This study analyzes the humor in Alfonso de Valdes's Dialogo de las cosas ocurridas en Roma, (1527) and Dialogo de Mercurio y Caron (1529) and in Juan's Dialogo de doctrina cristiana (1529). Chapter I studies the lives and works of the Valdes brothers to show that they were reformers as well as humorists and that there was a definite literary, religious, and political link between Erasmus, Charles V, and them. The next three chapters determine that the humor of the Valdes brothers is not hilarious, but ironic satire. In Dialogo de las cosas ocurridas en Roma, the satire is didactic in pursuit of religious reform. The satirical barbs are aimed at the Pope, religious leaders, war, celibacy, relics, money and religious corruption in general. Alfonso expresses his humor through the typical satirical devices: understatements, overstatements, paradox, and irony. In Dialogo de doctrina cristiana, against the background of a comprehensive review of Christian doctrine, Juan ridicules the hypocrisy of Christians who worship the Virgin Mary by fasting and praying and clergymen who are caricatured as ignorant. Juan expresses his humor mainly through understatements, parody, irony, and mild satire. Dialogo de Mercurio y Caron presents a portrait of good and bad souls. The satire is Horatian with Juvenalian overtones. Alfonso denounces the characters' sins and follies but praises their virtues. The main jist of the didactic satire is that Christians do no obtain immortality by external works but by transformation of the inner life. The humor is expressed through hyperbole, caricature, reductio ad absurdum, understatement, overstatement, allegory, paradox, invective, and especially irony. The conclusion asserts that in their humor, the Valdes brothers followed Erasmus's example of criticizing ecclesiastical corruption, condemning external rites and ceremonies, defending / the inward nature of religious beliefs, returning to simplicity of Christian doctrine, and restoring faith, charity, and honesty. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 48-07, Section: A, page: 1786. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1987.

George Sand made a profound impression on her literary world with her vast range of genres, styles and techniques. The feminists of the time wanted her support, while men often felt threatened by her work and life-style. The majority of these reactions were in response to the characters Sand portrayed in her novels, plays and nouvelles. We find, to no real surprise, that the predominant personages are women struggling in a society on the verge of change. These women are trying to find a place for themselves in a world where ideas about love and marriage, social equality and human relations are in flux. / While most of these themes appear to be favored topics of study in the larger body of Sand's work, as well as in her shorter works, this study will endeavor to bring to the fore some characteristics found in her Nouvelles that seem to have been overlooked in the critical arena. By applying an analytic examination concerning the psychological essence of Sand's characters, this dissertation aims to provide a new perspective on the characters in five of Sand's nouvelles: La Marquise, Lavinia, Metella, Mattea and Pauline. The basis of this analysis lies in Sand's use of negative and positive imagery as it is associated with mirror reflections. It is the contention of this investigation that, by examining the reflective techniques that appear in these nouvelles, the reader will be impressed with the depth of character that George Sand is able to provide with fleeting images that reveal souls. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 52-05, Section: A, page: 1735. / Major Professor: Azzurra Givens. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1991.

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<p>In the wake of a twentieth century marked by the Occupation, the Algerian War, the AIDS crisis, and the aftermath of these events, the debates surrounding French identity have acquired particular urgency. French novelists, meanwhile, have increasingly turned to first person narratives; autobiographies and especially autofictions continue to dominate current publication lists. Equally concerned with identity questions, these same texts have often been accused of solipsism, and their authors described as narcissists of little talent. In this dissertation, I argue that the debates surrounding national identity and the problematic construction of a written personal identity are, in fact, intimately related. I analyze a variety of first person narrative works by three major contemporary authors (Patrick Modiano, Assia Djebar, and Hervé Guibert) in order to resituate these purportedly personal critiques of "Frenchness" within an evolving historical and historiographical trajectory that informs national, community, and personal identity. In so doing, I suggest the ways in which both subjects and identities are constructed (and critiqued) textually with respect to a history of traumatic events, as well as the collective memories that those events inspire. I argue that Modiano's contemporary evocations of Occupation-era France, Djebar's complex and shifting assessment of the Algerian War and the legacies of French colonization in Algeria, and the dominant position occupied by Hervé Guibert's AIDS writings in relationship to the rest of his prolific production all merit reexamination. I therefore seek to analyze the fraught construction of identity in a French society marked by its shifting relationship to history as memorialization, while complicating the generalizations that often result from identity-based scholarship. The novel juxtaposition of Modiano, Djebar, and Guibert within the dissertation enacts my desire to challenge the limits posed by reading authors solely in the light of narrowly-defined identity politics.</p> / Dissertation

<p> French literary theorists Dominique Viart and Bruno Vercier identify the beginning of a new era for French literature in the 1980s, characterized by hypotheses, hesitations, and the general notion that truth and reality cannot be fully grasped by discourse. The 1980s can be considered as transitional for the comics medium as well. Art Spiegelman's <i>Maus</i> (first published in 1980, completed in 1991) demonstrated that comics are not only capable of representing difficult familial and historical pasts, but that visual narratives benefit from formal and aesthetic devices that are inherent to the ninth art's polysemiotic possibilities. In this dissertation, I study francophone comics in which a second- or third-generation individual seeks to understand a familial past that exceeds his or her personal experience and that has previously been silenced or repressed, either individually (by the primary witness) or collectively (by the political hegemony). In the research corpus, the narrator's search elicits modal and temporal intersectional spaces: representation and anti-representation in Chapter One, the past and the present in Chapter Two, the collective and the individual in Chapter Three, and the interplay between memory, history, and imagination in the concluding Chapter Four. In addition to an interdisciplinary theoretical framework, Viart's notion of <i>insavoir</i> [not-knowing] and Pierre Nora's concept of "sites of memory" act as overarching theoretical tools throughout the essay. </p><p> The thematic organization of intersectional spaces fosters the identification of recurrent devices as the individual discussions reinforce and nuance one another sequentially and retroactively. Aware of the inherent limitations of representation and the notion of cognitive <i>insavoir</i>, the authors of the research corpus attempt to communicate meaning instead of presupposing understanding or the ability to "know" a traumatic, violent, and repressed past (and the capability to represent such a history through text and image). Such recurrences are symptomatic of an emerging sub-category within the medium, wherein the figure of the intersection is pertinent and productive precisely because these works operate in multi-directional <i>insavoir</i>. Like novels in the literary era identified by Viart and Vericer, the resulting representations oppose binary thought, opting instead for narratives that are self-critical, uncomfortable, thought-provoking, and ultimately, perhaps, more true.</p>

<p> This dissertation analyzes the evolution of French detective novels through the scope of its composition, especially the uses and functions of legal errors. It begins at the time of its creation in 1866 and goes all the way to 1939, the beginning of World War II, synonymous with the coming of a new subcategory of the genre known as the &laquo; roman noir &raquo; on the market of French literature. By examining legal error, I clarify the process by which detective novels reflect the transformations of society through the involvement of scientific discoveries, new judicial structures, and currents of thoughts. Data has been collected from an extensive corpus of detective novels and works of critics known for their studies on literature and society. To complete this study, I use three strategies. </p><p> First, I approached the question on a sociological aspect to demonstrate how detective novel is a genre of its time, its evolution in parallel with society. Second, on a more structural manner, I observed the structuration of the detective novel and the different tools or mechanisms used by authors to create the secret and delay the unveiling of the truth. Last, I compiled a corpus of literature to show the evolution of the detective novel, and I compared and contrast author's work to determine patterns of continuity or key moments of rupture in the structuring of detective literature. I completed my work with the analysis of an exception in the corpus: the collection of Fant&ocirc;mas, an outsider of the genre that comes as a counter-example, and illustrates the rise of a new demand. The findings show how legal error testifies of the drastic changes in the conception of literature and exemplifies that literature became accessible to a wider crowd of readers who have developed through History that particular taste and expectations defined as popular culture.</p>

The objective of this study is to test empirically for affective differences postulated to vary by reader gender in response to literary texts. Eighty participants, composed of equal numbers of male and female English- and Spanish-speakers, were randomly distributed into three experimental groups. Participants in two groups read emotionally-provocative text stimuli, and participants in a control group read an affectively-neutral text stimulus. The provocative text stimuli are excerpts from Cervantes's Persiles y Sigismunda, and the affectively-neutral text stimulus is from Quevedo's Buscon . Participants completed the Ambivalent Sexism Inventory (ASI) and Positive and Negative Affect Schedules (PANAS). A first PANAS measured current moods, and a second one measured moods in general. On completing the second PANAS, participants read the text stimuli. After reading the text stimuli, participants completed a third PANAS to measure their current moods relative to the texts they had just read. The results of this experiment reveal no significant differences between male and female readers, and thus do not support the hypothesis that affective reader-response to literature varies by gender. Implications for reader response-based literary theories are discussed, along with suggestions on how such theories may be refined or modified.

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