The Marine's Hymn. It has graced countless battlefields since its creation in the 19th century, bolstering confidence and lifting spirits. Still a mainstay in the modern Marine Corps' esprit de corps and a constant presence to those attempting to earn the title of United States Marine, the Hymn reflects the emphasis the Marine Corps places on its extensive and impressive historical record. While the Marine Corps has been immortalized in film and fiction for their dogged assault across the Pacific in World War II, their perseverance in Korea and Vietnam, and their most recent service in the Middle East as part of Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan, few can identify the true cradle of the modern Marine Corps. In the first four decades of the 20th century, the Marine Corps were constantly engaged across the Pacific and Caribbean, fighting multiple insurgencies simultaneously against determined and skilled guerillas. As the Corps faces a similar situation today in the Middle East, these formative years beg further analysis. No individual is more suited to broach the subject than one of the Marine Corps' most revered heroes, Major General Smedley D. Butler.

.

Ce travail explore les représentations du corps mort dans des cuentos hispano-américains contemporains pour essayer d’établir par ce biais une typologie des rapports que l’être humain entretient de façon générale avec la mort. L’idée centrale que nous avançons est que la littérature reproduit un nombre limité de réactions universellement valables, se montrant ainsi capable de mettre à la disposition de ses lecteurs un inventaire étrangement fiable des attitudes qu’eux-mêmes, à l’instar des personnages, sont susceptibles d’aborder face à cet événement ultime. Le choix du cadavre comme protagoniste des récits étudiés s’explique par le fait qu’il soit la seule image concrète et tangible de la mort et que, par son apparence repoussante, il représente une terrible source de hantise qui conditionne et altère toute tentative paisible de se rapprocher de celle-ci. Le cadre théorique des mondes possibles littéraires qui posent la fiction comme expérience envisageable et la particularité formelle du genre littéraire du cuento avec sa petite étendue et son caractère auto-suffisant permettent la vision du texte comme espace tombal où gisent ces nombreux cadavres fictionnels. Le lecteur a ainsi accès de près au corps mourant/mort, froid, putride, puant, dépecé ou bien embaumé, et les expériences littéraires acquises de cette manière s’ajoutent à son effort d’apprivoisement de la réalité effrayante de la mort. / This work explores the dead body as it is represented in a number of contemporary Latin American cuentos in order to establish a typology of the different reactions of human beings in general when faced with death. I suggest that literature reproduces a limited number of universal behaviours in this situation and thus it gives readers a fairly reliable inventory of the attitudes that they, like the characters, are likely to adopt.The corpse as a protagonist of the short stories discussed here has been selected because it is the only concrete and palpable image of death and that, by its repulsive appearance, it represents a terrible source of fear which conditions and alters any intention of peacefully trying to come to terms with it. The theoretical framework of the literary possible worlds whereby fiction is seen as a potential experience, and the formal characteristics of the cuento, such as its reduced, self-contained nature, allow the text to be read as a funerary space where all these fictional dead bodies lie. The reader is thus brought into close contact to the dying/dead, cold, putrid, stinking, dismembered or embalmed body and the literary experiences he/she goes through help him/her to come to grips with the frightening reality of death.