Many critics have noted Perez de Ayala's fondness for contrasts and paired opposites. We believe that his Jesuit training and education in the classics of both Greece and Spain helped form the author's dualistic frame of mind. But, in his novels, we notice a progression from clear-cut dualisms to a more polaristic view and, finally, to integration in the person of Tigre Juan The early novels are replete with paried opposites but, later, the oppositions begin to be between major themes such as, for example, the dualisms of spectator vs. actor, 'voluntad' vs. 'abulia,' the ideal vs. the real and, finally, the most basic dualism of all--the male and the female. The characters of the early novels are extreme examples of one dualism or another but, in the later novels, the characters become polaristic. The best example of this is, of course, the meshing of the personalities of Belarmino and Apolonio. In like manner, Urbano is able to change from 'abulia' to 'voluntad,' thus showing that the two are not irreconcilable opposites but, instead, poles that can be interchanged depending on the circumstances. When we reach the two volumes dedicated to Tigre Juan, the dualisms have all been integrated: the protagonist is a harmonious blend of spectator and actor, and the dualism of 'voluntad' and 'abulia' has disappeared. Moreover, he is also able to integrate the dualism of the ideal vs. the real by humanizing the Don Juan and the 'honra' traditions of Spanish culture Starting with Belarmino y Apolonio, we notice an increase in personages that combine contradictory characteristics and, in particular, increasing use of the androgynous character. Again, Tigre Juan serves as an example of the harmonious blend of male and female elements into one integrated whole The first attempt at unification was by the use of circles in La ca(')ida de los Limones. Later, in Belarmino y Apolonio, we observed the use of language as a unifying factor and, in the last novels, the great integrating force is love. El curandero de su honra ends with Tigre Juan's song which symbolizes the harmony of the universe / acase@tulane.edu

This dissertation intends to demonstrate that Mateo Aleman uses the proverb in order to elaborate his prose in Guzman de Alfarache (1599, 1604). To exemplify this, the dissertation begins in chapter one to trace the origins and define the proverb. In chapter two, the author gives a detailed study of the two parts of the novel. The analysis proves that Guzman de Alfarache contains 244 proverbs, some of them repeated more than twice, These proverbs convey a series of themes clearly elaborated in the text. These themes are: (1) need of survival, (2) wrong administration of goods, (3) misogyny, (4) determinism, (5) lack of solidarity and (6) lack of justice The proverb is also used to introduce other parts of the discourse. They combine with other levels of popular language and result in a sort of formulaic language. This is the subject of chapter three. In chapter four the author studies the morphology of the proverbs. The forms that the proverbs take provide another way of interpreting the text. Five forms were found which function accordingly to the context: complete proverbs, variant proverbs, fragments of proverbs, allusions to proverbs and motifs. Chapter five deals with the paremiological style of Mateo Aleman. Aleman uses the same features of the proverb in his prose: rhyme, alliteration, antithesis, paradox, rhetorical questions, exclamations, allusions to proverbial literature. The dissertation also has proverbs and proverbial phrases indexes / acase@tulane.edu

Towards the end of the nineteenth century, a philosophical movement of German origin, called krausismo, was introduced in Spain by a University professor, Julian Sanz de R(')io. As a philosophy krausismo was short-lived, but it evolved to become a powerful cultural and educational movement destined to transform many facets of Spanish society. One of the principal concerns of the followers of Krausism was the reform of the country's educational system. They believed that many of the Spain's problems stemmed from the dogmatic, partisan education which isolated it from the rest of Europe. Krausismo became the burning issue of the day, and the liberal krausistas found irreconcilable enemies in the neo-Catholics. In 1876, when a group of the Krausist professors was expelled from their chairs, they found the Institucion Libre de Ensenanza, the first independent educational institution in Spain. This act was to become Krausism's most valuable contribution to the country. A large number of intellectuals were attracted by the institucionistas, among them such writers as Leopold Alas, Emilia Pardo Bazan, and Benito Perez Galdos, as well as members of the Generation of 1898 The cultural climate created by the krausistas led to a change of attitude towards literature in general and the novel in particular. This genre was considered the best medium by which to carry a message to the people. In our opinion, it is not mere coincidence that the years of greatest Krausist activity were also those of the rebirth of the modern Spanish novel. This dissertation explores the relationship between Krausism and the novel of the turn of the century, in order to establish this movement's link with the Generation of 1898 The study is divided into an introduction, five chapters, a conclusion, and two appendixes. In Chapter I, we define krausismo and summarize its origin and evolution. Chapter II, analyzes its influence on the novelists Alas, Pardo Bazan, and Galdos. It is our conclusion that their novels reflect the krausist concept regarding this genre. A third chapter systematically explores the contact between nineteenth century writers and intellectuals associated with Krausism and the Institucion Libre, and the Generation of 1898 in the years 1898-1905. For this purpose we have examined their correspondence as well as newspaper and magazines of that period In Chapter IV, we study the content of those periodicals and letters, in order to point out krausist ideas echoed or shared by Unamuno, Azor(')in, and Baroja in their formative years. Principal among them are their ideas about pedagogy, antidogmatism, and the 'Europeanization' of Spain. Chapter V, analyzes krausist themes in such works as En torno al casticismo, El alma castellana, La voluntad, El arbol de la ciencia and Camino de perfeccion, thus establishing the strong link between krausismo and the early works of Unamuno, Baroja, and Azor(')in. The appendixes reproduce two documents which are difficult to obtain. One is Krause's 'Mandamientos de la Humanidad al Individuo', and the other is an article on Francisco Giner de los Rios by Azor(')in, in which he evaluates this educator's influence on 98 / acase@tulane.edu

The topic I explore in my dissertation is directly related to the recent surge of interest, demonstrated by numerous critics, for aesthetic production traditionally considered as peripheral. Such is the case, in literature, for texts which deal primarily with fantasy. Over the last two decades, fantastic literature has motivated a vastly varied critical response and has subsequently encountered an equally wide range of definitions. My methodological approach is essentially interdisciplinary, confronting several perspectives that inspire and inform my work, such as narratological studies, psychoanalytical readings poststructuralist literary theory and postmodern research on science a literature In order to illustrate my topic, I take a close look at the fantastic tales' written by Guy de Maupassant and Auguste de Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, two major authors in this category. Their work corresponds exactly to the well-known definition of the fantastic as a genre, provided by Tzvetan Todorov in his seminal Introduction a la litterature fantastique This work elaborates on the Todorovian notion of the ambiguity of the fantastic. By examining the ways in which ambiguity operates at the structural level I attempt to demonstrate Maupassant and Villiers' intuitive awareness of the problematic status of fantastic narration. The tension resulting from such awareness has led both authors to produce highly complex and self-reflexive narrative patterns. I closely examine the way each author represents ambiguity through investigation into the interrelated concepts of desire (as described by Freud) and entropy (as defined by chaos theory). These, in my view, function as poles of attraction between which the fantastic narrative structure oscillates. I interrogate the role they play in testing the limits of the text's structural space Relying on the historical coincidence between nineteenth-century fantastic literature, the discovery of the unconscious by Freud and the conceptualization of entropy by Clausius in the second law of thermodynamics, I establish intimate connections between the routinely compartmentalized fields of literature, psychoanalysis and science. My work investigates the way in which the uncanny functions as the element of the fantastic structural logic which exposes the text's uncertainty about its own status. I then attempt to uncover the 'entropic' properties of the fantastic narrative by studying the devices used by fantastic writers to suggest disorder in an otherwise tightly ordered narrative. The most striking of these devices is the systematic recourse to what I call 'chaotic figures' which function as agents of ambiguity both at the thematic and structural levels The purpose of this work is to demonstrate that the fragility of narrative organization, structurally suggested in the fantastic texts of the late nineteenth century, anticipates the chaotic narrative patterns of postmodern metafiction. This task, to my knowledge, has never been attempted before / acase@tulane.edu

In Paul Valery's Cahiers, where the investigations and perplexities of the author's daily thought were recorded over a period of fifty-one years, Valery returns again and again to the theme of falsification in connection with almost every subject he explores. Indeed, in his view, falsification is a process not only present but even unavoidable in all human experience. Without it, whether it be conscious or unconscious, man would not be able to cope with the infinite diversity of reality, abstract or concrete In the Introduction of this dissertation, the writer presents an overview of some philosophical and artistic trends relating to Valery's concept of falsification as exhibited in the Cahiers in order to enable the reader to grasp a better understanding of it. Chapter I examines Valery's view of falsification as an essential process in man's perception and representation of the exterior world, of the past, and of dreams. In addition, Valery's reasons for considering language not only as the mind's most important tool, but also as its most considerable source of falsification are studied, as well as his theory that a more mathematical type of language would eliminate many of language's abusive falsifiers. In Chapter II, Valery's arguments against philosophy and religion for their falsity are analysed. Its inevitability in human relationships, including that of the self with the self, as Valery sees it, is investigated in Chapter III. Chapters IV and V deal with literature, history, and art. No literature, except poetry, in Valery's opinion, escapes useless falsification, and thereby qualifies as true art. In conclusion, falsification is something encountered at every turn in Valery's pursuits, acknowledged, and then used advantageously by him in particular ways to intimate and discover progressively reality, which is ultimately inexhaustible / acase@tulane.edu

Benito Perez Galdos's literary depictions of addiction transcend those of other late nineteenth-century Naturalist authors, such as Emile Zola of France, to offer a strikingly modern perspective of addiction. Typical nineteenth-century representations of alcoholism merely describe the long term effects of heavy drinking and alcoholic degeneration, especially in the proletariat. In Galdos's novels, such as La desheredada (1881) and Fortunata y Jacinta (1886--1887), figures of addiction and representations of addictive pathologies, which we recognize in his descriptions of vicio, locura, and embriaguez, demonstrate an understanding of the same motivations or defects that are recognized as addictive features today Studies that focus on addiction in nineteenth-century Spain or on representations of alcoholism in nineteenth-century Spanish letters are rare. Historians of the period's psychiatry concur that Spain relied heavily on foreign, especially French, psychiatric models and theories. In addition, figures of madness and addiction were represented and constructed in the novelistic art of the era, and the work of Galdos is especially rich in this respect. A comparison of historical and medical literature with Galdos's fiction of the same period is fruitful in delineating some common beliefs as well as pointing to subversions of official 'truths' regarding madness and addiction. From this perspective, we can read Galdos's work as a challenge to medical science and the discourses related to the construction and control of the individual in nineteenth-century Spain on two fronts. Firstly, the humanist author's ironic appropriation of medical, scientific, and pharmacological subjects and terms signals a refusal to privilege science over literary fiction in its power to explain and study human behavior. Secondly, Galdos's work contains a challenge to the normalizing discourse of science, which sought to posit (as Foucault famously described) distinct identities in the categorizing of human beings and their behavior. It is particularly through figures of madness and addiction that Galdos teases out the contradictions inherent in the discourses employed by the medical, religious, and social experts of the day, thereby problematizing the binaries of reason and unreason / acase@tulane.edu

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This dissertation explores the ways in which the provocation of fear in the reader of the chanson de geste, conte folklorique, conte merveilleux, the gothic and the nineteenth-century conte fantastique contributes to the formation of individual and collective identity. I begin with an analysis of the epic, the folkloric and the marvellous. Through close readings of selected texts, I identify the mechanisms by which the provocation of fear encourages characters and readers to act according to the goals and ideals of the collective social group. I argue that in these genres the present-day notion of the individual is indistinguishable from the collective social group, and that the role of fear centres on the textual manipulation of emotion as benefits that collective. Turning to the fantastic, I challenge notions of the fantastic as a subversive genre. Considering the professionalization of medicine and science as well as the development of the concept of human rights, I look at how the French fantastic of the two primary 'waves' (1830s and 1880s) focuses on the interior, psychic development of the individual not at the expense of the collective, but as a unit of sociohistoric change. To reveal the therapeutic mechanisms at work in the conte fantastique and the ways in which it anticipates modern-day notions of individuality, I consider the presence of historical cultural trauma in nineteenth-century France. I examine instances of loss in the fantastic, and I demonstrate how fear ushers the main character into the bereavement process. I draw parallels between the fantastic narrative and the process of mourning work outlined by Freud and others as I argue for the fantastic text a potential forum for the mourning work of the nineteenth-century reading population. Through close readings of Gautier and Merimee's fantastic short stories, I show how fear in the first wave provokes what Freud terms 'reality-testing' in the form of libidinal cathexis to an object of desire. Ultimately, the narrator ceases his narcissistic identification with the lost object and assumes a traditional role in society. As a result, he purges his fears. In my analysis of the second wave of the French fantastic, I focus on Maupassant's short stories. I draw on Freud's definition of pathological mourning as well as additional bereavement theories that incorporate the persistence of trauma post-loss. I argue for Maupassant's fantastic narrative as a forerunner of the intake interview common in psychiatric sessions and as an act of what psychologist Robert A. Neimeyer terms 'meaning reconstruction,' or the integration of traumatic events into a personal narrative. I then demonstrate how fear provokes the reconstruction of the narrator's traumatically shattered selfhood while eliciting the crucial participation of the sympathetic reader-as-witness. In conclusion, I argue that not only does the French fantastic of the nineteenth century offer a historic parallel to the mourning process, but that it also anticipates notions of trauma theory, bereavement and the construction of selfhood as we know them today / acase@tulane.edu

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