This thesis begins with an examination of the religious thought of Romain Rolland, showing how he derived an ethic of human solidarity that is fundamental to his later theorising about society and politics. The main sources of Rolland's ethic are indicated, and an attempt is made to set it in the context of modern French philosophy. Having established this base, the thesis goes on to examine chronologically the development of Holland's thought about politics, having as its central premise the notion that it is Rolland's search for a political system which would give full expression to his ideal of human solidarity that leads him towards various types of politics in turn. Several phases are distinguished in this evolution, starting with a period of vacillation between largely unformulated liberal beliefs and a violent, authoritarian style of politics, at the beginning of Rolland's adult life. We then take up his first involvement with socialism in the mid-1890's, his failure to elaborate a meaningful type of socialism in the context of his day, and his gravitation towards Darwinian and similar types of historical-political theorising; this phase culminates in the period of intense activity represented by Le Théâtre de la Révolution, coinciding with the Dreyfus case. Chapters V and VI deal with the period prior to 1914, dominated by Rolland's search for an 'internationalist' or European style of politics, and his analyses of national cultures and life-styles in Jean-Christophe: it is argued that this marks to some extent a regression from his previous socialistic preoccupations. Chapter VII shows Rolland's change of attitude during World War I, and his return to the conviction that social change was an absolute necessity in Europe. The next two chapters analyse Rolland's exploration of possible political bases for such a change, including such alternatives as Wilsonian internationalism, Gandhian non-violent protest and, eventually, Soviet Communism which, according to this thesis, Rolland accepted with slight reserve. The final chapter is retrospective, and aims to show how at key moments in Rolland's life, his artistic conception and execution was crucially shaped, if not determined by his political preoccupations. At all stages great attention is paid to the question of Rolland's intellectual sources and to putting his political thought firmly into the social and intellectual context of its day, rather than attempting to see it as an isolated phenomenon. To this end, numerous historical analyses and comparisons with contemporary figures are made.

This thesis analyses nine novels and two films by Jean-Philippe Toussaint, spanning the period from La Salle de bain (1985) to Nue (2013). Drawing on the hermeneutic phenomenology of Paul Ricoeur, it argues that Toussaint's texts can be fruitfully understood as representing fictionalised forms of reflexive narrativity. Through the close readings of the texts developed in this thesis, it is argued that Toussaint's anonymous fictional narrators are presented as both the readers and writers of their own lives, engaged in reimagining their own past experiences in ways which are heuristically motivated towards future possibilities for action, and that these reimaginings are represented both as and through the formal variations of the texts themselves. Also emphasised, however, is the way in which such refigurative narrative engagements are frequently depicted as deceptive or problematic. The first chapter, Self in the World, analyses La Salle de bain (1985), L'Appareil-photo (1988) and La Réticence (1991), focusing on the ways in which Toussaint's novels engage with thematic issues of subjectivity, identity, agency and the human capacity for reflexive narrativity. The second chapter, The Other in the Self, analyses two novels, Monsieur (1986) and La Télévision (1997), and two films, La Sévillane (1992) and La Patinoire (1999), focusing on the ways in which Toussaint's texts deploy various forms of ironic discourse in the critical mediation of the relationship between individual subjectivity and the exigencies of society, the workplace, and problems related to creative agency. The final chapter, Selfhood in the Other, analyses the novels of Toussaint's Marie tetralogy, Faire l’amour (2002), Fuir (2005), La Vérité sur Marie (2009), and Nue (2013), focusing on how this series interrogates philosophical questions of intersubjectivity by drawing on a number of historical conceptualisations of the aesthetic concept of the sublime.

This thesis investigates Rome as a site of modernity and an incubator of aesthetic modernism. More specifically, it analyses Rome’s visual and discursive imagery during the three decades that stretch from the end of the Second World War to the 1970s. It does so through a comparative analysis of literary, cinematic and critical texts. These include novels such as Levi’s L’orologio (1950) and Pasolini’s Petrolio (1992); films such as Rossellini’s Roma, città aperta (1945) and Fellini’s La dolce vita (1959); critical texts stemming from Roman intellectual circles in journals such as Rinascita, La strada, Presente, and Nuovi argomenti; and historical analyses of Rome’s urban development such as those of Benevolo, Insolera, Cederna, and Vidotto. The aim of this study is twofold. On the one hand it challenges traditional readings of Rome as an anti-modern or pre-modern urban entity (i.e. the myth of the ‘Eternal City’), which was generated during the Grand Tour and has continued to inform academic scholarship on Rome. On the other, it shows that Rome lies at the centre of extremely significant constellations of modern images and discourses which can be compared to most studied examples of urban modernity such as Paris, London, Berlin or New York. From a methodological perspective, this thesis delves into Foucault’s notion of ‘Archaeology’. Instead of analysing texts in a strictly philological way, attempting to detect their affiliation or their belonging to specific traditions, this thesis investigates its sources as symptoms of history’s movements. Instead of framing Rome through traditional categories such as ‘Eternal City’ or ‘Modern Hell’, this archaeological analysis suggests the coexistence of three discursive formations of Rome’s modern image, which are based on the concepts of fleetingness, dilation and entropy. These three terms inform the three sections of the thesis. Furthermore, it argues that Rome represents a case of ‘anachronistic’ modernity that might allows us to depart from canonical interpretations of Italian modernity as ‘backward’.

This study examines the recent literary phenomenon known as the New Italian Epic, a label coined by Wu Ming 1 in a document called the Memorandum in 2008. Wu Ming 1 used the label New Italian Epic to describe a corpus of Italian texts, mainly published after the year 2000, that are an unusual mix of genres, styles and media, and that have a renewed sense of political and ethical commitment. After describing the phenomenon and outlining the main theoretical underpinnings to my analysis of it, I examine the Memorandum in detail, in order to individuate the ideas that will resurface throughout the study, related to postmodernism, new technologies, history and memory studies, epic, realism, and the role of literature in society. This is followed by a periodisation, which traces developments in recent history and literature that influenced the New Italian Epic phenomenon, including the Cannibal and migrant writers of the nineties, the violent events at the G8 protest in Genoa in 2001, and the political and cultural climate in Italy in the new millennium. I go on to analyse three key themes that particularly stand out in the New Italian Epic texts – the recurring theme of the death of the father, the use of the historical novel form, and texts that seem to be journalistic, but sometimes change or distort reality – each of which is accompanied by close reading of two or three novels from the New Italian Epic corpus, and compared to other previous or contemporary cultural developments in Italy and abroad. I conclude by considering the interactions between literature and film in the twenty-first century, and suggest that the ‘unidentified narrative objects’ we have seen throughout the study seem to be a particular product of our times.

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This thesis is conceived as a general study of Flaubert's major works and as an assessment of recent critical approaches to them. Chapter 1 is an extensive evaluation of Sartre's L'Idiot de la famille, for which I claim the right to serious attention, before summarising its method and its argument that Flaubert's negative relationship to language becomes a positive one to style. This is set against Flaubert's own exposition, in both letters and works, of the problems of language and expression in the personal and artistic contexts. I show finally how other critics, in a very different perspective, have arrived at remarkably similar conclusions about Flaubert's concern for language as an opaque, material entity. Chapter 2 argues that Flaubert's aesthetic aims are equally served by the building of an illusion, i.e. that he does not undermine the idea of the novel as representation. The journey to the East is indicated as the turning point in the emergence of an aesthetic ideal combining stupidity, reverie and the aesthetic attitude to the world and to language. An examination of the formal organization of Flaubert's representations centres on the relationship between discourse and récit, with reassessment of such problems as impersonality, irony and point of view. A discussion of repetition leads to a consideration of the modernity of auto-representation. Within this formal perspective the last chapter argues against the common modern belief in Flaubert’s deconstruction of all stable meaning, reinstating the organizing function of character as a centre of value. Inarticulate and stupid characters, the traditional focus of Anglo-Saxon attacks on Flaubert’s lack of moral complexity, are shown to have privileged status in relation to vital aspects of Flaubert's aesthetic as established jn the first two chapters. A correct “moral” reading of the story will therefore have nothing do with an attitude to real life, but will depend upon awareness of the work's formal intentions.

This thesis focuses on the revisiting of several scientific theories on the part of Italian authors from 1865-1901, and illustrates how the process of assimilation was the effect of an accommodative process, which resulted in authors reinterpreting these theories in terms of a contrast between a visible and an invisible domain. The first chapter focuses on Arrigo Boito’s ‘Lezione d’anatomia’ and Camillo Boito’s ‘Un corpo’ in order to show how the visible/invisible contrast becomes a hermeneutical grid by which the female body is defined, this body being the field on which medical normativity and the artistic approach meet and come into conflict with each other. The second chapter analyses how the visible-invisible contrast subtends Italian Spiritismo, a discipline that was read in scientific terms and (as in Luigi Capuana’s writings) as a theory concerning artistic – and literary – creation as well. Since the Spiritismo entails a process of ‘feminisation’ of the medium, which characterises both the ‘scientific’ and the ‘artistic’ facet of the discipline, the third chapter investigates the ways in which the female character has been represented as both a physical appearance and an elusive interiority (especially when dealing with the activity of reading) in Italian narrative from Tarchetti’s Fosca to the early twentieth century. As a conclusion, the fourth chapter retraces the formation of the visible-invisible dichotomy as resulting from the assimilation of European science through the analysis of the figure of the physician in Paolo Mantegazza’s Un giorno a Madera, Angelo Camillo De Meis’s Dopo la laurea and Luigi Capuana’s re-writing of his novel Giacinta. Moving from here, this thesis argues that the visible-invisible dichotomy is peculiar to the time span considered, as the twentieth-century will be distinguished by a general distrust towards – and trivialisation of – positivist science.

<p> In the 19th century, writers like Chateaubriand, Nerval, and Flaubert traveled in search of sublime, exotic transport that still existed (they believed) outside of France. However, this tradition changed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. With the advent of a modernity defined by calculated rationalism and progress, many writers began to lament the death of travel as a sublime, writerly experience. To paraphrase Sartre&rsquo;s Roquentin, they mourned the death or dearth of adventure and enchantment left in the world.</p><p> In my dissertation, I read the travel memoirs of three authors who look for ways of overcoming this <i>disenchantment of the world:</i> the futurist and vagabond Blaise Cendrars, the surrealist ethnographer Michel Leiris, and the heteroclite traveler-poet Henri Michaux. I examine how each of these authors develops a particular method of travel that mixes poetic desire with the technological, social, and political realities of the modern world; Cendrars through a fascination with speed and vehicles, Leiris through ethnography, and Michaux through an obsession with ethical practices of self-control. Each author&rsquo;s method, I show, leads him to form what the critic Michel Deguy calls a <i>po&eacute;thique</i> &mdash; writing that finds enchantment through reason and engagement with the real world. The title of my dissertation, <i>Rational Enchantment,</i> then, describes this <i>po&eacute;thique</i> process. In other words, I show how, through travel, Cendrars, Leiris, and Michaux cultivate representations of enchantment that, in turn, contribute to the re-enchantment the world. </p><p>

<p> This project analyzes a long-neglected dimension of Early Modern Peninsular Studies: court theater. My thesis explores theoretical, political, and scenographic frameworks of court drama written for and produced in the court of Carlos II of Spain. I explore the notions of imagined communities and agency in order to understand how the theater functioned within the Habsburg court, and I juxtapose the role of the king as a spectator to that of the individual consumer of the public theater to confirm it is possible not to identify as part of the mass public during theater consumption. From there, my archival research exposes the political conflicts during the 1670s between Queen Regent Mariana of Austria and her illegitimate step-son, Don Juan Jos&eacute;, as their opposing factions vied to dominate the terrain of courtly politics in Madrid. My research investigates how these tensions were reflected in the 1670s works: <i>La estatua de Prometeo</i> and <i>Fieras afemina amor</i> by Pedro Calder&oacute;n de la Barca. This then led me to consider the political anxieties around the topic of succession in the 1690s as well. I illustrate that Francisco Antonio de Bances Candamo&rsquo;s political trilogy offered viable options for an heir through his presentation of what I term the nephew-king paradigm. My research illustrates how politics and royal theater production in the 1670s and 1690s were linked due to theater&rsquo;s status as a facet of the royal Baroque identity. My project concludes by establishing court drama as its own genre through an investigation of court performance, the scenographic advancement, and the musical evolution in Baroque Spanish court drama&mdash;a highly original artistic genre in seventeenth-century Spain. I establish staged performance as malleable and trans-dynastic as it outlasts the performance of the monarchs for which the work was staged. Ultimately, this project proves that theater is a part of royal Baroque Spanish identity. </p><p>

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.