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.

This dissertation analyzes the strategies that Spanish and Hispano-African authors employ when writing about Africa in the contemporary novel (1990-2010). Focusing on the former Spanish colonial territories of Morocco, Western Sahara, and Equatorial Guinea, I analyze the post-colonial literary discourse about these regions. This study examines the new ways of conceptualizing Africa that depart from an Orientalist framework as advanced by the novelists Lorenzo Silva, Concha López Sarasúa, Ramón Mayrata, María Dueñas, Fernando Gamboa, Montserrat Abumalham, Javier Reverte, Alberto Vázquez-Figueroa, and Donato Ndongo. Their works are representative of a recent trend in Spanish letters that signals a literary focus on Africa and the African Other. I examine these contemporary novels within their historical context, specifically engaging with the theoretical ideas of Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978), to determine to what extent his analysis of Orientalist discourse still holds value for a study of the Spanish novel of thirty years later. In addition, the work of theorists such as Gil Anidjar, Emmanuel Levinas, James C. Scott, Ryszard Kapuściński, Georges Van den Abbeele and Chandra Mohanty contribute to the analyses of specific works. These theorists provide a theoretical framework for my thesis that contemporary Spanish authors are writing Africa in ways that undermine and circumvent the legacy of Orientalist discourse. I seek to highlight the innovative approaches that these authors are taking towards their literary engagement with Africa. The imaginary that pertains to Africa has served an integral role in the history and creation of modern Spain, and it is illuminating to trace the influences that it continues to exert on Spanish writers. In the last thirty years, Spain’s relationship with Africa has dramatically changed through peace treaties, the independence of nations, migratory patterns, tourism, and in other substantial ways. Within this dissertation, I address these changes by focusing on literary representations of political engagement, gender issues, and travel to highlight how Africa is represented in light of these recent developments. As Spanish authors continue to engage with and to write about Africa, this study hopes to show that Orientalism is no longer a prevalent discourse in the contemporary Spanish novel.

The objective of this thesis is to analyze children's characters in the novels of El Camino, Mi idolatrado hijo Sisí and El príncipe destronado. After a brief summary of children characters within Delibes novels, we focus on analyzing common aspects of children heroes, on feelings of anxiety and fear, the importance of background, in which the child grows up, we concentrate on teenagers problems and children's evolution, we focus on the way how children speak and on the analysis of hilarious moments, which are originated from the children's innocence of the world. This thesis intends to take into account all these aspects. In the second part we dedicate to composition of the novel that Delibes completely conformed to the novels intention. The children characters are explored in the context of other characters, taking into account the point of the social background and related problems. In the final chapter we compare the novels to the film production.

The Baroque-era Spanish poet Luis de Góngora is renowned for his difficult syntax, and particularly for the literary device called hyperbaton, or the stylistic inversion of normal word order. While the elaborate gongorismo style has not gone unnoticed by linguists, classical analyses of the poet’s work typically view sentence structure as one-dimensional and characterize the force of a hyperbaton by the length of an interposed phrase. Taking the sonnets of Góngora as a data set, I invoke the theory of generative syntax to argue that this apparent interposition is actually multiple instances of raising, often into specifier positions, though typically for stylistic reasons rather than for the purpose of feature-checking. Esta tesis está escrita en español.

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My thesis is a creative expression in poetry about my study abroad experience in Chile. During my time in Chile I traveled all over the country and tried to experience as much of the culture as possible. These poems speak of different parts of the country that I visited and different cultural aspects to which I was exposed. The work also includes photos from my travels to accompany several of my poems. This thesis was written with the hope that others might be able to better understand my semester in Chile.

In chapter 1, I ponder the role of authorship and whether or not an original text can truly exist. Specifically, the claim that Borges has that a copy can be superior to an original. From this, brings me to chapter 2 with the movie Man of la Mancha. In this movie, I highlight some of the pros and cons of a copy. The windmill scene is a negative emanation of the Quixote, while the interaction between people and the presence of women is something the movie truly displays well. In the third chapter, I look at Lost in la Mancha because it demonstrates a failed attempt to translate the Quixote. In essence, anything that tries to represent this truly great text will fail; however, it's failure can paradoxically be thought of as a success because it's an homage to the Quixote. As far as the Ezra Pound material, I thought it extremely pertinent to look at his experience on a metro because he attempts to describe a vision that he had through poetry. He notes that it is very difficult to encapsulate his entire experience because the primary form of art (his vision) is being described through a secondary form (words). Thus, when you translate a form of art through a medium it loses some of its value. This is what happens with the Quixote; its primary form (words) is being displayed through a secondary form (film), and it inevitably loses something in the translation. The final chapter/conclusion is a more in-depth investigation of this investigation primary form of art (writing). This uses the character of Gines as a concrete example of a formal and stylistic quality that is unique to literature. Namely, the physical ranging of words on a page in both a spatial and literary sense. When you extract those lines from a novel you implicitly remove some of the dialectic between Cervantes' work and the genres he's invoking, just by taking it out of the form of literature. The surroundings of text establish the meaning of the novel. The conclusion is my final chance to argue why the Quixote is so special and untranslatable. I touch on the qualities that keep it forever live and present in us today. Through the Quixote's proclivity for renaming the real world (established societal beliefs/values, etc.) in his own vein, Cervantes allows for the Quixote to reappropriate the world around him, making it uniquely his. In so doing, Cervantes creates a character who is able, not only to write his own self-history, but to control the way that said self-history will be written by others. By blurring the lines between narrator and narration and history and fiction, Cervantes creates a work that is endlessly present, where words becoming living page, and actions occur as they are said.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 2001. / Typescript. Vita. Includes bibliographical references. Also available on the Internet.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, San Diego, 2002. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 299-303).

Tesis-Madrid. / Bibliography: p. [9]-16.