Rio de la Plata, La Christiada, and Bernardo. In Chapter Four the study centers on the transtextual relationships established between La Araucana and Villagra's poem, which determine the individuality of the Historia de la Nueva Mexico and its inclusion within the Hispanic American literary canon. The poem's uniqueness is based on its peculiar narrative structure, the hypertextual relationship it maintains with the Ercillan paradigm, as well as the juxtaposition of codes that determine an intertextual space. This space is the aesthetic image of ideological tensions in the narrator's perspective. It is the tensions which place both the narrator and the text within the ideological and artistic parameters of the Baroque period.

This dissertation studies parts of six medieval Jewish Torah commentaries in order to examine how they related to what we call Pentateuchal poetry. It examines their general approaches to Bible interpretation and their treatments of all Pentateuchal poems. It focusses on qualities we associate with poetry--parallelism, structure, metaphor, and syntax--and explores the extent to which they treated poems differently from prose. / The effort begins by defining Pentateuchal poetry and discussing a range of its presentations by various ancient writers. Subsequent chapters examine its treatment by Rabbi Saadia Gaon of Baghdad (882-942), Abraham Ibn Ezra of Spain (1089-1164), Samuel Ben Meir (1080-1160) and Joseph Bekhor Shor (12th century) of Northern France, David Kimhi of Provence (1160-1235), and Obadiah Sforno of Italy (1470-1550). / While all of these commentators wrote on the poetic passages, none differentiated systematically between Pentateuchal prose and poetry or treated them in substantially different ways. Samuel Ben Meir, Ibn Ezra, Bekhor Shor, and Kimhi did discuss some poetic features of these texts. The other two men were far less inclined to do so, but occasionally recognized some differences between prose and poetry and some phenomena unique to the latter.

This dissertation tests and evaluates four current theories of the verse structure of biblical Hebrew poetry. These theories are: the counting of minimal units, such as poetic feet, stresses or syllables, practiced in various forms since antiquity, and recently employed by D. N. Freedman, F. M. Cross and others, the analysis of poetic line-forms proposed by Terence Collins, the syntactic structural analysis proposed by M. O'Connor, and the semantic analysis practiced by Willow van der Meer, Johannes de Moor and a group of scholars associated with the Kampen School of Theology. All of these theories purport to identify and explain the fundamentals of biblical Hebrew verse structure. Each of these theories is presented comprehensively. These presentations include a review of literature relevant to the field of Hebrew verse structure studies in general, and to these four current theories of verse structure in particular. / These four theories are applied to four poetic passages from the Hebrew Bible: Judges 5:2--31, Isaiah 5:1--7, Lamentations 1 and Psalm 126. These applications show how each of these theories describes the verse structure of each of the poems. Following this, the theories and their applications to these passages are compared to determine which, if any, of these theories are effective in distinguishing poetry from prose, distinguishing one poem from another, predicting the form of a poem, and prescribing rules for the composition of poetry. The strengths and weaknesses of each theory are identified. In addition, the reasons for the failure of these theories to provide an adequate description of the verse structure of biblical Hebrew poetry are indicated.

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