This thesis examines female political imprisonment during the early part of Spain’s Franco regime through the life narratives by Carlota O’Neill, Tomasa Cuevas, Juana Doña, and Soledad Real published during the transition. It proposes the foregrounding notion of the ‘No/Body’ to describe the literary, social, and historical eradication and exemplification of the female prisoner as deviant. Using critical theories of genre, gender and sexuality, sociology and philosophy, and human geography, it discusses the concepts of subject, abject, spatiality, habitus, and the mirror to analyse the intersecting, influential factors in the (re)production of dominant discourses within Francoist and post-Francoist society that are interrogated throughout the corpus. In coining the concept of the ‘No/Body’ as a methodological approach, a narrative form, and a socio-political subject position, this thesis repositions the marginal and the (in)visible as an essential aspect of female carcerality. Read through this concept, the narratives begin to dismantle and rewrite dominant narratives of gender and genre for the female prisoner in such a way that the texts foreground the ‘No/Body’. This thesis thus presents the narrative corpus of lost testimonies as a form of radical textual and political practice within contemporary Spanish historiography.

Dada is often dismissed as an anti-art movement that engaged with a limited and merely destructive theoretical impetus. French Existentialism is often condemned for its perceived quietist implications. However, closer analysis reveals a preoccupation with philosophy in the former and with art in the latter. Neither was nonsensical or meaningless, but both reveal a rich individualist ethics aimed at the amelioration of the individual and society. It is through their combined analysis that we can view and productively utilise their alignment. Offering new critical aesthetic and philosophical approaches to Dada as a quintessential part of the European Avant-Garde, this thesis performs a reassessment of the movement as a form of (proto-)Existentialist philosophy. The thesis represents the first major comparative study of Dada and Existentialism, contributing a new perspective on Dada as a movement, a historical legacy, and a philosophical field of study. The five chapters analyse a range of Dada work through a lens of Existentialist literary and theoretical works across the themes of choice, alienation, responsibility, freedom and truth. These themes contribute to the overarching claim of the thesis that Dada and Existentialism both advocate the creation of a self that aims for authenticity through ambiguity.

abstract: Over the centuries, definite articles in Romance languages have expanded their use to include generic, collective, and abstract nouns, essentially becoming noun markers. This usage is not confined to just a few languages, either, but is found in most, if not all, Romance languages, major and minor. This thesis examines the question of how this came to be, whether through diffusion from one language to all others, or through independent parallel development. I first trace the history of definite articles in three major Romance languages, French, Spanish, and Italian, starting with the emergence of the definite article in Late Latin as it derived from Classic Latin demonstratives. It includes an analysis of the use of definite articles in six works of literature, one in each language from the late thirteenth century, and one in each language from around the year 1500. The results show definite articles were used more frequently than expected in the earlier Spanish work, perhaps hinting at diffusion from Spain. Nevertheless, placing these results in historical context, I argue that this use arose through independent parallel development through the process that gave birth to definite articles in the first place - grammaticalization. / Dissertation/Thesis / Masters Thesis Linguistics and Applied Linguistics 2019

Em vista da permeabilidade conceptual do nonsense literário, a exploração do eixo cómico de Aliceþs Adventures in Wonderland e Through the Looking-glass é uma via de demarcação teórica e análise prática do nonsense carrolliano. Com efeito, tendo previamente assumido uma linha de tradição literária enraizada no cómico, estabelecem-se várias conexões entre o discurso nonsense, enquadrado nos esquemas socioculturais vitorianos, e as práticas linguísticas pós-românticas, nomeadamente a introversão da linguagem poética na sua significação interna que legitima a construção verbal nonsense deslocada e descentrada do seu apoio referencial. Nesta perspectiva, a desconstrução cómica da realidade nos textos de Carroll intercepta a distorção subjectiva do mundo empírico característica do simbolismo onírico e, como tal, torna-se possível localizar no processo simbólico da figuração verbal nonsense o seu evidente sentido: a confirmação da realidade da linguagem poética.

Após uma introdução ao romance histórico (Problematização, génese, evolução, modalidades na contemporaneidade), A Esmeralda Partida de Fernando Campos é devidamente enquadrada no contexto da obra deste autor contemporâneo. A obra supracitada é o romance histórico de Fernando Campos onde o universo feminino tem um peso estrutural mais relevante. A exploração literária e a riqueza dos elementos e personagens femininos nos âmbitos mais estritamente estrutural, social, político, económico, religioso, cultural, sobrenatural e supersticioso são então investigados a fundo, nunca perdendo de vista a moder nidade do texto

THE GREATEST IS LOVE is a collection of ten short stories showing the painful manifestations of romantic relationships in the lives of contemporary American characters from many walks of life. As in the stories of D.H. Lawrence, these characters are often driven towards what may be bad for them, finding that love overrides their rational thoughts. In “The Mechanic” a woman whose legal career has left her isolated becomes irresistibly attracted to her friend’s ex-husband. Three stories center on one character, Charles, whose early failures both in college and at work lead him to become a detective, only to be tempted to betray his new calling by a woman who leads him astray. As in Italo Calvino’s Difficult Loves, the stories in THE GREATEST IS LOVE combine the pain and comedy of passion. Even when it is challenging, love offers characters irresistible glimmers of hope.

Seventeenth and eighteenth-century French writers on Louisiana produced a wealth of propaganda on the colony known as Louisiana. This literature contained extensive descriptions of the colony's environment, peoples, and history. Stated within this literature were French plans for building a new society in Louisiana. French writers on Louisiana intended to improve upon the Ancien Regime French society which had proven unsatisfactory, violent, and inadequate in the eyes of many of its members. Despite their plans to remake their society in a better form in Louisiana, the French writers failed in their endeavors to construct a non-violent community in the territory. The reason for this failure was the fact that the Louisiana French showed definite destructive proclivities in their social construction. The Louisiana French believed that the sacrifice of the natural environment and of non-white peoples living in the colony was acceptable if made for the greater good of the civilization they tried to build. The French in Louisiana exploited the environment and destroyed Native American culture and African-American freedom in their pursuit of social-construction. The decision to exploit the landscape and the peoples of Louisiana resulted in a society that was violent, much like Ancien Regime France, as seen by the revolts and conspiracies that resulted from European policy in the region. The French writers and other philosophes revealed this violence in their records of the history of the colony and their anti-imperialist literature / acase@tulane.edu

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Jose Angel Valente is unique among Spain's contemporary poets because of his singular dedication to the process of poetic creation. His work emphasizes the importance of regenerating the essential, original and vital capacity of language For Valente, the poetic, creative act, is a process of discovery, a way to acquire knowledge of man's existence and of universal principles. He assigns the reader an active role that is as creative as the poet's. Valente usually writes enigmatic, perplexing poems that acquire wider meaning through indirect reference to sources outside the text. These poems function like a code or system which permits the reader to view them not just as autonomous entities, organic wholes, but as intertextual constructs. The reader frequently has to perform rapid, unanticipated aesthetic 'adjustments' when confronting Valente's texts Valente's own preoccupation with the creative process especially that undertaken by the mystics, compels him to venture into linguistic spaces where he finds the greatest tension between unspoken and spoken content. Valente's concept of poetic creation brings to mind the kabbalist's perception of Scripture as an inexhaustible well. Just as the texts of the Kabbalah, Valente's work seek the cooperation of the reader who is already disposed to create a hermeneutics in order to discover meanings by himself/herself The object of this dissertation is to bring into the foreground Valente's theory of the creative process, his idea of writing as a constant movement of inquiry and experimentation. This study emphasizes the interconnections that exist between Valente's work and mysticism. This dissertation explores how poetic, erotic, and mystic elements appear in his poetry like three manifestations of a single, identical experience. This study also examines the influence on Valente's work of surrealism and of the aesthetics of other arts, particularly painting and music and their connection to Valente's idea of the poetic process / acase@tulane.edu

The Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) has been treated frequently in literary as well as in historical studies. However, scholarly work on the songs of the Spanish Civil War has lagged behind literary studies. This dissertation examines the songs of the Spanish Civil War and explores the dialectical relationship between history and popular lyrics within a social and literary framework. An understanding of the function of the popular war song contributes to our comprehension of the importance of popular poetry among certain social groups or classes of Spanish society during the 1930's The present work, using as examples some 100 songs, analyzes them according to their context, function, and themes. In each chapter I explore the historical and literary antecedents of the Spanish Civil War song as historical document and as popular literature The first chapter of this study focuses on the interrelationships of literature and popular song in Spain. The primary emphasis is on the place of musical lyrics in the history and development of Spanish poetry. This chapter also analyzes the song's poetic structure and style at the lexico-semantic and linguistic levels and it provides as well an introduction to their ideological content The next four chapters form the body of the thesis. The first two chapters discuss the theme of the two Spains, which Menendez Pidal has identified as 'conservative' and 'progressive,' and which have characterized Spain throughout its history. These chapters explore the ideological bases that inspired both sides, the Republicans and the Nationalists, and their representation within the Civil War song The final two chapters center exclusively on the religious question and on the meaning of death in the war song. These two subjects, with deep roots in Spanish life and literature, are of fundamental importance to the poetry of the song I conclude by suggesting that in the popular song of the Spanish Civil War we see the problematic interaction of two literary discourses, one critical and the other fictional, with both dependant on the historical period in which they developed / acase@tulane.edu