O facto deOs Grão-Capitães: uma sequência de contosde Jorge de Sena pertencerem a um género literário ainda pouco estudado motivou-nos a investigar os elementos que fazem desta coletânea uma sequência de contos. O livro de Sena é, que saibamos, o único em língua portuguesa intitulado como "sequência de contos" pelo seu autor. Com efeito, ambicionamos discutir os pressupostos teóricos do género em questão, como também analisar a matriz estrutural e temática que faz deste volume uma coletânea integrada. O livro de Jorge de Sena utiliza vários elementos estéticos que permitem a sua conceptualização como coletânea de contos integrada. Neste âmbito, estudamos o livro de Sena como paradigma do género sequência de contos e analisamos os elementos de paratextualidade com a imagética carceral e de desolação da sociedade do Estado Novo, que integram os diferentes, contudo interligados, contos num todo orgânico. Deste modo, estudamos como os nove contos que compõem o livro exploram enredos que se complementam e dão à coletânea uma integridade narrativa que só o género "sequência de contos" permite.

The dissertation for my PhD is a composite novel called We Are Everyone You Know. The novel is set in a small town that is neither rural nor suburban, which, like the characters, defies classification. The cast rotates. Main characters become supporting characters in subsequent chapters and vice versa. I employ this strategy so the reader is able to see each character as an individual, that even those who seem to be in the background are living complex lives. The novel explores such themes as poverty, gentrification, the loss of innocence caused by a corrupt world, and the inability of people to realize their identities when the promises of youth turn out to be lies. Each chapter or story is told from either a different point of view or in a different style or genre. While the novel as a whole is grounded around a family and group of friends in a small town, the pieces of the story range in form from simple realism, to modernism, to post-modernism, to surrealism, to meta-fiction. I experiment with genres ranging from crime drama, to disaster survival, to sports comedy, to kung-fu epic, and more. Interspersed between the genre pieces are realist stories of a new lost generation—thirty-somethings who are stuck in permanent adolescence, who work at soul-crushing jobs, and who find neither the shining future that was promised to them in their youth nor the comfortable mediocrity of their parents’ lives. For this project I have been particularly inspired by the works of Louise Erdrich, James Joyce, and Jennifer Egan.

L’œuvre de Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio a déjà donné lieu à de nombreuses investigations, mais celles-ci n’apportent que de rares lumières sur le lecteur potentiel, figure pourtant essentielle du phénomène littéraire. Le rôle de ce lecteur en tant que récepteur de l’œuvre possède une importance particulière dans la qualité de l’acte de communication, car il reçoit le livre avec la somme de ses préjugés et de ses aspirations ; il participe à la production du sens et au développement des thèmes qui parcourent l’œuvre de l’écrivain. Quelle est l’image de lecteur virtuel telle qu’elle est projetée dans le texte de Le Clézio ? Quel est son rôle dans la création de l’œuvre ? Et comment l’auteur s’arrange-t-il pour réduire le plus possible la distance qui risque de s’établir entre l’écriture et la lecture ? Nous tenterons de répondre à ces questions en effectuant une analyse sémiostylistique des recueils de nouvelles de l’écrivain : La fièvre, Mondo et autres histoires, La ronde et autres faits divers, Printemps et autres saisons et Cœur brûle et autres romances. / The work of Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio has already been the subject of numerous investigations, but they provide little lights on the potential reader who is nevertheless an essential literary phenomenon. The role of the reader as receiver of the work has a particular importance on the quality of the act of communication because he receives the book with the sum of his prejudices and aspirations. He participates in the production of meaning and development of themes that run through the work of the writer. What is the virtual reader’s image as projected in the text of Le Clézio? What is his role in creating the work? And how does the author manage to minimize the distance between writing and reading? We try to answer these questions by making a sémiostylistique analysis on short story cycles of the writer : Fever, Mondo and Other Stories, The Round and Other cold Hard Facts, Spring and other seasons and Burn Heart and Other Romances.

This dissertation is a study of contemporary Pashto prose writing in a context of war and crisis based on a corpus of digitally published and/or printed short stories from the 1990s onwards. Out of this larger corpus, 16 stories have been selected and analysed under four topics: "The Terrorist", Female agency: Representations of and by, "The Madman", and Axtar: Longing for peace or imaging disillusion. A central idea is that the analysis should be text-oriented, but the contextualisation of the analysed texts is a secondary important focus. Chapter one presents the material and gives a general context to the study. In the second chapter, after a general conceptualisation of the short story genre, I discuss the borders between prose and poetry. In chapter three I provide an overview of Pashto literature where the aim is to pinpoint certain characteristics of literature in what I call a poeticised community, such as that of the Pashtuns. The fourth chapter contains an introduction to the four topics mentioned above, a summary of each of the four stories belonging to the specific topic with selected parts in direct translation from the Pashto original, as well as a discussion of form and contents of each topic separately. Chapter five consists of a general conclusion. An appendix with the original Pashto text of translated sections is found before the bibliography. One feature that has emerged from this study is the notion of how the narratives are often found to communicate and respond to their immediate surroundings, in time as well as in space. Another important conclusion is that devices normally regarded as belonging to the realm of poetry are not uncommon in Pashto short story writing.

Topic of the thesis are selected short stories from the book Guerrillas (Gverilci, 2004) by the Slovene writer Polona Glavan. The first part introduces the writer and her work. It focuses on the literary historic classification of her works as well. It explains the movement of minimalism in art and its appearance in the literature. The last topic of this part is the Slovene generation of minimalists. The second part of the thesis contains the main theme - commented translation of the selected short stories. It means the text analysis of stories and analysis of the selected problems connected with the process of translation. There are presented steps which have been used as well. The thesis is mainly focused on the appearance of minimalism in texts by Polona Glavan and the suitable translation of them to the Czech language.

The author of this dissertation addresses the motif of magic figuring in Spanish medieval short prose. The researched works of art are the following titles: Calila y Dimna, Sendebar, El Conde Lucanor, Libro del Caballero Zifar and Libro de los Gatos. Out of the aforementioned anthologies the author further analyses specific selected short stories which contain the motif of magic. The introduction describes medieval history and literary genres and more closely analyses the interpretation of magic on the basis of both period and current literary works and publications. Author presupposes medieval didactic literature for the most part describes real world which the reader is acquainted with. The motifs of magic are divided into five sections:Devil, Afterlife, Magical Realm, Fake Magic and Medical Superstitions. Each chapter addresses one particular topic, analyzing it in the context of the researched stories but also in the context of medieval culture as a whole. The end of each chapter offers a comprehensive summary. In contrast with publications dealing with the topic of magic in the Spanish literature, the dissertation focuses more closely on the element of magic used as trickery as this view of magic is widely represented in the literature. The conclusion discusses the issue of faith in a life of a...

Alors qu’Anatole France (1844–1924) est considéré comme écrivain sceptique et ironique, un de ses contes intitulé « Le Jongleur de Notre-Dame » échappe à une telle définition. Le ton pieux et sincère de ce conte, fondé sur une légende du Moyen Âge, semble aller à l’encontre du scepticisme, de l’anticléricalisme, et du classicisme déclarés de l’auteur. Au lieu de tenir pour exceptionnels ce type de textes qui mettent en scène une forme de « pureté » dans un sens religieux, tenter de les intégrer dans l’œuvre d’A. France permettra de découvrir une nouvelle facette de l’écrivain, et d’appréhender son idée et son œuvre dans une complexité et une profondeur qui sont cachées sous une apparence simple. Dans un premier temps, on mettra en relation les thèmes médiévaux chez A. France et la mode du médiévisme au XIXe siècle, tant dans le domaine scientifique que dans le courant littéraire, afin d’éclairer l’influence de son époque sur son image médiévale, et la signification de cette image. Dans un deuxième temps, on traitera de la pratique de la réécriture. Par une comparaison, d’une part, entre les textes d’A. France et leurs hypotextes, et d’autre part, entre la réécriture francienne et la réécriture chez les écrivains contemporains, on précisera les caractéristiques et les procédés de la réécriture de notre écrivain. En outre, on montrera que la mise en cadre, ainsi que la réécriture, s’impose dans ses textes, soulignant ainsi la modestie de l’auteur, et la diminution de l’autorité auctoriale. Toutes ces analyses révèleront l’importance de la « simplicité » qui apparaît à plusieurs niveaux dans les textes franciens, et qui peut donner accès à une « pureté » harmonieuse. / While Anatole France (1844–1924) is considered a skeptical, ironic writer, one of his short stories, entitled “Le Jongleur de Notre-Dame” can not easily be reduced to such a reading. Instead, it is a pious and sincere story based on a legend from the Middle Ages – a perspective contradictory to his skepticism, anticlericalism, and classicism. Rather than counting as exceptional cases texts like this that portray “purity” in a religious sense, an attempt to integrate them into the overall view of the works of A. France will enable us to discover a new side to the writer and apprehend his ideas and his works in a complexity and depth that are hidden under simple surface appearances. As a first step, we connect the medieval themes of A. France with the medievalist movement of the 19th century, seen in both historical study and literature, in order to clarify the influence of his times on his image of the Middle Ages, and the meaning of that image. As a second step, we consider the practice of rewriting. By comparing the texts of A. France with their sources, and comparing rewriting of those sources by A. France with rewriting of similar sources by his contemporaries, we identify A. France’s method of rewriting and the characteristics of the product. In addition, we find that the use of “frame story” narration is as necessary as rewriting in the texts of A. France, serving to accentuate the modesty of the author and as a result affecting a decrease in authorial authority. All these analyses reveal the importance of the “simplicity” that appears at several levels in the texts of A. France, and which can give access to the harmonious “purity”.

This theses will pay attention to a commented translation of selected short stories of contemporary Croatian author Julijana Matanović from her storybook Zašto sam vam lagala. The first part of the theses will be focused on a introducing of the author and her literary production including her place in the context of Croatian literature. The second, essential, part will contain the translation of the selected short stories into Czech language. In the third part will be sketched the translating process, there will be also described the applied translation methods. Here will be also concretely analysed some translatological problems. In the language side, the work will be reviewed with the Czech language possibilities. There would be also the comparison with the already existing German translation of the storybook.

Depuis les années 1970, c'est-à-dire en quatre décennies, la littérature contemporaine en occitan a investi de nouveaux espaces de création. Ce renouveau s'exprime notamment dans les nouvelles, auxquelles la publication en recueils a donné une autre dimension. La première partie s'attache à l'étude méthodique de ces textes en prose. Son objet est de circonscrire les contours d'un genre protéiforme, de mettre en relief des particularités formelles et thématiques, et de dégager des axes et des évolutions, en liaison avec les courants qui animent la littérature internationale. L'analyse révèle une tension entre ces deux pôles que constituent le fantastique et le réalisme, en relation avec la situation particulière de la langue. En outre, le choix linguistique invite à s'interroger sur la notion d'identité qui émerge ou qui est sous-jacente dans ces écrits en langue d'oc. Pour les auteurs, la langue occitane est essentielle, et synonyme d'ouverture et de modernité. Ils assument le paradoxe qui consiste à choisir une langue minorisée pour écrire des textes ambitieux et novateurs. La seconde partie est consacrée à la présentation détaillée des recueils de nouvelles qui constituent le matériau de base de ce travail, avec un aperçu sur chaque nouvelle. Cet état permet de mettre en évidence concrètement la richesse et la diversité de la nouvelle et de ses thématiques, et de révéler des textes de qualité injustement oubliés. On trouvera également pour chaque auteur une bibliographie indicative permettant de replacer les textes dans le contexte de l'oeuvre.Le corpus comprend plus d'une soixantaine d'écrivains en occitan, et concerne tous les dialectes de l'aire linguistique occitane. / The revival of contemporay Occitan literature had its beginning in the 1970s, when the publication of collections of short stories in paperback versions gave it a new momentum. The first part of the thesis seeks to delineate a multi-faceted genre and to outline its recurring themes as well as formal characteristics. This analysis reveals how the particular situation of the Occitan language contributes to creating a paradoxical relationship between realism and the fantastic. The choice of the Occitan language as a literary medium also raises the question of cultural identity which permeates these stories. The use of a minority language to write ambitious and innovative texts might seem paradoxical, but it is a deliberate choice by these authors who view Occitan as a language conveying values such as tolerance or modernity. The second part is devoted to the detailed presentation of the short stories on which the thesis is based. The brief overview of each of these stories, some of them lesser known, reveals the richness and diversity of the themes addressed. An indicative bibliography is also provided for each author. The corpus includes the works of more than sixty writers and constitutes a comprehensive survey of the dialects in use in the Occitan-speaking region.

L'attrait exercé par le Décaméron sur quelques grandes figures de l'humanisme (telles qu'Antonio Loschi, Leonardo Bruni, Enea Silvio Piccolomini, Leon Battista Alberti, ou Bartolomeo Facio) et quelques représentants de second plan (par exemple Filippo Beroaldo, Benedetto Colucci, ou encore Francesco Tedaldi) a donné naissance au XVè siècle à un véritable corpus de récits originaux et de traductions latines de nouvelles isolées de Boccace, qui témoigne d'une fertilisation réciproque des cultures vernaculaire et humaniste. Dans le contexte du XVè siècle, marqué en ce qui concerne la littérature en langue vulgaire par l'ancrage de la nouvelle dans sa tradition populaire, le corpus humaniste se distingue par la volonté des auteurs d'élever le genre. Sur le plan stylistique, la prose latine, riche de réminiscences antiques, est appelée à rehausser l'écriture, tandis que sur le plan des contenus et des finalités, l'accentuation de la dimension historique et éducative des nouvelles doit ennoblir le genre. / During the 15th century, the attraction of the Decameron on both some of the most prominent figures of humanism (Antonio Loschi, Leonardo Bruni, Enea Silvio Piccolomini, Leon Battista Alberti, or Bartolomeo Facio) and some lesser authors (such as Filippo Beroaldo, Benedetto Colucci, and Francesco Tedaldi) gave rise to a whole corpus of original stories and Latin translations of isolated short stories by Boccace, which testifies of the cross-fertilization at work between vernacular and humanist cultures. In the context of the 15th century, more particularly of 15h century literature written in the vernacular, which was marked by the propensity of short stories to be rooted in popular tradition, the humanist corpus is characterized by the willingness of its authors to bring the genre to a higher level. As regards the style, Latin prose, which is highly reminiscent of antiquity, is called on to elevate the writing, while from the point of view of the content and the goals to be reached, putting the stress on the historical and educational dimension of short stories is to ennoble the genre.