Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2008. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 69-11, Section: A, page: 4325. Adviser: Karen L. Fresco. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 319-339) Available on microfilm from Pro Quest Information and Learning.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Indiana University, Dept. of Spanish and Portuguese, 2005. / Title from PDF t.p. (viewed Dec. 3, 2008). Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 66-03, Section: A, page: 0828. Chair: Catherine Larson.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Indiana University, Dept. of Comparative Literature, 2009. / Title from PDF t.p. (viewed on Jul 15, 2010). Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 70-12, Section: A, page: 4669. Adviser: David Hertz.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Indiana University, Dept. of Spanish and Portuguese, 2006. / "Title from dissertation home page (viewed July 16, 2007)." Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 67-10, Section: A, page: 3815. Adviser: Kathleen A. Myers.

<p>My dissertation, Wanderers in Contradiction. The Italian Road to Modernism (1903-1922), analyzes how a generation of intellectuals approach the cultural revolution brought by Modernism. In Chapter One, dedicated to Pirandello’s essay On Humor, modernist themes, such as the perception of life as an unstoppable and unrepresentable flux, are examined in the Italian work that best represents them in the context of nineteenth-century ‘negative thought.’ Chapter Two, which is devoted to the writings of Giovanni Papini and Giuseppe Prezzolini, and Chapter Three, in which I focus on the work of Ardengo Soffici and Aldo Palazzeschi, analyze the ‘positive’ response to Modernism. These intellectuals highlighted how the cultural crisis was an opportunity to reject dangerous forms of essentialism, and opened the way for a new form of art committed to the representation of contingency. Conversely, Chapter Four, which deals with Giovanni Boine and Piero Jahier, and Chapter Five, on Scipio Slataper and Carlo Michelstaedter, illustrate the ‘negative’ reaction to the modernist crisis of values. These authors, who abandoned a purely epistemological perspective in favor of a religious or ethical one, manifest an anti-modernist thread within Modernism itself. Therefore, my research contributes to three different general areas of scholarship: literature, philosophy, and history. Broadly speaking, it advances the understanding of Italian culture and the way Italian intellectuals participate in and are influenced by European interactions. It also engages with philosophical debates concerning the crisis of metaphysical Foundations, including the role of Italian writers in this process.</p> / Dissertation

This dissertation examines the role of women in four of Émile Zola's novels, in particular their privileged position as the conduits through which he exerted his "experimental" literary method. Zola has long been recognized as subjecting his female characters to extreme violence, but scholars have not yet thoroughly explored how the ways in which he represents this violence provide insight into the nature of his narrative practice. For Zola, literary fiction offers access to a scientific truth, and the female body and its capacity for procreation is the source material for his investigation. By subjecting his female characters to analysis and ultimately dissection, Zola violently exploits the creative potential of their bodies and builds a literary empire upon them. In La Curée, Zola presents one of his first experimental heroines, a bored and pampered wife whose identity is constructed through reflections and refractions via a series of mirrors, both visually and narratively. This multiplicity of interferences effaces the female voice and subjectivity while exploiting the visual appeal of the female body. Nana offers a counterpoint on the same theme, featuring a woman who, through the desirability of her body, reverses the paradigm and exerts control over those around her with masterful manipulation of optics and language. Nana's body inscrutably defies analysis and playfully disrupts gender constructs by assuming contradictory sexual characteristics that are only indirectly observable. Zola shifts his narrative focus from the women themselves to the broader notion of sexual difference in La Bête humaine, in which the female body signifies the difference that drives male desire and destabilizes civilized society. The representability of sex becomes increasingly problematic as female speech, filtered through the body, puts the reliability of language into question. The problematics of the legible body that Zola develops in these texts can be traced all the way back to Thérèse Raquin, in which he conducts a literary investigation into the relationship between bodies and texts. This short novel, Zola's first of the genre, is particularly interested in the different (pro)creative capacities of male and female bodies and the representational possibilities inherent in them.

Mujeres de papel examines the representation of female same-sex desire in Spanish literature and culture between 1868 and 1936, drawing on novels, popular sex manuals, sexological treatises, postcards, and illustrations. While scholars have productively attended to Post-Francoist literary and cinematographic expressions of non-normative sexualities, my dissertation sheds new light on its rich yet discontinuous prehistories. I argue that the figure of the “lesbian” is a convergence point for the ideas, beliefs and anxieties of Spanish modernity. From the will to know and categorize to erotic fantasies, the “lesbian” constitutes a pervasive yet unstable trope, which resists and at the same time motivates its definition and control. Chapter one analyzes Francisco de Sales Mayo’s 1869 La Condesita (Memorias de una doncella), a work halfway between a private diary, an erotic novel, and a medical treatise, which features a provocative case of female homosexuality. The next two chapters grapple with literary, (pseudo)scientific, and visual artifacts of the so-called “sicalipsis,” or erotic wave that inundated Spanish culture between the late 19th century and the 1930s. Works studied in these sections include novels by Rafael Cansinos-Assens, Álvaro Retana, Artemio Precioso, and Felipe Trigo, popular sex manuals by Vicente Suárez Casañ and Ángel Martín de Lucenay, and visual erotica. Chapter four turns to the fiction of Feminist writer Carmen de Burgos in conjunction with the theories on “intersexuality” formulated by Gregorio Marañon, Spain’s most renowned scientist and public intellectual of the 1920s. / Romance Languages and Literatures

This dissertation examines representations of prostitution in male-authored French novels from the later nineteenth century. It proposes that prostitution has a map, and that realist and naturalist authors appropriate this cartography in the Second Empire and early Third Republic to make sense of a shifting and overhauled Paris perceived to resist mimetic literary inscription. Though always significant in realist and naturalist narrative, space is uniquely complicit in the novel of prostitution due to the contemporary policy of reglementarism, whose primary instrument was the mise en carte: an official registration that subjected prostitutes to moral and hygienic surveillance, but also “put them on the map,” classifying them according to their space of practice (such as the brothel or the boulevard). It is this spatial and conceptual taxonomy, I contend, that makes the prostitute a fulcrum for authorial mapping – for the assertion of mastery over both the prostitute and the city. The first chapter reads the inscription of the tolerated brothel in novels by Huysmans and Goncourt as the mark of a nostalgic longing for old Paris and a desire for stability in a resistant urban present. Analyzing the representation of the brasserie à femmes in lesser-known works by Tabarant and Barrès, Chapter Two posits that the brasserie prostitute fuels the desires of a generation of aspirational Rastignacs by selling stories alongside beer and sex, adopting a writerly role and troubling authorial mastery of the prostitute and the city. The mobilization of prostitutional metaphors in the Rougon-Macquart is the subject of the third chapter, which argues that Zola deploys the prostitute’s entropic force to dismantle the Paris of his predecessors, Balzac and Haussmann, and clear the ground for the construction of a proper city. The final chapter demonstrates that fin-de-siècle novelist Charles-Louis Philippe makes use of the clandestinity of street prostitution in order to locate a breed of urban mapping that is not contingent on mastery. By remapping the prostitute, the dissertation proposes a new model for understanding both the nineteenth-century novel of prostitution and the lived and represented experience of a Paris that Zola termed “le mauvais lieu de l’Europe.” / Romance Languages and Literatures

En mi deseo por mostrar una nueva perspectiva tanto en Cárcel de Amor como en La Celestina, encontré un artículo que encierra muchas de mis ideas sobre estas dos obras medievales: “El Ojo de la Mente”, escrito por Michael Rifaterre. Para Rifaterre lo que realmente importa en la intertextualidad de los ibros medievales es el hecho de que se busca un texto homólogo, se hacen asociaciones a textos ya conocidos, se apela a los archivos mentales tanto del lector como del escritor. En otras palabras, la memoria es el estilo que sirve para presentar el contenido. Esto para mí es una perspetiva fascinante que me hizo ver muchas obras desde puntos de vista diferentes. Si la memoria es un determinante de estilo y un elemento influyente en el contenido, la memoria define en gran parte tanto el estilo como el contenido. Empecé por considerar a La Celestina a partir de esta premisa y me pareció más abstracta que nunca. Pensé como Gilman en su libro Arte y Estrutura, que la obra es un continuum de la conciencia, es conciencia hablada. Reduje los personajes a imágenes a movimientos de pantomima como hizo Dorothy Clarke en su libro, Decalogue and Deadly Sins in La Celestina. Concluí como Lida de Malkiel que la obra da suficiente tiep para que se comunique una noción de realidad y de verosimilitud psicológica, no para el desarrollo emocional de los personajes como piensa Malkiel, sino un tiempo suficiente para afianzar un concepto en la memoria. Visto desde un ángulo menos abstracto, el hecho de que a memoria es determinante de estilo y contenido acercó en mi opinión a La Celestina más al género de la novela. Me hizo considerar aspectos como el narrador fidedigno y la narración confiable o no confiable en una obra que según algunos, no tiene narrador. En Cárcel de Amor encontré el primer juicio por jurado de las obras medievales que he leído. En esta obra vi una clara separación, casi simétrica entre lo que es real y lo que es abstracto. Pasamos de lo abstracto a lo concreto para recordar algo. Tenemos una prisión alegórica y una real, un duelo alegórico y uno real, las armas del alma pecadora y las armas que matan al hombre, el rey que es Dios y un rey que está en una corte real, el juicio final que propone la teología cristiana y un juicio por jurado en el que la memoria juega un papel muy importante. La memoria prevalece por sí sola en estas obras. Llega a ser un elemento de narración, y un marcador de identidad. En el aspecto religioso, cumple una función moral. En el aspecto humano da nuevas dimensiones a los personajes. En el aspecto literario es un fuerte marcador de estilo y contenido que abre nuevas puertas a la interpretación de estas obras.

This study examines and explains the politically, ecclesiastically and socially motivated perceptions of Joan of Arc by the French and the British focusing on late medieval and early Renaissance depictions. Joan was tried by the British in France. Even so, she had a text-book British heresy trial according to the precedent set during John Badby's trial in 1401. Equally importantly, close examination of fifteenth century French texts shows French ambivalence towards, diminution of and, in some cases, complete rejection of Joan and her role in French history. Indeed, the British perceptions about the Maid are the only perspectives on Joan that remained constant through the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Our modern perceptions of Joan of Arc seem fairly stable. Yet what became evident during the research for this project is that this stability is a recent development we have simply inherited Napoleon's view of the Maid of Orléans. Throughout the Middle Ages and Renaissance, the British characterized Joan of Arc as a witch and a great threat to their political well-being. British ideas about Joan of Arc, however negative and contrary they may seem to our modern ideas about her, are the only ideas that remained constant during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.