En mi deseo por mostrar una nueva perspectiva tanto en Cárcel de Amor como en La Celestina, encontré un artículo que encierra muchas de mis ideas sobre estas dos obras medievales: “El Ojo de la Mente”, escrito por Michael Rifaterre. Para Rifaterre lo que realmente importa en la intertextualidad de los ibros medievales es el hecho de que se busca un texto homólogo, se hacen asociaciones a textos ya conocidos, se apela a los archivos mentales tanto del lector como del escritor. En otras palabras, la memoria es el estilo que sirve para presentar el contenido. Esto para mí es una perspetiva fascinante que me hizo ver muchas obras desde puntos de vista diferentes. Si la memoria es un determinante de estilo y un elemento influyente en el contenido, la memoria define en gran parte tanto el estilo como el contenido. Empecé por considerar a La Celestina a partir de esta premisa y me pareció más abstracta que nunca. Pensé como Gilman en su libro Arte y Estrutura, que la obra es un continuum de la conciencia, es conciencia hablada. Reduje los personajes a imágenes a movimientos de pantomima como hizo Dorothy Clarke en su libro, Decalogue and Deadly Sins in La Celestina. Concluí como Lida de Malkiel que la obra da suficiente tiep para que se comunique una noción de realidad y de verosimilitud psicológica, no para el desarrollo emocional de los personajes como piensa Malkiel, sino un tiempo suficiente para afianzar un concepto en la memoria. Visto desde un ángulo menos abstracto, el hecho de que a memoria es determinante de estilo y contenido acercó en mi opinión a La Celestina más al género de la novela. Me hizo considerar aspectos como el narrador fidedigno y la narración confiable o no confiable en una obra que según algunos, no tiene narrador. En Cárcel de Amor encontré el primer juicio por jurado de las obras medievales que he leído. En esta obra vi una clara separación, casi simétrica entre lo que es real y lo que es abstracto. Pasamos de lo abstracto a lo concreto para recordar algo. Tenemos una prisión alegórica y una real, un duelo alegórico y uno real, las armas del alma pecadora y las armas que matan al hombre, el rey que es Dios y un rey que está en una corte real, el juicio final que propone la teología cristiana y un juicio por jurado en el que la memoria juega un papel muy importante. La memoria prevalece por sí sola en estas obras. Llega a ser un elemento de narración, y un marcador de identidad. En el aspecto religioso, cumple una función moral. En el aspecto humano da nuevas dimensiones a los personajes. En el aspecto literario es un fuerte marcador de estilo y contenido que abre nuevas puertas a la interpretación de estas obras.

This study examines and explains the politically, ecclesiastically and socially motivated perceptions of Joan of Arc by the French and the British focusing on late medieval and early Renaissance depictions. Joan was tried by the British in France. Even so, she had a text-book British heresy trial according to the precedent set during John Badby's trial in 1401. Equally importantly, close examination of fifteenth century French texts shows French ambivalence towards, diminution of and, in some cases, complete rejection of Joan and her role in French history. Indeed, the British perceptions about the Maid are the only perspectives on Joan that remained constant through the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Our modern perceptions of Joan of Arc seem fairly stable. Yet what became evident during the research for this project is that this stability is a recent development we have simply inherited Napoleon's view of the Maid of Orléans. Throughout the Middle Ages and Renaissance, the British characterized Joan of Arc as a witch and a great threat to their political well-being. British ideas about Joan of Arc, however negative and contrary they may seem to our modern ideas about her, are the only ideas that remained constant during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.

Matrixial reading is a new methodology for literary criticism that emphasizes the ethical relevance of literature. Adhering to an interdisciplinary approach, I adopt feminist artist and psychoanalyst Bracha Ettinger's paradigm of subjectivity-as-encounter, based on the maternal/late pre-natal infant relation, to refigure reading relations. Analyzing selected texts, I show how readers are invited to form an ethical covenant based on matrixial, as opposed to phallic, relations. I discuss exile and the foreign in Dany Laferrière's novels; Marguerite Duras' work provokes an epistemological reflection on ignorance; with Nancy Huston I demonstrate the role of reading in healing trauma.

Aphoristic thoughts must be distinguished from their articulation in aphorisms, for they are found in all other genres of discourse as well. Within these discourses they present non-discursive points, i.e. points where the mind interrupts the linear progression of the text in order to stop and contemplate a momentary end of thinking. This study seeks to isolate the thought from thinking. It does so in a series of reflections on German, French and English aphoristic texts. These reflections explore a viable alternative to the contextualist paradigms of literary criticism, history, and philosophy. Instead of reintegrating the isolated thought in an extended historical narrative or critical argument, this method seeks to respond to it with another thought. The "context" of the thinker's thought is not a genre, a literal text, or field of inquiry, but a world that is only rarely textual in a literal sense. Unlike the disciplines to which most serious reflection is devoted, the aphoristic utterance makes sense outside a formal discipline. One motif around which the independent sections of this study are arranged are Goethe's and Nietzsche's thoughtful wanderer, exposed to the elements outside. Another is Nietzsche's gay or cheerful science, in which ultimately nihilistic ideals like certainty, consistency and truth are diagnosed, treated with and replaced by the wit, partiality and idiosyncracy of the aphorist. In addition, the study discusses aspects of the scholarship, addresses the problem of the aphoristic collection, and attempts an inventory of aphoristic ends.

This dissertation discusses Anna Banti's Artemisia, Roberto Rossellini's Paisà, Ingeborg Bachmann short story “Simultan,” Helma Sanders-Brahms' Deutschland, bleiche Mutter and Alain Resnais' Hiroshima mon amour. The novels and films addressed all create a condition of epistemological crisis; they present the spectator or reader with a landscape of rubble, both literal and figurative, in which all existing structures have been erased. There are no stable epistemological certainties left, only provisional configurations that are always threatening to collapse once more into the debris, history is defined by slippage and displacement. Bachmann and Resnais, in particular, explore the trace and echo of “history,” and the rupture of temporal stability; for them, history shares the structure of language, ruled by metonymy and slippage, always exceeding any stable framework. These self-referentially split and fractured narratives present us with a universe in which everything is in flux. If “history” is “broken” by definition, so too are subjectivity, gender and desire: rupture and splitting are their constitutive elements. In Rossellini's films, especially, heterosexual masculinity has lost any claim to “authenticity” and has become purely performative, a phantasm of opera, theater, film, even puppet shows. The male subject is constituted both as spectacle and obsessive spectator, with voyeurism and scopophlia the only possible forms of desire. The lacuna of desire left by the collapse of the heterosexual male subject is partly filled by the scopophilic appetites of the cinematic spectator: we see ourselves, and our own deviant desire, constantly represented on screen.

In this study we examine the development of the female poetic voice in the Puerto Rican context. Taking from the theoretical frameworks of Cultural Studies, Feminist Studies and New Historicism we re-read the political, cultural and literary history of Puerto Rico and its relation to the construction of the representations of Woman in texts written by women as well as those by men. In the first chapter we analyze the weight of gender and history in the elaboration of general discourse. We point out how all texts speak from a particular gendered perspective and respond to a historically determined moment which requires critical analysis that takes into consideration these contextual phenomena. From here we begin to re-examine the development of the female poetic creation from the end of the nineteenth century to the 1930s. We study the change of sovereignty and the political, social and cultural impact that this had on the literature of Puerto Rico. Mainly, we look into the gestation of a political-literary discourse created by Puerto Rican intellectuals, who were at the same time, responsible for the political and cultural events of the island. The second chapter explores the creation of a new political project for Puerto Rico which begins in 1940s and culminates with the Commonwealth. In addition, we review the political projects of the Commonwealth which required the active participation of literature since it was through literature that a cultural nationalism would be built, a nationalism that would compensate for the lack of an independent political state. Concluding this second chapter, we re-examine the decades of the sixties and seventies, viewing them as a period of change and of social and political struggle. We study the gradual separation of the literary and political spaces, which allowed a more transgressive discourse as well as a more authentic female voice. The third chapter is a critical analysis of the female poetic voice through the twentieth century. Among the selected poets are: Clara Lair, Haydee Ramirez de Arellano, Marigloria Palma, Angelamaria Davila, Olga Nolla, Manuel Ramos Otero and Mayra Santos Febres.

The literary lecture is a subgenre of the traditional academic lecture that combines literary and metaliterary analysis, artistic self-fashioning, and public performance. This study considers the literary lectures of five writers as a sampling of a major transformation in this genre in Spain between 1900 and 1926. Ramón del Valle-Inclán, Ramón Gómez de la Serna, José Ortega y Gasset, Federico García Sanchiz, and Federico García Lorca have been chosen for their representation of a range of literary generations, cultural backgrounds, and socio-political beliefs, and for what their innovative practices of lecturing reveal about the mechanics of this reinvented genre. These five case studies demonstrate that the literary lecture is a complex literary genre that exists in a liminal state between the spoken and the written, reality and fiction, and the public persona and the internal self. Furthermore, these changes come at a time when audience composition was beginning to skew heavily toward the rising middle and upper-middle classes, and especially toward women. Ultimately, the transformation of the lecture from 1900-1926 in Spain is seen as the product of the appropriation of a traditionally academic, essay-like genre for both artistic and educational purposes and for satisfying the desires of middle-class consumer culture. Finally, this dissertation explores for the first time the implications of editorial treatments of the lecture: the classificatory anxieties of editors in the passage of the lecture from stage to page, exemplified in the treatment of the lecture as written text in the Obras completas of Federico García Lorca.

Philosophiae Doctor - PhD / In this study I focus on how Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s fiction portrays his socio-political vision through the prevalence of the intimate relationships it displays. The study critically analyses the significant role romantic love and friendship play in the novels The River Between (1965), Weep Not, Child (1964), A Grain of Wheat (1967), Petals of Blood (1977), Devil on the Cross (1982), Matigari (1987) and Wizard of the Crow (2006) against the backdrop of Ngũgĩ’s other fiction, plays and non-fiction. Ngũgĩ identifies himself as a Marxist, anti-colonialist/imperialist, and anti-capitalist writer, for whom there is no contradiction between aesthetic and political missions. The aesthetic and political projects take form through the representation, very importantly, of romantic love in his fiction. The significance of eros, which is clear in the fiction, is not, however, present in Ngũgĩ’s theoretical reflections on his writing as formulated in his essays. In Ngũgĩ’s early novels, we see love attempting to break the boundaries of religion and class in the creation of a modern nation-state. But there are obstacles to these attempts at national unity through love, the only relationship apart from friendship that is self-made, and not determined by kinship relations. In the fiction from the middle of Ngũgĩ’s career, we see romantic love consummated in marriage. The achievement of unity is, however, undercut by betrayal, which is a repeated theme in all the novels. The “betrayal” of the ideal of romantic love by materialism is the most significant threat to love. Friendship emerges in one of the later novels as a kind of “excursus” to romantic love that foregrounds, by default, the ways in which Ngũgĩ’s political vision seeks be consolidated through the personal relationship of romantic love. In Ngũgĩ’s final novel, we see his personal and political visions coming together in a utopian erotic union for first time. Because of the nature of the exploration, which aims at opening up the wider significance of eros, the study is not framed by a dominant theory, most of which would lead to understanding eros through gender and power relations. Instead, the study has been framed through concepts and debates on romantic love that emerge in sociology, anthropology, philosophy and literary history.

Magister Artium - MA / This thesis aims at presenting a comprehensive study, through which more will be learnt about the art of the Andalusian Muwashaḥāt. This is a study of their artistic structure, types, and poetic purposes. The art of the Muwashaḥāt was different in form and rhythm from the classic Arabic poem, because the Muwashaḥāt had multi meters and rhymes, and it relied on the musical rhythm. Besides, the poetic language of the Muwashaḥāt was based on both classical and vernacular Arabic. The Muwashaḥāt was invented by the Andalusian poets to keep pace with the musical development in Andalusia, the researcher will shed light on aesthetic methods, and the poetic styles that characterized the Muwashaḥāt as an innovative poetic art which had strong ties with the music and singing, and showing the impact of the Andalusian environment on the development of this art. The art of the Muwashaḥāt left a distinguished mark on the Arabic poetry and music, especially in the Maghreb and North Africa where a lot of musical schools and poets still pay a lot of attention to such type of that Andalusian art. The continuous interest in this art, until current days, strongly motivated the researcher to proceed with this study.

Abstract not available