The basic characteristic of Postmodern times manifests itself through the dissolution of totalitarian theories. In a more complex and scattered world, postmodern thinking rejects the absolutist interpretations of Big History. This approach implies the multiplicity and acceptance of each and all perspectives that might contribute to a new dimension of a given literary work. We approach this ideology as the end of all ideologies through three critical methods that enhance the textual features as well as the internal contradictions that emerge from the text. The study of the unconscious understood as being structured as language is achieved following the parameters of French anti-Lacanian psychoanalysis. Next, Julia Kristeva's linguistic theories are used to analyze the semiotic content of Tusquets' feminine voices. Finally, the break with the Western system of thought is developed by means of Derrida's deconstructive criticism.

Through a group of films from the late 60s and 70s which have been totally obliterated in the canonical studies about Spanish film due to their low technical quality and apparent triviality, this study focuses on their cultural impact, overwhelming production and extending consume. This group of films, belonging to a genre called “sexy-celtiberic” comedies, suggests and presents a series of social, psychological and sexual behaviors very important in the dynamics of the configuration of a national ideology. The evolution of the treatment of the female body and her sexuality in this filmic genre provides a very challenging field of study within a social, economic, political and cultural context. The use of the female body in this cultural media serves to shape, in a controlled way, the national identity of a society under a dictatorial regime based on a traditionalist moral ideology that is being undermined by a cultural “other.” The sexual and national economy can not work in a simple opposition to the new and foreign, but, as we can see in these comedies, a play of acceptance and repulse comes into action. The female body is one of the pillars on which this national transformation into democracy is supported and where the text of this new national configuration is inscribed. The national discourse is inscribed in the female body, a foreign one in the comedies of the late 60s and a national one in the 70s, to pertain a heterosexual economy whose aims are matrimony and reproduction. However, the Spanish female body needs to contain certain sexual actions, very far away from the moral duty imposed on her, to save the national welfare (that is to say, the male Spaniard) from the foreign influences. Women become a non-historic and pure signifier that can be moved along a chain of signifying and can be furnished with different meanings within a national discourse. Her use and role are going to be present in the long and difficult road to Spanish democracy.

In 1639, a law prohibiting women any head covering; veil, mantilla, manto for example, is promulgated for the fifth time in the Iberian Peninsula under the penalty of losing the garment, and subsequently incurring more severe punishments. Regardless of these edicts this social practice continued. My dissertation investigates the cultural representation of these covered women (tapadas) in Spain and the New World in a vast array of early modern literary, historical and legal documents (plays, prose, and regal laws, etc.). Overall, critics associate the use of the veil in the Spanish territories with religious tendencies and overlook the social component of women using the veil to simply explain it as a mere fashion practice. In my dissertation, I argue that it is more than just a garment; the veil was used by women to make political statements, thereby challenging the restrictive gender and identity boundaries of their epoch. A critical analysis of early modern historical and legal peninsular texts and close-readings of Golden Age literary works, together with colonial cultural productions, allow me to identify patterns in how the tapadas were represented both artistically and culturally. Accordingly, my project attempts to reassess the significance of the tapadas in Hispanic culture for 350 years and demonstrate how their resilience to stop using the veil publicly is symptomatic of the absolutist monarchy inefficiencies in imposing social control. I move away from the tendency to investigate works including tapadas exclusively, and I conclude by reconstructing more accurately their cultural impact on the social dynamics in Spain as well as the New World.

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The purpose of this study is to contribute to the investigation of the semantics and syntax of Negative Words (N-words) in negative concord languages, with a focus on Spanish. An in-depth look into the syntactic behavior as well as into the meaning of terms such as nadie 'nobody', nada 'nothing', nunca 'never', etc., will provide some insight into the controversial nature of these words in the Romance languages as well as a better understanding of their peculiar pattern of distribution. On a larger picture, a thorough investigation of the semantics and syntax of these items will, in turn, contribute to a better understanding of the nature of negative polarity items in general. Thus, as I just anticipated, my conclusion is that N-words are in fact equivalent to negative polarity items, and that the phenomenon of negative concord, by which, in some languages, various negative items contribute only one semantic negation to a sentence, is a subcase of the crosslinguistic phenomenon of negative polarity licensing. In this respect, my analysis of N-words builds on the analyses of Bosque (1980) and Laka (1990). I base my conclusion that N-words are negative polarity items upon an extensive survey of comparative data coming from different Romance languages as well as from English, and I bring up new data and arguments supporting my view on the issue. In addition to arguing for the negative polarity nature of N-words, I also explore the extent to which syntactic operations are involved in the licensing of N-words, and I provide evidence showing that N-word licensing does not directly involve syntactic movement (contra most standard assumptions). Finally, in my investigation of the nature of N-words, I go beyond simply identifying them as negative polarity items. Specifically, I look deeply into the logicosemantic contribution of N-words, and I present arguments and data showing that N-words do not have either negative or any other kind of quantificational force. Rather, as I argue, they are better characterized as logicosemantic variables (in the sense of Kamp 1981 and Heim 1982.) In this regard, I depart from Bosque's (1980) and Laka's (1990) characterization of N-words. My view is more radical than theirs in that I do not just claim that N-words do not have inherent negative content, but also that they do not have any quantificational force of their own at all.

<p>This dissertation takes the paradoxical role of Colette in the canon of French and women's writing, from her earliest works to present, as an entry into a radically new interpretation of her life and literary oeuvre. This work is distinguished from previous works on Colette both in its approach and in the scope of its research, relying on extensive archival research revealing unpublished and unstudied aspects of Colette's biography and reception, and using a variety of modes of analysis to interpret this research. </p><p>This dissertation shows, in its first two chapters, how the myth of Colette as the incarnation of a particularly French brand of femininity, a spontaneous, natural writer, in no way literarily self-conscious, neither contributing to nor influenced by literary innovations, whose writing expresses her instinctive femininity, was constituted, from the earliest reviews of Colette's first novel, Claudine à l'école (1900), through feminist interpretations of Colette from the 1970s to present. Because Colette was understood to be a feminine writer of women by both misogynist conservatives of 1900 and radical feminists of the 1970's, their understanding of this writer remained remarkably homogenous and durable. The third chapter relies on contemporary celebrity theory in order to investigate Colette's own agency in the creation and policing of this durable public image, tracing both ways that Colette maintained her image, and ways that she profited from it, focusing in particular on her eponymous literary collection, the Collection Colette, and her "produits de beauté" cosmetics line and a beauty salon. This understanding of Colette's agential role in her public image inspires a new reading of the 1910 novel La Vagabonde and the relationship Colette depicts between the protagonist, Renée Néré's stage persona and her life when she is not in front of an audience.</p><p>The next two chapters suggest new ways of approaching Colette, beyond the durable myth of the spontaneous feminine writer that she worked so hard to maintain: as a consummate professional and as a literary innovator. The fourth chapter focuses on Colette's professionalism: using a Bourdieusian-inspired analysis of Colette's correspondence to uncover her role in the literary field, tracing the full extent of her social, artistic, and professional networks with other writers, journalists, and artists. This chapter then explores concrete examples of her manipulation of these networks, studying in particular her collaboration with Maurice Ravel in L'Enfant et les sortilèges and her management of the literary department at the newspaper Le Matin. The final chapter of this dissertation reads Colette in terms of discourses of modernism, from which she has long been excluded due to her imagined marginality to the literary field, focusing in particular on French conceptions of the harmonious reconciliation of classicism and literary innovation which reached their height in the 1920's, and which I have termed the "classique moderne." This dissertation makes a contribution to trends in French literature, literary history, the sociology of literature, women's studies, women's history, feminist literary criticism, and celebrity theory.</p> / Dissertation

<p>While Italian art of the twentieth century is usually associated with either the avant-garde practices of Futurism or the classicism of Fascist visual culture, the Italian modernists' complex engagement with concepts of the ‘Baroque’ has yet to be explored. Through an extensive analysis of paintings, sculptures, publications, collecting practices, and exhibitions, my dissertation addresses this lacuna by investigating how the Baroque was discursively constructed and visually represented in Italian modernist artistic and cultural debates between 1880 and 1945. I study how artists and critics such as Umberto Boccioni, Giorgio De Chirico, Adolfo Wildt, Lucio Fontana, and Roberto Longhi championed or disparaged the Baroque in the context of heated debates over the import of Italy’s rich cultural heritage, its status in modern Europe, and the potential role of avant-garde art as a catalyst for national regeneration. In contrast to previous scholars I argue that the development of modern art in Italy was actively shaped by cultural perceptions about the Baroque. My dissertation therefore sheds new light on the role of style in the cultural politics of Italy, which in turn will transform our understanding of visual culture in modern Italy, and of twentieth-century representations of the Baroque in art, literature, and aesthetics.</p> / Dissertation

In “Bodies of Wisdom,” I reassert the primacy of the body in the philosophical practices of two early modern French authors, Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592) and Blaise Pascal (1623-1662), whose writings have been associated with the ancient tradition of “philosophy as a way of life.” Harkening back to the Classical understanding of philosophy as a form of medicine, these authors’ works rely a good deal on somatic and/or medical terminology to describe states of the soul and philosophical practices more generally. While there exists a wide body of literature that addresses the medical analogy in Hellenistic philosophers, few commentators have ventured to read the analogy literally, and none thus far have done so for authors of the early modern period. In this dissertation, I reclaim the literal relationship between medicine and philosophy by examining instances in both authors where descriptions of health and illness can be read both metaphorically (“spiritually”) and literally (“somatically”). Philosophy is not just like medicine in that it seeks to bring about individual well-being; it is medicine in the fullest sense, because the exercises intended to bring about well-being must pass through the body in order to give lasting shape to the life of the practitioner. Many scholars have acknowledged Pascal’s inheritance of Montaigne’s moderate skepticism, and as one of history’s most astute – and sometimes acerbic – readers of Montaigne, Pascal was uniquely poised to highlight those aspects of Montaigne’s philosophy that attenuated the reader’s belief in the power of human reason. This meant that for both authors, there had to be some more reliable alternative to the reasoning mind to arrive at an understanding of truth. The body, it turns out, served just such a purpose. Although Montaigne and Pascal had very different purposes in writing the Essais and the Pensées, respectively, I show how a mutual concern for empirical certainty amidst the tenuousness of philosophical and religious opinion precipitated a return to bodily experience, as the most viable means of knowing the self and the world. Despite the widespread conception of the early modern period as one of “thoroughgoing” – and one might say, Cartesian – dualism between body and mind, I argue that Montaigne and Pascal are evidence of a countertrend: their writings suggest that we cannot think our way to philosophical virtue; we must enact that virtue through our bodies, using them as tools for interpretation and modification of our internal states. I thereby call into question a distinction that is commonly made between somatic techniques, on the one hand, and spiritual exercises, on the other, in much of the literature on philosophy as a way of life. The implications of this are far-reaching: if the suffering that philosophy purports to treat is at once spiritual and somatic, then the “spiritual” exercises designed to address this suffering also borrow a great deal from the soma, and should be advertised as such. Further, if spiritual health is indeed contingent on our relationship to the soma, then the classic definition of philosophy as a “spiritual” practice (namely, one associated with the logos) needs to be expanded to include the material and/or somatic dimensions of the discipline. Although I try to provide a clear roadmap for how these authors go about spiritual healing, I recognize that the trajectory to spiritual health is seldom very direct. Surely, we can find examples of somatic exercises that appear to have a predictable effect on the mind and, inversely, spiritual exercises that yield positive physical results. However, the process of effecting change and training for virtue is almost never unidirectional. The constant trafficking between body and mind, evidenced most abundantly by the passions, belies a much less tidy relationship between the two faculties. To describe this relationship, I rely both on early modern medical therapeutics and on Pierre Bourdieu’s twentieth-century conception of habitus. Viewed through the lens of habitus, the practice of philosophy can be conceived as a process of embodiment, wherein the practitioner appropriates and accommodates in a bodily way the virtues traditionally aligned with the good life—before realizing that, as habitus, he or she is always, already well-adapted to the good and thus endowed with a certain form of health from the beginning.