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.

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This dissertation, focusing on the Vers de circonstance, takes issue with traditional views on Stéphane Mallarmé's aesthetics and his positioning on the relation of art to society. Whereas Mallarmé has often been branded as an ivory-tower poet, invested solely in abstract ideals and removed from the masses, my research demonstrates his interest in concrete essences and the small events of the everyday. As such, the Vers de circonstance offer an exemplary entry point to understanding these poetic preoccupations as the poems of this collection are both characterized by their materiality and their celebration of ordinary festivities. Indeed, most of the poems either accompany or are directly written on objects that were offered as gifts on such occasions as birthdays, anniversaries or seasonal holidays. The omnipresence of objects and dates that can be referred back to real events displays Mallarmé's on-going questioning on the relation of art to reality. As I show, some of these interrogations rejoin the aesthetic preoccupations of the major artistic currents of the time, such as Impressionism in France and the Decorative Arts in England. These movements were defining new norms for the representation of reality in reaction to the changes of nineteenth century society. But as the genetic study of the Vers de circonstance reveals, along with the contextual framing and analysis of his other works, the occasional and the concept of the real play a fundamental role in his poetics at large. On the one hand, the aesthetic concept of the real allows him to draw the attention of his readers to the tension between the concreteness of reality with its elusiveness and ephemerality. On the other hand, the occasional is a way for Mallarmé to humanize the otherwise anonymous and impersonal quality of print. In an epoch when reality became mechanically reproducible and the distance between an author and its readers became increasingly distant and diffuse, the questions posed by Mallarmé on the relation of art to real objects, people and events were fundamental. As I conclude, therefore, the use of widely accessible quotidian objects, the mise en abyme of the visuality of writing, and Mallarmé's programmatic note to the reader to emulate his poetic project, all combine to validate his postulation of a new poetic art turned towards the everyday and his contemporaries.

<p>"Sentimental Manipulations: Duty and Desire in the Novels of Sophie Cottin" examines four novels by Sophie Cottin, from 1798 until 1806. A forgotten but once-popular novelist, Cottin used the theme of motherhood to develop the relationship between women and desire and duty. These novels use the sentimental novel in different ways that challenge the limits of genre and confront social perceptions of motherhood. The generic transitions reveal subversive representations of women's sexuality and choice. The author's rewriting of motherhood and genre thus plays a crucial role in understanding the complex and developing notion of the sentimental novel in a period of transition after the Revolution. The eighteenth century gave rise to more structured gender divisions in society that provided little space for women's freedom outside of the patriarchal dictates of the family and motherhood. Jean-Jacques Rousseau's 1761 publication of <italic> Julie; ou la Nouvelle Héloïse</italic> and his 1762 publication of <italic> Emile; ou de l'éducation</italic> are thought to have defined social roles for women in relation to their reproductive abilities. The novel, as a site of social production, was understood to have influential moral implications and was used to confront and maintain socially accepted behavior. Mother-child depictions in literature, therefore, reveal socially acceptable behavior for women. My first chapter examines the development of motherhood as a form of social duty imposed on women. I explore the Rousseauian themes in Cottin's first sentimental epistolary novel, <italic> Claire d'Albe</italic>, published in 1978. The representation of adultery reveals the complex relationship between women's duty, virtue, and sexuality. In my second chapter, I analyze how Cottin manipulates the epistolary sentimental genre in <italic> Amélie Mansfield</italic>, published in 1802. Cottin creates narrative spaces that privilege women's expression and redefine women's choice through a violent and controversial depiction of the protagonist's suicide. I explore the social implications of the removal of the suicide scene from all publications of the novel after 1805. My third chapter examines the incorporation of elements of the travel narrative into the sentimental genre in <italic> Malvina </italic>, published in 1800, and <italic>Elisabeth; ou les exilés de Sibérie</italic>, published in 1805. Through the description of travel, I explore Cottin's representations of duty and women's education at two distinct moments in her publishing career.</p> / Dissertation

<p>Although Charles Baudelaire's poetry was censored in part for his graphic representations of death, for Baudelaire himself, death was the ultimate censorship. He grappled with its limitations of the possibility of articulation in Les Fleurs du mal, Le Spleen de Paris, "Le Poème du hachisch," and other works. The first chapter of this dissertation, "Dead Silent," explores Baudelaire's use of apophasis as a rhetorical tactic to thwart the censoring force of death as what prevents the speaking subject from responding. Chapter two, "Voices Beyond the Grave," then investigates the opposite poetics of articulation and inarticulation, in the form of post-mortem voice from within the cemetery, and particularly as didactic speech that contradicts the living. "Baudelaire's Widows" argues that the widow is for Baudelaire a figure of modernity par excellence, auguring the anticipation of mourning and the problem of remembering the dead as a lifelong cognitive dilemma. Chapter four, "Lethal Illusions," combines analysis of suicide in "La Corde" and "Le Poème du hachisch" with interrogation of mimesis. If the intoxicant serves as suicide and mirror, the production of illusion is the possibility and the fatal pathology of art. Yet art simultaneously channels a truth understood as the revelation of illusions--not least the illusion of a life without death.</p> / Dissertation

<p>In my dissertation, I connect the role of literature and its interpretations with France's current occultation of its colonial and imperial past and present. The dissertation puts forth a re-consideration of an excluded work and of some hexagonal classics across time-periods.</p><p>The first chapter focuses on an excluded author from the Canon, The Baron de Lahontan (1683-1716). His Dialogues avec un sauvage (1703) are unique because the strident critique of the clergy, the wealthy and the aristocracy is free from patriotic and essentialist concerns. Today his works are claimed by some Amerindian scholars (such as George Sioui) as illustrative of Amerindian values, but largely ignored by French educational and publishing institutions. . I then examine briefly Diderot's Supplément au Voyage de Bougainville (1773). The comparison of Diderot's Supplément with Lahontan's Dialogues underline that Diderot critique of colonialism was not the primary objective of this work and was limited to issues of sovereignty and pointedly left aside the issue of commerce and indirect political influence.</p><p>The second chapter is on the work of Flaubert, Salammbô. I propose that Flaubert' Salammbô (1862) paints a world in which a collective consciousness based on class begins to emergeI also propose basing myself on Sartre's work on the author, that in Salammbô Flaubert finds a space in which to unfold his own contradictions (as symbolized in the novel by those of Salammbô herself) regarding his belonging to and hatred of the French bourgeoisie.</p><p>In the third chapter, I examine the works of Maupassant as a journalist and novelist in the context of colonialism. As a journalist he defended the interests of an emerging class of colons as a journalist by engaging in a complicated manipulation of public opinion. Maupassant was also the author of classic novel Bel-Ami (1885) which can be read as a ruthless indictment of the financial motivations behind France's colonial expansion. One of my arguments is that Maupassant's fiction in relation to the colonial renewal of the 1880's was what Balzac's novels were to emerging capitalism: his powers of observation transcend his political beliefs.</p><p>The ultimate chapter is about Camus's L'étranger (1942), Le premier home (written in 1959 published posthumously in1994) and his relation with Sartre. I examine how the historical events shaped Camus's fiction and how after his death they contributed to his standing in the literary field today. In L'étranger Camus does not acknowledge Arab characters by name, nor is the violence inflicted upon them considered neither central nor worthy of particular concern. I argue that Camus standing today as progressive and humanitarian thinker despite writing for the French colonial empire is indicative of France's inability to come to terms with its colonial past. </p><p>My re-visitation of the above works has led me examine the notion of progress in history and how its political corollary, the division between progress and reaction, later between left and right does not incorporate the issue of colonialism. I also attempted to assess the colonial and imperial projects as endeavors motivated primarily by economic gains of specific social groups which used race and identity as justifications and cover ups. This interpretative framework based on the theories put forth by Jean-Paul Sartre in his works on colonialism, racism and Flaubert.</p><p>This dissertation contributes a novel critique of hexagonal canonical works and proposes a re-evaluation of the extensive influence of political imperatives on the elaboration and status of works of literature.</p> / Dissertation

Thesis (Ph.D.)--New York University, 2007. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 68-10, Section: A, page: 4287. Adviser: Mikhail Iampolski.