Matrixial reading is a new methodology for literary criticism that emphasizes the ethical relevance of literature. Adhering to an interdisciplinary approach, I adopt feminist artist and psychoanalyst Bracha Ettinger's paradigm of subjectivity-as-encounter, based on the maternal/late pre-natal infant relation, to refigure reading relations. Analyzing selected texts, I show how readers are invited to form an ethical covenant based on matrixial, as opposed to phallic, relations. I discuss exile and the foreign in Dany Laferrière's novels; Marguerite Duras' work provokes an epistemological reflection on ignorance; with Nancy Huston I demonstrate the role of reading in healing trauma.

Aphoristic thoughts must be distinguished from their articulation in aphorisms, for they are found in all other genres of discourse as well. Within these discourses they present non-discursive points, i.e. points where the mind interrupts the linear progression of the text in order to stop and contemplate a momentary end of thinking. This study seeks to isolate the thought from thinking. It does so in a series of reflections on German, French and English aphoristic texts. These reflections explore a viable alternative to the contextualist paradigms of literary criticism, history, and philosophy. Instead of reintegrating the isolated thought in an extended historical narrative or critical argument, this method seeks to respond to it with another thought. The "context" of the thinker's thought is not a genre, a literal text, or field of inquiry, but a world that is only rarely textual in a literal sense. Unlike the disciplines to which most serious reflection is devoted, the aphoristic utterance makes sense outside a formal discipline. One motif around which the independent sections of this study are arranged are Goethe's and Nietzsche's thoughtful wanderer, exposed to the elements outside. Another is Nietzsche's gay or cheerful science, in which ultimately nihilistic ideals like certainty, consistency and truth are diagnosed, treated with and replaced by the wit, partiality and idiosyncracy of the aphorist. In addition, the study discusses aspects of the scholarship, addresses the problem of the aphoristic collection, and attempts an inventory of aphoristic ends.

This dissertation discusses Anna Banti's Artemisia, Roberto Rossellini's Paisà, Ingeborg Bachmann short story “Simultan,” Helma Sanders-Brahms' Deutschland, bleiche Mutter and Alain Resnais' Hiroshima mon amour. The novels and films addressed all create a condition of epistemological crisis; they present the spectator or reader with a landscape of rubble, both literal and figurative, in which all existing structures have been erased. There are no stable epistemological certainties left, only provisional configurations that are always threatening to collapse once more into the debris, history is defined by slippage and displacement. Bachmann and Resnais, in particular, explore the trace and echo of “history,” and the rupture of temporal stability; for them, history shares the structure of language, ruled by metonymy and slippage, always exceeding any stable framework. These self-referentially split and fractured narratives present us with a universe in which everything is in flux. If “history” is “broken” by definition, so too are subjectivity, gender and desire: rupture and splitting are their constitutive elements. In Rossellini's films, especially, heterosexual masculinity has lost any claim to “authenticity” and has become purely performative, a phantasm of opera, theater, film, even puppet shows. The male subject is constituted both as spectacle and obsessive spectator, with voyeurism and scopophlia the only possible forms of desire. The lacuna of desire left by the collapse of the heterosexual male subject is partly filled by the scopophilic appetites of the cinematic spectator: we see ourselves, and our own deviant desire, constantly represented on screen.

In this study we examine the development of the female poetic voice in the Puerto Rican context. Taking from the theoretical frameworks of Cultural Studies, Feminist Studies and New Historicism we re-read the political, cultural and literary history of Puerto Rico and its relation to the construction of the representations of Woman in texts written by women as well as those by men. In the first chapter we analyze the weight of gender and history in the elaboration of general discourse. We point out how all texts speak from a particular gendered perspective and respond to a historically determined moment which requires critical analysis that takes into consideration these contextual phenomena. From here we begin to re-examine the development of the female poetic creation from the end of the nineteenth century to the 1930s. We study the change of sovereignty and the political, social and cultural impact that this had on the literature of Puerto Rico. Mainly, we look into the gestation of a political-literary discourse created by Puerto Rican intellectuals, who were at the same time, responsible for the political and cultural events of the island. The second chapter explores the creation of a new political project for Puerto Rico which begins in 1940s and culminates with the Commonwealth. In addition, we review the political projects of the Commonwealth which required the active participation of literature since it was through literature that a cultural nationalism would be built, a nationalism that would compensate for the lack of an independent political state. Concluding this second chapter, we re-examine the decades of the sixties and seventies, viewing them as a period of change and of social and political struggle. We study the gradual separation of the literary and political spaces, which allowed a more transgressive discourse as well as a more authentic female voice. The third chapter is a critical analysis of the female poetic voice through the twentieth century. Among the selected poets are: Clara Lair, Haydee Ramirez de Arellano, Marigloria Palma, Angelamaria Davila, Olga Nolla, Manuel Ramos Otero and Mayra Santos Febres.

The literary lecture is a subgenre of the traditional academic lecture that combines literary and metaliterary analysis, artistic self-fashioning, and public performance. This study considers the literary lectures of five writers as a sampling of a major transformation in this genre in Spain between 1900 and 1926. Ramón del Valle-Inclán, Ramón Gómez de la Serna, José Ortega y Gasset, Federico García Sanchiz, and Federico García Lorca have been chosen for their representation of a range of literary generations, cultural backgrounds, and socio-political beliefs, and for what their innovative practices of lecturing reveal about the mechanics of this reinvented genre. These five case studies demonstrate that the literary lecture is a complex literary genre that exists in a liminal state between the spoken and the written, reality and fiction, and the public persona and the internal self. Furthermore, these changes come at a time when audience composition was beginning to skew heavily toward the rising middle and upper-middle classes, and especially toward women. Ultimately, the transformation of the lecture from 1900-1926 in Spain is seen as the product of the appropriation of a traditionally academic, essay-like genre for both artistic and educational purposes and for satisfying the desires of middle-class consumer culture. Finally, this dissertation explores for the first time the implications of editorial treatments of the lecture: the classificatory anxieties of editors in the passage of the lecture from stage to page, exemplified in the treatment of the lecture as written text in the Obras completas of Federico García Lorca.

Abstract not available

This paper is an attempt to combine my love of reading with my interest in education. My exploration of romance literature and its popular appeal is based on a developmental "bibliotherapy" approach to reading. Focusing on the adolescent girl in her identity crisis, I examine potential benefits and pitfalls that romance reading might hold for her as she grows toward an independent maturity and becomes involved in intimate relationships. Although it includes classroom observations, my project is not a data-based survey of adolescent girls and their reading habits; rather, it is a theoretical exploration of moral and pedagogical concerns which I have encountered through my experiences with teaching and reading. As such, it deals with issues of gender and genre and the role of the educator in the promotion of relevant texts during the transition years of adolescence. I rely on several eighteenth-century works--Radcliffe's popular gothic romance and Austen's satire of that genre (though Austen's novel, too, contains a moving romance); on Rousseau's Emile and Gilligan's feminist theories--to develop my thesis that romance reading can provide a landscape for sublimation and delay of early sexual experience; and that it is the educator's role to guide young girls in their reading to recognize the dangers of reification and to lead them toward a stronger sense of self. / Thesis / Master of Arts in Teaching (MAT)

Entitled “Reassessing the Theatre of the Absurd: Parabolic Drama and the Question of Absurdity,” my dissertation interrogates the conventional idea that the Theatre of the Absurd contemplates the purposelessness of life by re-examining some of the major plays of Beckett, Ionesco, Genet and Pinter. I suggest that the plays of the Theatre of the Absurd are, instead, ethical texts that contemplate how life can be made meaningful. I argue that Martin Esslin’s 1961 characterization of such work as “absurd” does not take into account a fully informed reading of Camus, and thus Esslin’s reading does not see the extent to which meaningfulness is fundamental to such cultural productions. Therefore, I push for a re-reading of these plays and playwrights that allows for decidedly meaning-making conclusions. Using an up-to-date understanding of Camus’ philosophy as a theoretical frame, I engage with the long history of Theatre of the Absurd criticism, performance histories and reviews, the genre of the parable, philosophy and performance studies. My dissertation, ultimately, argues against a strictly absurd reading and, instead, positions such work within the larger realm of ethics (in the general vein of Camus).

No description available.

To truly understand Spain, one must have more than just a basic knowledge of the country's physical features or general traditions. If one investigates further into the history of ethnology of the name that is Spain, one discovers an intricate network of individual worlds that somehow revolve around one center, Madrid. Each "patria chica" or "miniature country" is a product of its location within the Peninsula, and each conserves its own institutions, values, and idiosyncracies. Today, the autonomous regions of Spain maintain and cherish their individuality with a certain degree of liberty thanks to the Constitution of 1978. Soon after the Reconquest of Iberia, the Catholic Sovereigns attained the unity of Spain. Consequently, the Castilian dialect of Latin became the official language of Spain and its overseas territories. The central power of Castile began its persecution of the regions. Castile succeeded greatly in homogenizing Spain by suppressing the very source of identity of its ethnic peoples--language. The installation of the Castilian language marked a new era in Spanish history. The linguistic supremacy of Castilian effectively arrested the cultural growth of the "atrias chicas" until very recently. Ample evidence of this is the virtual loss of the Leonese, Aragonese, Asturian, Navarrese, and Andalusian dialects of Latin along with the 400-year-old dialectalization of the Galician, Catalan, and Basque languages. Castilian dominance of Spain greatly degraded the state of education in Catalonia, Euzkadi, and Galicia. Not only did people from these regions lose an enormous part of their heritage, but Galicia, in particular, became the unwilling victim of generations of illiteracy and poverty. The year 1975 has come to represent the renaissance of the ethnic Spanish regions. Today, the historic autonomies of Spain can finally step out of the Castilian shadow and rediscover their pasts. One objective for them is certain--they must place their own languages at the forefront of their efforts to preserve their cultures. Their languages are their past, present, and future. Just how they will use them in this age of increasing global unity may make the future an interesting new era in Spain's history.