Thesis--Leipzig. / Cover title. Vita. Includes bibliographical references.

Published also as Thesis (Ph. D.)--Columbia University. / Bibliography: 4th-5th prelim. leaf.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Indiana University, Dept. of English and the Dept. of Comparative Literature, 2005. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 67-01, Section: A, page: 0177. Advisers: Andrew H. Miller; Oscar Kenshur. "Title from dissertation home page (viewed Dec. 11, 2006)."

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Indiana University, Department of Spanish and Portuguese, 2009. / Title from PDF t.p. (viewed on Jul 7, 2010). Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 70-10, Section: A, page: 3848. Advisers: Consuelo Lopez-Morillas; Juan Carlos Conde.

Made available in DSpace on 2014-06-11T19:26:54Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 0 Previous issue date: 2006-08-24Bitstream added on 2014-06-13T20:15:59Z : No. of bitstreams: 1 carlessi_ap_me_arafcl.pdf: 508079 bytes, checksum: f6368117f53ad0ea83f5f427982043a6 (MD5)

The thesis investigates the sociological, cultural and ideological factors that affect the production and marketing of two major translations published in Fascist Italy and targeting both adult and young readers. The dissertation focuses upon a selected corpus of translations of the American novels, Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) and Little Women (1868), which were repeatedly translated between the 1920s and 1940s. By adopting an interdisciplinary approach, which encompasses fields such as the history of publishing, the sociology of translation, children’s literature, studies on the role and functions of the Paratext and scholarship on Fascism and its cultural policy, this study aims to offer a detailed examination of the Italian publishing market during the Ventennio. It probes the contexts informing the publishing history of these translations, their readerships, and interrelations with the growing importance of cinema, as well as questions related to the various retranslations produced. Furthermore, given the central role of publishing in the shaping of political consent and the contradictory attitude of the regime towards translations, this thesis explores ideological influences affecting selected translations of these novels that centre on issues of particular resonance for the regime, namely, race and gender. The dissertation is divided in two parallel sections, each one divided into three chapters. The opening chapters in each part examine the publishing history of Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Little Women respectively, with attention to the USA, the UK, and France and a primary focus upon Italy, above all Fascist Italy. The following chapters in each section investigate the role that the visual representations of these two books played in conveying racial and gender aspects and in contributing to the construction of their meaning by the readers. Finally, the closing chapters of each section are devoted to a translation analysis of selected passages in order to survey translational behaviours used to depict feminine and racial features, given that these were known to be especially problematic during the Ventennio. This survey aims to pinpoint norms informing translations targeting both young people and adults.

No description available.

In this thesis, I propose a theoretical framework to understand the process of secularization produced by the revolutions of language and life. Thanks to the linguistic turn it has discovered that knowledge is kept within language. As Agamben explains, the Copernican revolution of language has made us “the first human beings who have become completely conscious of language. For the first time, what preceding generations called God, Being, spirit, unconscious appear to us as what they are: names for language. This is why for us, any philosophy, any religion, or any knowledge that has not become conscious of this turn belongs irrevocably to the past”(Agamben, 2005a: 45). Thanks to the vitalist turn, modern thought has found out that human beings are natural beings and, in spite of the peculiarity of their characteristics, their origin is the result of the natural process of evolution. I will maintain that this process of secularization leads to a new theological way of thinking definable as secularized theology. The peculiarity of secularized theology lies in the fact that it finds its ownmost reason of existence in the demonstration of the “death of God” but, the absence of revelation becomes the true revelation. The absence of the theological God reveals a secularized form of God – the God of those who believe of being without God. The name of this new divinity comes from Nietzsche who wrote that he would believe only in a God able to dance: The Dancing God. In La vita. Un’invezione recente, the Italian philosopher Davide Tarizzo argues that before modernity human beings did not exist “in the sense that the question of the humanity of man was not being asked, nor was there any ‘analysis of finitude’ in which ‘man’s being is always maintained, in relation to man himself, in a remoteness and a distance that constitute him”(Tarizzo, 2011: 53). Modernity becomes the process of secularization whereby the human being no longer measures himself against God, but becomes the measure of himself. The human being himself is the subject and the object of his own inquiry. The linguistic and the vitalist turns are, first and foremost, a reaction to theology. If in theology human being measures himself with respect to God, the disappearance of God makes human being size of himself. What distinguishes and opposes them is the definition of the human being, the unit of measure used to establish the humanity of man. On the one hand, the essence of the human being becomes language, on the other, the nature of the human being starts being biological life. Modernity is the epoch of the Dancing God and language and life are the two opposing doctrines fighting for the orthodoxy. The ultimate reason for this conflict is the definition of the essence or nature of the human being. In order to let emerge the fracture between the linguistic and the vitalist turns, I will address the question of the philosophy of biopolitics. Biopolitics is the discipline aimed at envisioning a politics able to give voice to the nature of the human being. Before proposing a biopolitical account it is therefore necessary to answer the philosophical question concerning the definition of the human being. I will claim that the fracture between the linguistic and the vitalist turn in defining what it means to be human is the source of modern monotheism. Thinking beyond secularized theology ultimately means to challenge the Copernican revolution of language and the Darwinian revolution of life in order to envision a new ontology grounded on a different understating of the human being. In the present work – which represents the pars dentures of this theoretical project – I will demonstrate that the revolution of language and life has to be understood as a form of revelation, more precisely, as the revelation of the lack of revelation. I will enquiry the linguistic and vitalist approach to the philosophy of biopolitics through the analysis of the work of three contemporary Italian philosophers: Giorgio Agamben, Roberto Esposito, and Davide Tarizzo. The decision to focus on Italian biopolitical theory is determined by the conviction that this philosophical approach offers one of the clearest and best-articulated insights into the fracture between life and language.

This variationist sociolinguistic study investigates language change in the Francoprovençal speaking communities of les monts du Lyonnais in France, and the Canton of Valais in Switzerland. In Chapter 1 we give a brief overview of Francoprovençal, and outline the parameters of the study. Chapter 2 presents an overview of where Francoprovençal has come from and why it is so controversial. Beginning with its origins, we give a brief history of dialectalisation for our fieldwork areas, before discussing Francoprovençal as an exceptional case in the Romance linguistic literature. Case studies on language maintenance and shift are presented in Chapter 3, where we contextualise our study on Francoprovençal and the emergence of the 'Arpitan' revitalisation movement. We argue that Francoprovencal does not quite fit the mould of other multidialectal contexts such as Breton or Corsican. Chapter 4 outlines the methods employed in undertaking the empirical and ethnographic fieldwork for the study. In Chapters 5, 6, and 7 we examine each of the linguistic variables in the study in relation to a number of extra-linguistic factors. Our findings indicate that, while older traditional speakers produce localised dialectal variants in a more monitored speech style, there is variation. Conversely, the new speakers not only show substantial linguistic divergence from other speakers in the sample, but also from each other. We present evidence to suggest that the pan-regional norm is having some impact on language use. In Chapter 8 we focus specifically on the Arpitan movement and its effects, asking in what ways a commitment to the revitalisation cause is driving change for some participants in the study. A novel Arpitan Engagement Index is employed to assess the extent to which speakers are connected with the movement and how this correlates with language use: we focus on the social significance of a series of 'new' Arpitan forms. We terminate with our conclusions in Chapter 9, where we advance a number of hypotheses in relation to language change in the communities under investigation. In particular, we suggest that convergence is taking place in the direction of both national and regional norms. Lastly, we suggest avenues for future research trajectories.

“Bare-Faced Cheek: Authenticity, Femininity and Cosmetics in English Romantic-Era Print Culture” examines the rhetoric that surrounded women’s use of cosmetics in Romantic-era England through the focus of prevailing notions of authenticity and a Romantic valorisation of nature over artifice. The rhetoric that surrounded women’s use of cosmetics in Romantic-era England was as contentious as it was dichotic when the moralising dogma of literature of conduct came to clash with the commercial agenda of advertising rhetoric and notions of beauty, taste and women’s proper place in the social order became subjects of deliberation and debate. The significance of cosmetics in the Romantic era shifted from that of courtly display and fashionable visibility to that of tasteful moderation and restrained decorum. This, in turn, elicited a furious anti-cosmetic backlash that spoke of women’s use of cosmetics in terms of vanity, duplicity and fraudulence. The increasing medicalisation of the female body and the dissemination of that knowledge through a burgeoning print trade meant that such accusations could be accompanied by dire warnings of the deleterious nature of many lead, mercury and arsenical-based preparations that were being prepared, manufactured and promoted by a coterie of hucksters, quacks and charlatans. However, the very burgeoning print culture that gave voice to such allegations and cautions also provided a sounding-board for other voices such as the newly emerging sub-genre of the beauty manual that presented cosmetics as benign, effectual and the sign of a healthy regard for the beauty bestowed upon humanity by God. Furthermore, the rise of periodical publications designed particularly with a female readership in mind provided a forum for discussion of matters cosmetical and regular features within such publications promoted the cosmetic benefits of skincare and the effectual preservation of beauty. Advertisers also made good use of such publications as places to promote their goods as anodynely effective and discretely undetectable: an effective weapon against the ravages of time and the vagaries of nature. Cosmetics under such auspices became not only admissible but laudable, a service to both society and domestic harmony through their mollifying ability to beautify the female face. Paradoxically then, the key to using cosmetics successfully within Romantic-era England was to learn the art of appearing authentic, natural and untouched by the dubiety of feminine ‘arts’. In a print culture conflicted over the permissibility of cosmetics within the secretive realm of the female toilette the figure of the cosmetically enhanced female was thus, one that came to be used figuratively by female novelists of the time to raise questions about: the validity of authenticity within the lives of contemporary women; the contingent nature of femininity in a society that increasingly sought to confine women within an idealised cultural script; the crushing intensity of a powerful social scrutiny; and the hegemonically disruptive potential of elective female transgression. Hence, cosmetic artifice within the works of the women authors I investigate becomes a metaphor for the over-arching artifice inherent within the social construction of Romantic-era woman. Moreover, the self-control required for her to assimilate herself as naturally virtuous, diffident and unworldly points to the cosmetic artistry required to make her naturally beautiful.