The Marianas, a chain of small tropical islands in western Micronesia, were the first to be subjected to colonisation in the Pacific and are among the last to move into self-governance. The islands were administered as a Spanish colony for 230 years following establishment of a Jesuit mission in 1668. The United States claimed Guam during the Spanish-American War in 1898, while Germany then Japan and finally the United States governed the Northern Marianas. This long period of colonisation largely obliterated the native Chamorros' consciousness of an indigenous past. Rapid social changes that began in the 1960s had severely undermined the Chamorro sense of identity by the beginning of the 1980s. Counterforces, however, were beginning to take shape, driven by local as well as international movements. Using Chamorro art as a theme, this thesis traces the history of the native people and their cultural transformations which defined their identity as a continuing cultural group, despite their loss of an indigenous history. Recent social, economic and political changes have triggered a movement to express their identity as a people separate from their colonisers. Indigenous artists are involved in a renaissance of artistic creation that draws on perceptions of their pre-contact culture for inspiration. Chapters explore the beginnings of a self-conscious cultural awareness and subsequent reconstruction of their ancient history, expressed through neo-traditional creations of song, dance and visual art forms. Their sources of inspiration and processes of creating identity symbols from an ancient past are revealed through extensive interviews and fieldwork. Indigenous ways of looking at history and perceptions of both insiders and outsiders regarding validation of these art forms are discussed in terms of local examples which are compared to Pacific and global movements of decolonisation and identity formation. The text is referenced by an appendix of over 150 photographic examples of Chamorro art and artefacts from museums, historical documents and fieldwork

The aims of this study are twofold: (1) to examine the development of linguistic humor interpretation and comprehension by second language (L2) Spanish learners by using a linguistic humor instrument comprised of comic strips, considering the linguistic properties of Spanish; and (2) to see whether and how reading comprehension ability is reflected in the understanding of four types of linguistic-based humor (i.e. semantic, syntactic, phonological, and morphological). Also discussed are the comprehension strategies utilized by the participants during humor processing. To address these goals, a mixed methods approach was implemented through a linguistic humor multiple-choice questionnaire together with a think-aloud protocol. Results are discussed with reference to Raskin’s (1985) Semantic-Script Switch Theory of Humor (SSTH). The data indicate: (1) comprehension of linguistic-based humor increases with L2 study; (2) L2 learners struggle most with polysemic lexical items; and (3) cognate status and pseudofamiliar words impede comprehension. Considering the analysis of the data, a reassessment of the SSTH and how it applies to L2 humor processing is suggested. Notably, linguistic-based scripts tend to dominate access to other non-linguistic based scripts because L2 learners remain within the linguistic-script frame and are unable to access and/or utilize non-linguistic scripts such as background knowledge. Furthermore, L2 learners contend with error scripts as an additional obstacle, which NS do not experience. The findings suggest that learners should be encouraged and explicitly taught about lexical depth in order to increase their ability to infer meaning from context, thereby increasing their metalinguistic knowledge base. Recommendations are made for the adjustment of the SSTH theory to be more inclusive of L2 learning environments. Finally, suggestions for the L2 classroom include: (1) methods to increase metacognitive awareness; and (2) pedagogical approaches to introduce language-based humor. / text

This is a history of the relationship between prejudices and reality during the first century of the Spanish Conquest and colonization of America. The study deals particularly with the Discovery and Conquest of La Española and La Nueva España. The authors studied are Cristóbal Colón, Ramón Pané, Pedro Mártir de Anglería, Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo, Bartolomé de las Casas, Hernán Cortés, Francisco López de Gómara, Bernal Díaz del Castillo, Vasco de Quiroga, Toribio de Benavente "Motolinía", Diego Durán, Bernardino de Sahagún and José de Acosta. There is a change in the perception of reality during the Renaissance. It brings a separation between the realms of the earthly and the divine as well as a glorification of the self, known today as individualism. There is also a great tension between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance in Spain. A way of seeing the world that privileges the divine fights ferociously with another one that suddenly has an immense need to understand the real, concrete world. This tension makes the study of the early descriptions and interpretations of America particularly interesting. They document the ways in which the Western imagination learns to apprehend reality in the very beginnings of the Modern Age. The writers of the Western Indies struggle with their words, their ideas, their faith and their own life in their attempt to describe and understand the New World. The process is highly complex and superbly exemplifies Marx's concept of ideology: the awareness that there is always a real and an imaginary way interacting with each other when we try to live and understand reality. Idealizations, prejudices, inventions, fantasies, destructions and abuses coexist in the texts of the "Cronistas de Indias" with a heroic effort to describe, understand, classify and explain a reality that is totally alien to their eyes and their mental schemes. This effort reaches an end with the triumph of the Counterreformation in Spain. All the early history of the New World had to be proof of a divine plan and so, many of the truths, methods and ideas that the early writers of America had gained, with a truly heroic effort to overcome ideological limitations, started to get lost once again. / text

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This thesis explores the concept of surrealist visuality in the work of the lesser-known, Spanish poet José Maria Hinojosa (1904-1936). His later, surrealist writings are analysed within both a comparative and interdisciplinary context. The theoretical framework for this thesis is provided by French surrealism - notably the writings of André Breton. And the interdisciplinary aspect includes lived events of surrealism along with more expected media. The whole argument is structured around a particular type of dialectic which is termed the 'surrealist dialectic'. Being a deviation from the Hegelian model, the surrealist dialectic concerns itself with the stages in between 'thesis', 'antithesis' and 'synthesis'. These intermediary stages are defined in terms of transgression, transformation and 'transreification'. The whole of this thesis is divided into three parts, each corresponding to a dialectical stage. There are three chapters in each of the three stages and these combine to offer another, 'micro-dialectic' within the whole. Each first chapter outlines the main theme from the context of French surrealism, and then applies this theory to Hinojosa's dream-narratives. The second chapters discuss Hinojosa's surrealism in biographical terms, and then combine other practices - surrealist collage (Angel Planells), paranoia-criticism (Salvador Dali), and surrealist cinema (Luis Buñuel) - with a response to Hinojosa's poetry. The third chapter focuses on the role of automatic writing, and analyses Hinojosa's oneiric texts from three different perspectives - as revolutionary power, as surrealist narcotic and as surreal madness.

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Multiculturalism is not a new phenomenon in European history. Neither are its literary and artistic manifestations. This thesis compares and contrasts two distant but similar multicultural contexts: Golden Age Spain and postmodern Britain. Picaresque and romance are chosen to illustrate how authors question religious oppression, cultural intolerance and thought control within multicultural contexts. Cervantes and Rushdie give voice to marginalised minorities and deconstruct the grand-narratives of religion; Aleman, Kureishi, Dhondy and the author of Estebanillo Gonzalez all depict life at the margins. The establishment of a counter-canonical critique of literary tradition in Golden Age Spain, and the emergence and development of genres such as the picaresque, would not have been possible without Spain's multicultural heritage and the presence of Spanish marginal and dissident voices. Gradually these voices from the periphery vanished as Spanish minorities were absorbed by the centre. Likewise, the power to confront of a marginal genre, such as the picaresque, disappeared. From the Spanish case we can draw a parallel in contemporary Britain, where representations of the margins are becoming absorbed into the mainstream. Postmodern Britain recalls the Spanish case not only in terms of the emergence of minority voices which are being absorbed by the centre, but also in terms of the choice of genres to express hybridity, difference and cross cultural and religious encounters. However, there is a difference between sixteenth and seventeenth century Spain and postmodern Britain; ethnicity has become desirable.