This story began with a question and grew in the answering, as did I, until it became a story more interested in the quest and the asking of the question than in the resolution or answer. That is not to say that this novel does not have a fairly standard beginning, middle and end. Instead, the uniqueness, if there is such a thing, emerges in the content of these parts, in the genres I used, and in the consistent voice of the central character that continually returns to the question. I wondered, (to use a phrase often times overused by Jenson, the main character in the most recent version of this story), why I was here. More precisely, I wondered what a person propelled by this question and the failure to find an answer, or at least an answer that provided any semblance of hope or self-confidence, would do when put into extraordinary circumstances. At what point would he abandon the question, or in this story, at what point would Jenson ultimately give up on his quest? Also, as a writer acutely aware that I write for a reader and not just for myself, I wondered at what point a reader would abandon a character like Jenson or a quest that didn’t have a clear end. These two themes—the questioning quest and the constant slipping away of answers—as well as my desire to create a character and world that were both familiar and yet epic in scale, forced me to write this story. What emerged has been a labor of love and obsession that shows the first person story of a character’s struggle to find his “belong’in place in the world.” This familiar motivation is overshadowed, though, by a more pressing goal—the first person account of a, possibly, unreliable narrator, failed parent and husband who must team up with his estranged wife to save his son. As Tolkien once said, “an author cannot of course remain wholly unaffected by his experience, but the ways in which a story-germ uses the soil of experience are extremely complex, and attempts to define the process are at best guesses from evidence inadequate and ambiguous.” What I can say, though, with absolute certainty is that this latest version of the story is a result of maturity and constant curiosity. As I have grown older the central character in the story has changed from a teenage boy fighting ogres and saving damsels in distress to a middle-aged man with phobias and faults battling some of the everyday problems we all encounter—how to deal with fear and feelings of inadequacy and how to rekindle love or talk with a girl. Of course, he still has to battle a strange being from a different dimension and figure out how to fix a secret, illegal scientific experiment so that he can save his son, who has been put into a coma because he has volunteered for an experiment that sent him to a different dimension. But the science and mystery and extraordinary circumstances don’t, or at least don’t always, overshadow the heart of the story. This is a man on a quest to find answers that may not exist, and the questioning quest will, undoubtedly, take him to the next dimension where he will have to find his son, figure out how to come back home, and perhaps…battle God.

Two paradoxical elements in Camus's work, both kept at a distance by the author, are the feminine and the sacred. The feminine is paradoxical in its patterns of speech and silence, and of partial or aspectual absence and presence. Whereas feminine speech and presence are abundant in Camus's theatre, absence, silence and fragmentation of the feminine characterize his narrative works, with the exception of the short story, "La femme adultere." The sense of the sacred, which permeates Camus's work, represents a philosophical paradox. Indeed, how to reconcile Camus's agnosticism and his philosophy of the absurd, which denies transcendance, with this sense of the sacred? How to explain the experience of "La femme adultere"? For it is in this text, after having intersected in the plays, that the paradoxes of the sacred and the feminine climactically come together and approach the metaphysical. A first critical approach sets the sacred in the context of Camus's time. Juxtaposing the early Camusian essays with certain writings of contemporary authors relative to religion and the sacred, it considers the sacred from philosophical, historical and sociological as well as religious perspectives. A second approach, psychoanalytic and feminist, explores Camus's narrative works and his drama. Referring mainly to the writings of Kristeva and taking up her notion of the "myth of the feminine" as the "last refuge of the sacred", it examines the absences and silences of the mother in the narrative works before concerning itself with the speech and presence of the female companion in the plays. This difference between the two genres is analyzed. Finally, the last part of the thesis, which focuses on "La femme adultere", examines the modalities of desire. It is this context of desire, linked to the Camusian concept of the absurd, that opens the feminine to the sacred. This double paradox is examined along with the possible meaning of the unexpected alliance of the feminine and the sacred in a corpus of work mostly perceived as masculine and agnostic.

The main purpose of the present research is to develop a critical reading of the double identity such as it is expressed in the novels of the North African immigrants living in France. But, and far from proposing another socio-historical analysis on North African immigration in France, the interest of this work is in filling the surprising lack of critical literary works on the subject. It is based on the concept of the wandering, which forms the imaginary identity of the "Beurs". This perspective reactivates older debates about the significance of "us", "the other", the races, the Nation-State and the nature and limit of the concept of national culture. It will also allow us to present some of the main characteristics of the Beurs's identity, and from there, will help us to redefine the myth of the modern stranger. The thesis of this research proposes that the Beurs's identity is mainly built through denunciation and subversion of the Nation State's official discourse and finally produces an original formulation. From the study of the themes, the form the way the story is told, and from the subversive character of the discourse about otherness (which refuses the idea of unity and wholeness that the French national culture is still pushing forward today), this paper shows, finally, how this new discourse on one's identity (coming from the world of the North African immigration, but from within the occidental world), could very well be a modern inversion of the concept of Orientalism. The novelty, which for us is capable of renewing the way the Western world looks at the Stranger, is that the latter is at once subject and object of the discourse, and that this neo-orientalism is itself a production of the western world, with the clear intent of ruining it.

No description available.

This study of the "prosaics" of allegory in Perez Galdos's novels examines the relationship between allegory at its most formally elemental and prose realism at its most complex. The first chapter introduces the major lines of philosophical, rhetorical, hermeneutic, and deconstructionist thinking in modern approaches to allegory, from the Romantics to Paul de Man, and illustrates various ways in which allegory's formal structures serve as the figural and morphological underwriters of Galdos's narrative fictions. Chapter II uses a single tropological occasion in Galdos's Miau to develop a realist's revisionistic equation, in which the authoritative and morphologically deterministic structures of typology are compounded by modern intertextuality and the figural structures of metonymy and metaphor. Dante's Inferno supplies the allegorical subtext for the tropological occasion in question, and in that fashion is introduced the master allegorist whose authoritative traces will serve as allegorical tracking points in each of the study's subsequent chapters. Nicolai Gogol and Charles Dickens provide control texts by which to gauge the innovative subtlety with which Galdos articulates his stylistic equation. Chapter III explores the role of personification allegory in construing a metaphysics of fictional character. Galdos's dialogue novel Realidad, Laclos's Les Liaisons dangereuses, Prudentius's Psychomachia, and Dante's Inferno provide opportunities for speculation about about reductivity and complexity in realistic characterization. The fourth chapter takes Galdos's Torquemada tetralogy as the basis for comment upon realistic fictions as allegories of epochal thinking. Michel Foucault's concept of the "episteme" opens the way for a discussion of the epochal disjunction in that novel series between Comtian positivism and Dantean allegory--a disjunction between system and synthesis. The fifth and final chapter draws upon allegory to propose a theory of the management of narrative time in realism. The theory suggests allegory as the underwriter of several narrative time codes that work against the impulse of chronology in prose narrative. Galdos's short novel Tristana is considered as an allegory of time--historical time, time detained, and time passing. Dante's tale of Paolo and Francesca, in the fifth canto of the Inferno, offers examples of Galdos's deployment of the time codes under consideration.

This dissertation analyses the role of popular music in contemporary Spanish culture. The eighties were a fascinating period of Spanish history, as the country was making its transition from dictatorship to democracy, and there were high national and international expectations connected to this change. The popular music of this period amply reflects the changes that the new country was undergoing. This study is theoretically grounded in new trends in Cultural Studies which open up and expand what we understand by “Culture” today. In this new theoretical reconfiguration, popular music today plays a predominant function in the conception of the social and cultural space of Spain. Through the study of these songs, we are able to understand this particular historical moment better, and also see how this culture has shaped us today. In the present “age of mechanical reproduction” (using Walter Benjamin's terminology) we are key contributors to Culture, yet we are also shaped by it. Because of this, all processes of cultural production deserve to be examined. The analysis responds to the recent parameters in contemporary Spanish Cultural and Literary Studies, an area which needs more scholarly attention, reflecting as it does current changes in our world. This work seeks to develop and legitimate a previously neglected and ignored area of study, using an interdisciplinary approach, by integrating different disciplines such as Music, Literature, or History.

Esta disertacion busca, interdisciplinariamente, un material y un nuevo contexto, desde una perspectiva feminista, como base para analizar, las obras escritas por mujeres y en especifico, las de poetas espanolas del siglo XX, esperando entrar en dialogo con la tradicion poetica patristica. Asi, el Capitulo 1 sirve de marco y guia al material provisto en los capitulos siguientes.El Capitulo 2 narra procesos interdisciplinarios realizados por investigadoras feministas, quienes desde los anos 60 encuentran nuevas narraciones y diversas categorias de analisis producidas por la presencia de mujeres en la historia.El Capitulo 3 sintetiza las diversas etapas y las respectivas prioridades de la critica literaria feminista, especialmente la anglo-americana, desde sus origenes en grupos heterogeneos pro derechos civiles, hasta la organizacion de grupos exclusivamente de mujeres, a la par con la entrada de intelectuales feministas a la Academia.El Capitulo 4, es una bibliografia de 223 poetas espanolas, que presenta su incursion en otros generos literarios y la recepcion inmediata a sus obras en resenas, antologias, prologos, revistas de poesia, anuarios y textos criticos.El quinto capitulo se dedica a poetas y antologias, tanto generales como especificas, representativas del quehacer poetico en la Espana del siglo XX.El Apendice consiste de dos Cuadros antologicos. El primero incluye poetas que aparecen en antologias generales. El segundo, poetas en antologias tematicas, nacionales y/o regionales representativas. Es una nomina de 825 poetas incluidos en 75 de las antologias mas importantes que presentan y/o marginan poetas a la vez que establecen el canon, y su relacion con obras de las poetas rescatadas. Esta disertacion se cierra con una bibliografia (alfabetica y cronologica) de las antologias senaladas.Los trabajos de referencia, dedicados a las escritoras espanolas, han aumentado en los ultimos anos. En ellos, como en este, se busca fomentar el analisis de la amplia participacion de las mujeres no como fenomenos literarios aislados sino como evento que amplia la esfera separatista de cualquier proceso en el que participan las escritoras, o que la integran a un espacio mas amplio que permita ver sus obras dentro de otra nueva historia-literaria.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.