This thesis creates a gendered typology of women’s testimonio that foregrounds the Cold War context of the genre. This new perspective reveals that contrary to the assertions of some critics, the texts struggle to convey a unitary propagandic message. Rather, their prime purpose is to counter hegemonic discourse. Yet, far from being unliterary or impersonal, they impart much personal information using a diversity of stylistic devices. The testimonios challenge the profoundly gendered national security discourse of their own governments and the US. The argument that brutal counter-insurgency tactics, widespread incarceration and torture, were necessary to combat “communist-inspired” insurgency is invalidated by these testimonios which replace dichotomising and reductionist Cold War propaganda with accounts of the local, subjective and personal reasons for political involvement. The texts disclose the potentially traumatising lived consequences of US foreign policy and national security strategies to reveal their disproportionate and excessive nature. However, the testimonialistas’ sense of a greater purpose, collective identity and belonging to a wider community enables them to remain resilient in spite of adverse experiences. Despite their loyalty to utopian and egalitarian ideals, sexism from within leftist movements and governments is exposed and denounced by the female protagonists as patriarchal institutions, traditions and gendered identities are consistently undermined. Latin American women, as guerrilleras, organisers and members of peasant and indigenous communities, present themselves as defiant protagonists who, aside from the male-dominated master narratives of the superpowers, demonstrate the strength of their political agency, psychological resilience and ideological convictions.

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This thesis proposes to read Argentine postdictatorship fictions of the 1980s–2000s not, as has frequently been the case, from the point of view of mourning, memory and defeat but from a more positive perspective oriented towards the reconstruction of a fuller national history and identity. As in Borges’s “Pierre Menard”, the argument is essentially a critical hermeneutic one: it is based on a dynamic rather than static thinking of history and textuality that seeks to open up the reading of texts to the present rather than leave their interpretation statically closed off in the past. The social, political, and economic crisis known as “the Argentinazo” (December 2001), the annulment of the Amnesty Laws in August 2003, and the politics of memory and human rights that ensued thereafter provide in this thesis a distinct historical context from which to rethink both “early” (1980s/1990s) and “new” (post–2001) postdictatorial literature. My suggestion all along is that the linkage of literature, artistic and activist cultural politics, including a politicised reading of literature, will necessarily have as its aim the formation of a popular or collective critical consciousness. Overall the main contributions of this thesis are twofold. Firstly, the interpretation of postdictatorial fictions from a pedagogico-political perspective makes the textual analysis of these fictions new and original in their own right. And secondly, this research demonstrates that postdictatorial fictions constitute a cultural reservoir or a cultural archive of historical resistance, dissent, and human rights struggles from which it is hoped present and future generations can learn to live more democratically.

No description available.

Questions of gender, feminism, and écriture feminine in individual cases continue to be given priority in studies of women’s writing in Baroque Spain, to the exclusion of study of the wealth of original sources that show women participating freely and equally in all aspects of the Republic of Letters, as contemporaries called the literary profession. My doctoral thesis seeks to correct this imbalance by charting the rise and consolidation of the status and image of women as authors in and around the period now recognized as having seen the beginnings of the literary profession, 1600-1650. I take as my field the república literaria in the Spanish Atlantic empire in the period 1450–1700, with parallels from England, France and Italy. Using Genette’s studies of the paratext (2001) and Darnton’s theory of the “communication circuit” (2006), and building on the work of cultural historians (Bouza 1992, 1997, 2001; Bourdieu 1993; Chartier 1994; Cayuela 1996 & 2005), I examine the role of women as authors and readers, chiefly through an analysis of the discourse of their paratexts in a representative corpus of texts patronized, written, or published by women in Catalan, Portuguese, and Spanish. The key criterion of selection has been the projection of a female voice in public texts, whether via a sobriquet, a real name, grammatical gender, or a pseudonym. However, where appropriate, it has been extended to include also literary correspondence, book inventories, and texts, which despite being published anonymously, have been shown to be by women. The study is divided into two parts wherein extant sources have been selected and arranged chronologically and by theme, rather than by author. Part I, comprising Chapters 1 and 2, examines the rise and expansion of women’s symbolic capital in the public literary sphere. Part II, comprising Chapters 3 and 4, shows that, by the seventeenth century, women’s literary practices had achieved commercial, professional and didactic renown on both sides of the Atlantic. Chapter 1 shows the rhetorical significance embedded in women’s first metadiscourses, whether in identifiable or anonymous authorship, dating back to the fifteenth century. Chapter 2 illustrates women’s rising literary authority by reviewing their public endeavours and literary self-consciouness in the sixteenth century. Chapter 3 shows the rise of discourses of fame and professionalization in single publications by identifiable female authors, a shift most noticeable in commercial traditions in print (ephemera, the novela and the theatre). Chapter 4 challenges the fallacy that women chose anonymity or hid behind a patron (or publisher) because of their sexual difference. It thus assesses whether the question of women’s literary successes ultimately depended on a negation of their female sex —through publishing anonymously, under a pseudonym, or in the name of a publisher— or was, rather, influenced by their authorial intent, social and religious status. In sum, the thesis shows that women’s sexual difference did not prevent them from gaining a successful and recognized place within the rising Republic of Letters, but was on the contrary turned to their advantage as a promotional point. Women were as important as men as agents in the emergence of the modern concept of the author as independent artist.

This thesis, written in Spanish, is the first critical reading of the work of Rosa Regàs. The main aim of this study has been to provide a vision of different readings of the spectrum of the texts produced by this writer. The work of Rosa Regàs is seen here as characterized by polyphony, by which is meant not only a wide range of narrative voices but also the multiplicity of perspectives adopted in Regàs's generically diverse work. The importance she accords to imagination and memory and to the concept of the journey, her particular aesthetics, her production of 'hybrid literature', the use of ambiguity, her sense of commitment reflected in her written and personal activism, her particular feminism—all attest to the overriding importance in her work of plurality. The introduction explores the biography of Rosa Regàs as well as her contribution to Spanish and European literature. The theoretical basis of the first chapter is narratological, applying the methods established by Norman Friedman, Gérard Genette, Enrique Anderson Imbert, and Mieke Bal, among others. The diversity of narrative voices used by Rosa Regàs in her novels and short stories is analysed to demonstrate the variety of her discursive practices and a style characterised by a lyrical narrative voice and an Impressionist technique. Chapter two explores a symbolic dimension in the first three novels and in most of the short stories: here a poetic style suggests 'modernismo' as an influence and it is argued that aspects of Rosa Regàs 's writing can be read as a belated, attenuated form of dissident cultural elitism, and as, in part, a form of neo-symbolism. The third chapter argues that the motif of the journey plays a leading role in her writing: the aesthetics and formal features of travel literature, which includes an emphasis on memory and the recording of subjective and concrete impressions. It studies the role of the journey in the narrative, looking in particular at the possible effects of gender difference on this aspect of her writing. The fourth chapter emphasizes memory as an essential and pervasive feature of her work. History functions in the literature of Rosa Regàs as a catalyst for memory in a number of ways: an intensely expressed experience is juxtaposed with fantasy; memory and imagination are linked in ways that invite the reader to participate creatively in the literary process. However, the author's most important objective in emphasizing memory is the attempt to blur the boundaries between history and life, autobiography and fiction. The final chapter deals with Rosa Regàs 's journalistic writings and attempts to trace the nuances and demonstrate the versatility of her work, as well as to evaluate her contribution to the study of the situation of women and her social and political commitment. These features make Rosa Regàs an original writer who is difficult to classify. Once again the importance of narrative voice is stressed, but now in the context of an engagement with contemporary issues.

My thesis explores how memory and trauma permeate the work of the poet Félix Grande (Mérida, Spain, 1937). It addresses the question of how his particular understanding of memory is opposed to a rather bleak view of it held by many other Spanish poets of the time. Grande does not yield to a generalized discrediting of memory. On the contrary, memory is the driving force behind his writing, and this thesis constitutes an analysis of its mechanisms. The originality of Grande’s work stems from the ways in which it shares common ground with contemporary research carried out by disciplines that integrate Memory and Trauma Studies. His poetic voice struggles to grasp aspects of memory whose articulation proves traumatic. These elements resist symbolic translation and turn his poetry into a work of constant rumination without closure. Grande’s work illustrates that literature is both inextricably linked to memory, and is well equipped to deal with trauma, as the labour carried out by memory, weaving and un-weaving, especially in its attempts to mourn, is at the heart of his artistic production. Finally, his work instantiates a relationship with language and memory which, while recognising the limits of language to express and of memory to retrieve the past, goes beyond this initial distrust to offer a positive perspective on these faculties, as the means for establishing modes of survival and rethinking our connections to the unknown.

The present thesis provides an analysis of language policy and language contact in present-day Barcelona. On the one hand, the effectiveness of the implementation of Catalan-medium education in Catalonia will be critically evaluated. On the other hand, Catalan-Castilian bilinguals' awareness of non-normative instances of language contact will be assessed. This thesis brings these two strands together, in order to paint an accurate picture of the current Catalan sociolinguistic situation. The 1983 Llei de Normalització Lingüística had numerous consequences, including the introduction of Catalan as the chief medium of education in Catalonia. Such legislation had many aims, not least to 'ensure Catalan language competence'. But to what extent has this been successful? Furthermore, the varieties of Catalan and Castilian in Barcelona are characterised by centuries of language contact, which has resulted in the incursion of numerous, non-normative linguistic items and constructions in both languages. To what extent are speakers aware of such non-normative language? Moreover, how do these questions concerning language policy and language contact bear upon one another? This thesis is therefore looking at the consequences of language policy and of language contact. With the aid of an innovative, three-dimensional model of sociolinguistic phenomena, it will be shown that these are maximally differentiated, yet clearly related. These will be termed top-down phenomena and bottom-up phenomena respectively. This is to be tested using a unique fieldwork experiment whereby fifty bilingual Catalan-Castilian Barcelonians of two different generations (one educated in Catalan, the other in Castilian, due to different linguistic policies) are asked to identify instances of non-normative language contact in two prepared texts. This work will allow conclusions to be drawn regarding the effectiveness of Catalan medium education, as well as offering insight into the nature of how we examine issues of language policy and language contact.

The Spanish Magdalene and Martha lives in MS Escorial h. I. 13 are translations of Old French texts represented by MSS C and F respectively, and not of any other Latin or French source. The C French and D Franco-Provençal versions of the Magdalene life are independent translations of the Latin B text, and the F and C5 French versions of the Martha life are independently executed versions of the Latin E text. There are, however, some puzzling affinities between the Latin and Spanish texts. The shorter Latin Magdalene life A. is the original version, which was elaborated to form the longer Latin life B. The C French translation is shorter than B. but its source is the longer B rather than the shorter A. text, the differences between original and translation being explained by the adaptive translation process. Comparison between the more complete D translation and the simplifying C text shows that the two versions C and D were intended for very different uses. The two-French Martha translations, F and C5 are from Latin originals much closer to the E Latin text than to the Sanctuarium. F is a simplifying translation, intended, like the C Magdalene text, for oral delivery, while, C5 is a more complete rendering, intended for private reading by aristocratic ladies. The Spanish MS could not have contained complete, translations of both the Magdalene and the Martha lives, since the missing, four folios would not have been sufficient for the material involved. The distribution of non-standard linguistic features shows that the two Spanish texts are the work of two different translators. The Spanish translations are both, in general, accurately and competently executed, but the differing numbers of errors, additions, omissions and changes in each confirms that they are the work of two different translators.

The novels Sender has written since the Spanish Civil War are interesting above all for their ideas. These centre on two main topics: one, philosophical - the nature of reality -, the other, psychological - the problems of adjustment to reality. Such ideas and topics are not to be found in Sender's pre-Civil War works; nor are these works characterised by the considerable ambiguity and structural complexity of the later books which challenge the reader with doubts and questions rather than supply-him with answers. The quasi-autobiographical novels, ih particular, among Sender's post-Civil War works, suggest that the war was a watershed in his life and thought. Certainly that is the major experience with which his fictional counterparts have to struggle - the non-autobiographical works often focus on other traumatic experiences. Certainly too, when Sender came to rework pre-Civil-War material in post-Civil War novels his originalviews were either changed or - more frequently - questioned and presented as being no more valid than a number of quite different views. Moreover, the lives of Sender's fictional counterparts - in his post-Civil War autobiographical novels - amount to hypothetical, moral and existential variations on the author's own life, before, during and after the Civil War. The complex structure and ambiguity of Sender's post-Civil War works are wedded to the philosophical and psychological topics they present and explore. Structure and ideas both reflect his response to the traumatic challenge which the Spanish Civil War forced upon his understanding and capacity for adjustment. In writing these works Sender has tried to shed some light on the reality of his own life - including its unknown and unknowable aspects - and by so doing confirmSto the attentive reader, the profound seriousness and importance of Sender's post-war writing.