This thesis analyses Spanish nation-building from a social-constructionist perspective assuming that nations are historically evolving social constructs and that nationhood is a largely modern phenomenon with pre-modern antecedents. A theoretical model for studying nationhood is proposed based on a critique of nationalism theories, Giddens’s social structuration model (Giddens 1984) refined by Sewell (2005); modernisation theories and discourse analytical approaches. A discourse-oriented methodology is proposed: Spanish nation-building, conceptualised as semiotically-mediated social action situated across time-space, is analysed nomothetically and ideographically, both in its broad historical context and in connection with recent narratives extracted from a large purpose-built corpus of newspaper articles. Several factors behind Spain’s problematic nation-building are identified in the socio-historical analysis: an unyielding geography inhibiting communications, a long history of political and cultural fragmentation, a late and uneven modernisation and the lack of hegemonic national narratives in the context of a long history of confrontation between different identities. The corpus-based discourse analytical approach employed in the latter part of the analysis illustrates the potential offered by corpus-assisted discourse studies in social research, revealing that a widely-accepted Spanish identity discourse from the centre’s perspective has not yet emerged.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Chicago, 1920. / At head of title: The University of Chicago. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Chicago, 1920. / At head of title: The University of Chicago. Includes bibliographical references.

Originally issued as the author's Thesis (inaugural)--Leipzig. / Includes bibliographical references and index.

Based on a framework of linking intercultural rhetoric research to genre theories, the present study investigated Taiwanese EFL novice students’ construction of generic structures and rhetorical features in writing in L1 (Chinese) and L2 (English). Quantitative and qualitative research methods were combined in the present study, including textual analysis of students’ genre writing, a student questionnaire and interviews with students. The textual analysis focused on the construction of genre-rhetoric conventions in intercultural letters of job application and argumentative writing, respectively. The student questionnaire explored writers’ reported writing instructional experiences in L1 and L2. The results of interviews suggested that writers’ decisions on the genre-rhetoric construction were affected by a wider range of small culture factors, for example, familiarity with writing topics, L2 language proficiency, transferability of writing experiences, and contextual factors, together with writers’ large cultural influence. The overall findings suggest that the way writers approach genre writing is significantly influenced and shaped by the context of situation. More importantly, writers’ agency has to be highlighted as it triggers and mediates social processes of multidimensional negotiation between text, writer and context in L2 writing. It is therefore suggested that context of situation where writing is produced and writers’ agency are two influential factors for shaping Taiwanese novice EFL students’ intercultural genre writing.

In this dissertation I explore how the representation of space and self is articulated in the autofictional writing of the Colombian author Fernando Vallejo (Medellín, 1942), focusing on four texts: Los días azules (1985), El fuego secreto (1987), La Virgen de los sicarios (1994) and El desbarrancadero (2001). I particularly examine what textual strategies are used to convey this articulation, and what perceptions of space and self, as well as what conceptions of the city and the intellectual, inform these texts. Drawing on theory and criticism on autobiography and autofiction, I propose to read in Fernando Vallejo's writing a return of the author-subject -a return of the ‘real’- though that return is taken as an opportunity to explore, in a playful and ironic mode, the fictionality of the notions of subject and identity in the autobiographical text, and to examine the privileged role played by space in that exploration. On one hand, based on theoretical studies of the poetics of space, I seek to demonstrate that, since space is always relative to a point of view, to a certain position -physical, biographical and ideological-, its representation conveys more than just spatial meanings. I argue that as a product of the gaze of this fragmented subject, of this author who returns, -though not as a guarantor of the truth of what he writes-, space is not only signified, represented, but also functions as a signifying element, condensing cultural, aesthetic and ideological meanings; in sum, a world vision. On the other hand, I show that it is mainly in reference to past and present spaces that images of self, both ambiguous and multiple, are created in the texts. And these images, these self-figurations, which constitute individual creations as much as cultural and social products, reveal in Vallejo’s writing, not just a fictionalizing reconstruction of his personal past, but a critical reading of Colombia’s history, and what Vallejo sees as its disastrous present. In this sense, my contention is that, beyond referring to existing places outside the texts, through the use of proper names and with diverse degrees of mimetism, and thus creating the illusion of reality, or beyond acting as mere background, narrative space functions as a key element in the production of meaning in the texts by Fernando Vallejo examined here.

This thesis investigates the reception and creation of post-1960 Franco-Belgian bande dessinée, through an examination of the key BD journals of the period, namely, Pilote (1959-1989), L'Echo des savanes (1972-present) and (A Suivre) (1978-1997). The BDs considered as representative of these magazines are not only contextualised socio-historically as cultural artefacts of the period, but are also analysed as texts. This thesis also considers the historical processes of the institutionalisation and intellectualisation of the BD in France and Belgium in a bid to understand the current cultural status and popularity of Franco-Belgian BD. In terms of reception, I focus mainly on the critical reception of BD. In terms of creation I focus particularly on the work of three authors, Claire Bretécher, Christian Binet and Benoît Peeters, concentrating on a personal aesthetic appreciation rather than a general public appreciation of their work. After a structural introduction to the thesis, I discuss certain significant aspects of pre-1960 BD history. In particular, I highlight the political suspicion in which children's illustrés were held in the immediate post-war period. I then suggest specific cultural and historical reasons, which explain BD's transition from frowned-upon illustrated children's material in the 1950s to its welcomed reception as a medium capable of meaningful adult commentary in the 1970s. This introductory chapter concludes with a summary of the key events marking BD's cultural institutionalisation in France and Belgium. This summary particularly emphasises the State intervention of the 1980s, which definitively recognised post-1960 BD as a national asset. In chapter one, I discuss the field of BD criticism, and investigate, in three sub-sections, the contents and context of the main critical trends such as they developed in the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s-1990s. I argue that the decisive process of BD's intellectualisation was inaugurated with the establishment of the CBD (Club des Amis de la bande dessinée) in 1962.

By taking learning as the axis of scholarship, personal and social epistemologies have a common ground: experience and reflective action. I am not considering learning as a vehicle whose success is measured to the extent that a portion of the external world is appropriated, but as a qualitatively different way to see, understand and handle experience. A scholarship of learning is tightly bound to the experiential roots of objects of study that keep on changing in individual and collective histories. Therefore, a scholarship of learning is not a set of context-free skills but a complex process of transformation of its practitioners’ identity and agency over themselves and their object of study. Such two-fold construction orientates a discipline no less than the ways of knowing, acting and being of those engaged in its investigation. I propose that the object of study of Modern Languages and Cultures should be literacy in the multilayered symbolic codes (some of which are tacit) that make intercultural interchanges intelligible and effective. The scope of this dissertation, however, is restricted to the investigation of deep learning in literacy. My thesis is that Modern Languages and Cultures should not be limited to objects of study, such as language, discourse, texts, films, etc. but has to include the processes of agentification of the learner and making sense of his or her experience in a foreign language and culture. I advocate the investigation of the experiential roots of language and culture in a scholarship of learning which seeks to integrate research and education, on the one hand, and language and content, on the other. Experience and learning are subjective-objective processes, and so I advise the epistemological revaluation of subjectivity. I propose that subjectification (i.e. the construction of the subject) is not only relevant for human development and social well-being, but is a source of knowledge in the Humanities.

The teachers' use of motivational strategies is generally believed to enhance student motivation, yet there is scant empirical evidence to support this claim. This classroom-oriented investigation focused on how the motivational practices of EFL teachers in South Korea related to students' L2 motivation and motivated classroom behavior. In a first phase, the motivation of over 1,300 students was measured by a self-report questionnaire, and the use of motivational strategies by 27 teachers in 20 different schools was examined with a classroom observation instrument specifically developed for this investigation, the Motivation Orientation of Language Teaching (MOLT). The MOLT scheme, along with a post hoc rating scale completed by the observer, was used to assess the teachers' use of motivational strategies. The MOLT follows the real-time coding principle of Spada and Frohlich's (1995) Communication Orientation of Language Teaching (COLT) scheme but uses categories of observable teacher behaviors derived from Dornyei's (2001) motivational strategies framework for foreign language classrooms. The results indicate that the language teachers' motivational practice is directly linked to increased levels of the learners' motivated learning behavior and their motivational state. In a second phase, three high- and three low-motivation learner groups (selected from the initial sample) were compared in order to uncover the students' interpretations and understandings of the quality of their L2 instructional contexts in relation to their motivation and motivated classroom behavior. Results based on quantitative and qualitative data (which were obtained using three new instruments specifically designed for this study) indicated that the motivational practices coexisting with different levels of motivation were woven into the contents and processes of L2 instruction and instruction in general. These contents and processes seemed to stem from teachers' and students' beliefs about what counts as learning in the L2 classroom and what is the best way to learn an L2.

This thesis examines the role of Scots language verse translation in the second-generation or post-war Scottish Renaissance. The translation of European poetry into Scots was of central importance to the first-generation Scottish Renaissance of the nineteen twenties and thirties. As Margery Palmer McCulloch has shown, the wider cultural climate of Anglo-American modernism was key to MacDiarmid’s conception of the interwar Scottish Renaissance. What was the effect on second-generation poet-translators as the modernist moment passed? Are the many translations undertaken by the younger poets who emerged in the course of the nineteen forties and fifties a faithful reflection of this cultural inheritance? To what extent are they indicative of a new set of priorities and international influences? The five principal translators discussed in this thesis are Douglas Young (1913-1973), Sydney Goodsir Smith (1915-1975), Robert Garioch (1909-1981), Tom Scott (1918-1995) and William J. Tait (1918-1992). Each is the subject of a chapter, in many cases providing the first or most extensive treatment of particular translations. While the pioneering work of John Corbett, Bill Findlay and J. Derrick McClure, among other scholars, has drawn attention to the long history of literary translation into Scots, this thesis is the first extended critical work to take the verse translations of the post-MacDiarmid makars as its subject. The nature and extent of MacDiarmid’s influence is considered throughout, as are the wider discourses around language and translation in twentieth-century Scottish poetry. Critical engagement with a number of key insights from theoretical translation studies helps to situate these writers’ work in its global context. This thesis also explores the ways in which the specific context of Scots translation allows scholars to complicate or expand upon theories of translation developed in other cultural situations (notably Lawrence Venuti’s writing on domestication and foreignisation). The five writers upon whom this thesis concentrates were all highly individual, occasionally idiosyncratic personalities. Young’s polyglot ingenuity finds a foil in Garioch’s sharp, humane wit. Goodsir Smith’s romantic ironising meets its match in Scott’s radical certainty of cause. Tait’s use of the Shetlandic tongue sets him apart. Nonetheless, despite the great variety of style, form and tone shown by each of these translators, this thesis demonstrates that there are meaningful links to be made between them and that they form a unified, coherent group in the wider landscape of twentieth-century Scottish poetry. On the linguistic level, each engaged to some extent in the composition of a ‘synthetic’ or ‘plastic’ language deriving partly from literary sources, partly from the spoken language around them. On a more fundamental level, each was committed to enriching this language through translation, within which a number of key areas of interest emerge. One of the most important of these key areas is Gaelic – especially the poetry of Sorley MacLean, which Young, Garioch and Goodsir Smith all translated into Scots. This is to some extent an act of solidarity on the part of these Scots poets, acknowledging a shared history of marginalisation as well as expressing shared hopes for the future. The same is true of Goodsir Smith’s translations from a number of Eastern European poets (and Edwin Morgan’s own versions, slightly later in the century). The translation of verse drama by poets is another key theme sustained throughout the thesis, with Garioch and Young attempting to fill what they perceived as a gap in the Scots tradition through translation from other languages (another aspect of these writers’ legacy continued by Morgan). Beyond this, all of the writers discussed in this thesis translated extensively from European poetries from Ancient Greece to twentieth-century France. Their reasons for doing so were various, but a certain cosmopolitan idealism figures highly among them. So too does a desire to see Scotland interact with other European nations, thus escaping the potentially narrowing influence of post-war British culture. This thesis addresses the legacy of these writers’ translations, which, it argues, continue to exercise a perceptible influence on the course of poetry in Scotland. This work constitutes a significant contribution to a much-needed wider critical re-assessment of this pivotal period in modern Scottish writing, offering a fresh perspective on the formal and linguistic merits of these poets’ verse translations. Drawing upon frequently obscure book, pamphlet and periodical sources, as well as unpublished manuscripts in the National Library of Scotland and the Shetland Archives, this thesis breaks new ground in its investigation of the role of Scots verse translation in the second-generation Scottish Renaissance.