José Saramago, em sua obra, procura construir uma compreensão do mundo (em seus aspectos políticos, sociais e humanos) a partir do envolvimento do Homem com a Palavra. Nas crônicas, produzidas ao longo de oito anos (1968-1975), essa relação é explorada por vários enfoques, uma vez que esse gênero permite uma oscilação do trivial ao filosófico, do riso à melancolia, do irônico ao panfletário, tornando-se uma espécie de \"laboratório de estilos\" para o futuro Nobel. Com isso, as crônicas constituem-se como elemento central na formação do escritor, sendo responsáveis por construir aspectos da persona saramaguiana. No presente trabalho, três eixos principais se estabelecem: a Linguagem, a Paisagem e a Viagem; e é a partir deles que todo o jogo literário saramaguiano se estabeleceria. / José Saramago, in his work, intends to build an understanding of the world (in its political, social and human aspects) from the interaction between Man and Word. His articles, published from 1968 to 1975, explored that relationship through many approaches, reflecting a genre that allows a fluctuation from trivial to philosophical subjects, from laughter to sorrow, from irony to pamphleteering. This genre became a form of styles laboratory for the future Nobel prize winner. Thus, the articles contains in them the main elements of the writers formation, being responsible for building aspects of Saramagos persona. In this work, three main axes are established: the Language, the Landscape/Prospect and the Journey; and is on them that all of Saramago\'s literary puzzle is produced.

L’objet de ce travail de recherche est de définir la relation de Samuel Beckett au classicisme français du dix-septième siècle. L’analyse préliminaire de différents manuscrits permet d’identifier les sources primaires et secondaires de ce dernier sur Pascal et Racine, et de mettre en avant, dans un second temps, les différentes correspondances, esthétiques et littéraires, entre l’œuvre de l’écrivain irlandais et Port-Royal. L’arrière-plan philosophique se définit par la conjonction de la logique, de l’éloquence et de la passion au cœur de l’œuvre racinienne, que l’on retrouve dans la rhétorique des Pensées, et l’analyse du langage dans la Logique ou l’art de Penser (1662) d’Arnauld et de Nicole. Les différents aspects de cette filiation intellectuelle sont établis à partir de l’analyse comparée des propos de Beckett dans ses séminaires sur la ‘modernité’ de Racine à Trinity College, Dublin, et des écrits théoriques de contemporains français parmi les plus illustres autour du ‘classicisme moderne’ et de ‘l’antirhétorique’. L’étude de l’essai sur Proust, écrit en 1931, suivra ce bilan historiographique afin démontrer que l’œuvre de Beckett se situe dans le prolongement de l’augustinisme littéraire français,qu’il connaissait au moins à partir des écrits et en particulier du roman de Sainte-Beuve, Volupté. En outre, les thèmes augustiniens parcourent l’œuvre plus tardive, notamment la trilogie de romans français, Molloy, Malone Meurt, et L’Innommable comme les textes courts tels que Le Dépeupleur et Sans. L’intertextualité entre les écrits de Pascal et ceux de Beckett, doublée d’une analyse stylistique, démontrera que la syntaxe appauvrie de l’œuvre beckettienne est profondément inspirée du pessimisme augustinien vis-à-vis du langage. En effet, Beckett, adoptant le français comme principale langue d’expression, choisit le style des Pensées comme l’un de ses modèles les plus fondamentaux. / This thesis examines Samuel Beckett’s understanding of seventeenth century French classicism. Thepreliminary analysis of genetic material, that allows the identification of Beckett’s primary andsecondary sources on Pascal and Racine, leads to a discussion of literary and aesthetic connectionsbetween the works of Beckett and the writers of Port-Royal. The philosophical backdrop of thatinfluence derives from the unique fusion of logic, eloquence, and passion manifested in the works of Racine, together with the conception of language in the Pensées and Arnauld and Nicole’s1662 Logique ou l’art de Penser. Literary theories on style and ‘modern literature’ that are contemporary to Beckett’s Trinity College lectures and early critical writings are examined here in the aim to define the different aspects of that intellectual filiation. A close reading of Beckett’s 1931 monograph on Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu follows the initial historiographical study, so as to show that the presence of French literary Augustinianism, manifested in the works of Sainte-Beuve, particularly his only novel Volupté, also underlies some of Beckett’s later prose. This includes the trilogy of French novels, Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable, and pieces belonging to the later period, particularly Le Dépeupleur/The Lost Ones, and Sans/Lessness. Beckett’s ‘syntax of weakness’, based on reduction and impoverishment, is inspired by the Augustinian pessimism towards language at work in the Logique. As such, the anthropological vision of Port-Royal anticipated Beckett’s definition of being as chaos, so much so that Pascal’s style crucially defined his use of the French language itself.

Les premiers romans de John Dos Passos s’inscrivent dans le courant moderniste et sont caractérisés par une organisation originale des mots sur la page. Le texte n’est pas un bloc monolothique mais il est découpé en sections et ponctué d’épigraphes. Il contient également une multitude de collages présentés dans des styles et des polices variés. Cette observation est le point de départ de cette étude qui propose d’analyser la matérialité du texte dans les premiers romans de John Dos Passos, Manhattan Transfer et la trilogie USA, publiés entre 1925 et 1938. Ces ouvrages interrogent le regard du lecteur sur le texte, en montrant ce qui est placé devant, autour de l’oeil de celui qui regarde. Ils invitent le lecteur à prendre conscience de ce qui influence sa vision. Le roman exhibe son armature et ses divers seuils, laissant soin à celui qui lit de poursuivre ou non sa lecture, de revenir en arrière et de faire les liens entre les différentes zones de texte. Le roman expose son mode de fabrication, soulignant qu’il est le produit d’un réagencement de textes antérieurs. Cette armature visible est autant faite de pleins que de vides et reflète la tension entre l’ambition de tout dire, tout contenir et la reconnaissance de la difficulté même de raconter. Le jeu avec les espaces blancs, la ponctuation et les indications phonétiques renforcent la dimension écrite du texte tout en essayant de de le faire sortir hors de la page et de résister à toute clôture. / The early novels of John Dos Passos are part of the modernist literary movement. They are characterized by an original organization of the words on the page. The text is no longer a monolithic block, but is divided into sections and its separations are highlighted by a vast paratext. It also contains a variety of collages presented in various styles and in different fonts. These observations are the starting point of this research, which focuses on the materiality of the text in the early novels of John Dos Passos, Manhattan Transfer and the trilogy USA, published between 1925 and 1938. These novels question the gaze of the reader on the text, showing what is placed in front of and around the eye of the observer. The reader becomes aware of what influences his vision. The novel displays its internal structure and various thresholds, allowing the reader to continue or to stop reading, to go backwards and to create connections between the different sections of the text. The novel displays how it has been constructed, highlighting that it is the product of the rearrangement of previous texts. This visible internal structure is also built out of gaps and empty spaces. It reflects the tension between the ambition to be exhaustive, to contain everything and to acknowledge the difficulty to tell a story. The interplay with the blank space on the page, the use of punctuation and phonetic indicators reinforce the written aspect of the text, while at the same time making the words stand off the page and resistant to closure.

This study investigates the social function of reading Urban Literature and the role the genre serves in the lives of a family of African American women. This investigation discovered that their talk about a particular Urban Literature text reveals intertextual links among multiple "texts" and that these links relate to elements of their lived worlds and cultural models. Using a case study portrait methodology, grounded in a sociocultural approach to language and literacy, this study focuses on the following questions: 1. What do the women in an all-female African American family read? Why do they read? 2. How are these African American women's self-perceptions and identities related to their family's reading practices? 3. How do the women in an all-female African American family engage and talk to one another about books as readers, individuals, and as a family? 4. How are the intertextual links they use during their talk socially constructed as they interact and react to one another? To address the first two questions, I conducted two in-depth individual interviews of the participants and analyzed their responses for evidence that reading Urban Literature is part of larger social and cultural practices related to their self-perception and their lived worlds and cultural models. In this case, reading Urban Literature serves a larger purpose than just pure entertainment. Specifically, I found that the women in this family read Urban Literature for the following social functions: (1) as a connection to urban life; (2) as a form of entertainment; (3) as a collaborative activity; and (4) as a means of constructing and defining their own identities. To address the second two questions, I joined the family for a discussion of an Urban Literature book called Rage Times Fury (2004). After documenting the conversation on video, I analyzed a 6 min 16 sec segment of the 1 hr 17 min 11 sec discussion to explore the ways the family members' talk collaboratively constructs meaning through intertextual links. The collaborative nature of their talk about Rage Times Fury reveals that this family uses intertextual links to: (1) define themselves as readers, particularly as readers of Urban Literature, and as students; (2) strengthen their bonds as members of the same family through strategies such as repetition; and (3) identify and validate their cultural models and prior lived experiences based on their shared social and historical perspectives. The analysis within this study suggests researchers can conduct more extensive studies of how African American families with adolescents engage in various literacy practices and how those practices are embedded in their social and cultural lived worlds. This study also recommends that educators should strive more to connect family literacy skills, practices, and cultural models in students' homes to instructional skills, practices, and cultural models employed in classrooms.

Research shows that academic literacy is discipline specific. Students have to learning the ways of communication in order to gain access to the discourse community of the selected discipline through understanding and performing required genres and learning necessary disciplinary knowledge. Scaffolding is important in the process to help students internalize the disciplinary knowledge and improve students' performance on academic papers. Computer-mediated communication (CMC) provides good chances of scaffolding and mediation especially for non-native graduate students who may have lost many opportunities of class participation due to their limited language proficiency or other cultural issues. In this dissertation, the researcher investigated how a group of L2 students tried to acquire academic literacy in applied linguistics by completing a series of teacher preparation classes. CMC was built naturally into the classes where students kept online discussions on various components of applied linguistics and were engaged in some online peer review activity on draft papers. Data were gathered from 8 sources: observations, questionnaire, online discussion entries, online peer feedback, students' major assignments, source materials, interviews and discourse-based interviews. The various sources of data were analyzed both quantitatively and qualitatively using different methods and schemes to present how L2 graduate students negotiate their academic literacy in CMC environment in terms of language functions and focus; how CMC influences both the process and the product of student's academic writing; and how students perceive CMC in the academic literacy acquisition process. Analysis of data indicated that non-native English speaking students used various language functions in their negotiation of academic literacy with their peers in the online discussion. They tended to apply a wider range of language function as they became more familiar with the discourse community. Students in this study also applied multiple intertextual techniques in the online discussion, whereas only a few were used in face-to-face class discussions. Results also indicated that computer-mediated communication facilitated students' understanding of tasks, performance of writing activities and applying citation conventions correctly. The scaffolding among students enabled them to effectively learn disciplinary knowledge and develop their academic literacy. Analysis of the students draft and final papers in the online peer review activities indicated that students incorporated peers' feedback into their revisions and benefited from such activities although they claimed high quality feedback was still not enough. Finally, although the students considered that computer-mediated communication had some drawbacks, it did facilitate their acquisition of academic literacy in the field of applied linguistics.

This project began in Dr. Anthony Magistrale’s graduate seminar focused on the works of Edgar Allan Poe. It is the result of our common interests in Poe’s textual canon, and furthermore in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century illustrative works that were inspired by it. After performing significant research, the conclusion was reached that despite the extensive collection of visual works, catalogued by Burton Pollin, little work had been done that actually explored the relationship between these works and the text. I found myself asking what role this canon of illustrations played in shaping the public understanding of and reception towards the Poe tales that are so widely known today. “A Par/ergon for Poe: Arthur Rackham and the Fin de Siècle Illustrators” is intended as an introduction for further study on the extent of influence that nineteenth- and twentieth- century artists had in promoting and supplementing Poe’s work. Given that the earliest prominent illustrator of the canon, Édouard Manet, began illustrating “The Raven” at the request of Charles Baudelaire, Poe’s first translator and the man who communicated Poe’s work to the world, the fin de siècle illustrations were produced concurrently to Poe’s burgeoning popularity. In the first chapter, I engage in a literary history of the fin de siècle artistic movements and major figures and their exposure to Poe, including Manet, Gustave Dore, and the Symbolists, Aubrey Beardsley, Harry Clarke, and the Decadents, and finally, Arthur Rackham and the Modernists. I track Poe’s influence after his death, exploring the question of why such prominent artists were interested in representing Poe’s work, specifically, in the first place. Subsequently, this thesis also discovers what elements of their work and aesthetics could be seen as representative of Poe’s. Then, using Jacques Derrida’s ekphrastic theory of the parergon/ergon supplementary relationship, I deconstruct the textual “lack” in Poe’s tales as that which sets up an availability to the illustration. Through this “lack,” the supplemental illustration can insert itself and exert its own power, altering the way the text is received based on the style and time of its reception. My second chapter turns to Poe’s tales and the subsequent illustrations by Rackham. I place particular emphasis on texts and images of “The Cask of Amontillado” and “The Fall of the House of Usher,” with supplementary references to “Hop-Frog,” “Ligeia,” “The Domain of Arnheim,” and “Landor’s Cottage.” I use textual analysis and visual case studies to demonstrate the way in which the illustrations fill the “lack” present in their respective texts, and build out precisely where this lack can be seen. I explore the way the images both mimic and change the reader’s relationship with the tales and characters, altering the reader’s response and thus, the overarching canonical interpretation. By doing this, my project demonstrates how strong of an impact Arthur Rackham and the fin de siècle illustrators made on the public perception of and reception to the tales of Edgar Allan Poe.

Este trabalho visa a discutir derivações textuais do romance de Victor Hugo Bug-Jargal, especialmente as traduções parciais em verso feitas por Gonçalves Dias e Castro Alves. Também discutimos a tradução integral do romance levada a cabo pelo tradutor Adolfo Bezerra de Menezes Neto, bem como a influência de Bug-Jargal em obras de Gonçalves Dias, Castro Alves e José de Alencar. Para tanto, lançamos mão da teoria da hipertextualidade de Gérard Genette. Também são acionadas contribuições teóricas de Haroldo de Campos, Antoine Berman, André Lefevere, Paulo Henriques Britto, Leyla Perrone-Moisés, Antonio Candido, Alfredo Bosi, Cyril Aslanov, Álvaro Faleiros e outros. Nosso ponto de partida foi um fenômeno que pode ser observado em algumas traduções brasileiras oitocentistas de Victor Hugo: trechos de romances e peças que, quando traduzidos, sofreram um processo de \"transposição de gênero\" e passaram a circular em português como poemas autônomos. O escopo do projeto original também abrangeria traduções brasileiras em verso de trechos das obras Marie Tudor, Ruy Blas e Notre Dame de Paris, mas o corpus foi restringido em virtude da surpreendente fecundidade do assunto. / This work aims at discussing textual derivatives of Victor Hugo\'s novel Bug-Jargal, especially the partial translations in verse made by Gonçalves Dias and Castro Alves. We also discuss the full translation of the novel carried out by the translator Adolfo Bezerra de Menezes Neto, as well as the influence of Bug-Jargal on works by Gonçalves Dias, Castro Alves and José de Alencar. For this purpose, we make use of Gérard Genette\'s theory of Hypertextuality. Theoretical contributions by Haroldo de Campos, Antoine Berman, André Lefevere, Paulo Henriques Britto, Leyla Perrone-Moisés, Antonio Candido, Alfredo Bosi, Cyril Aslanov, Álvaro Faleiros and others are used as well. Our starting point was a phenomenon that can be observed in some eighteenth-century Brazilian translations of Victor Hugo: excerpts from novels and drama that, when translated, underwent a process of \"gender transposition\" and began to circulate in Portuguese as autonomous poems. The scope of the original project would also cover Brazilian translations in verse of excerpts from the works Marie Tudor, Ruy Blas, and Notre Dame de Paris, but the corpus was restricted due to the surprising fecundity of the subject.

When it comes to the production and reception of texts, most linguists will readily agree that writers as well as readers constitute and follow typical text patterns as they produce and read texts. It has become common today to describe text patterns as typical sets of manifestations of formal, thematic, and pragmatic features that arise from resemblances between different texts and that are inscribed in the communicative memories of a language community. However, speakers also transcend text patterns every day and oscillate between following and overstepping textual rules. This thesis investigates how speakers categorize linguistic knowledge in text patterns, and follow and transcend these patterns in everyday communication, using the example of Rainald Goetz’ text Loslabern. Excerpts from reviews about Loslabern illustrate how readers perceive the text: Some readers consider Loslabern as a ‘ruined’ text that falls apart, whereas others describe Loslabern as ‘ocean-like’ and fluid. Based on these reader experiences, the thesis attempts to answer the following central question: How can we describe ‘Loslabern’ and connatural texts from the viewpoint of textual linguistics in accordance with the readers’ intuitions? The thesis proposes and discusses three options: Textual linguistics may describe Loslabern i) as a broken text, ii) in terms of different concepts of text pattern, and iii) in terms of a novel concept of text pattern. The analytical section focuses on a discussion of different concepts of text pattern: discrete structural and prototypical pragmatic concepts. It examines how these concepts fall short of describing Loslabern in accordance with the readers’ intuitions. Following Wittgenstein and his concept of family resemblance, it creates a multi-dimensional and open concept of text patterns. This concept enables textual linguistics to depict the intertextual embeddedness of Loslabern and other texts systematically, to gain insight into the mechanisms of forming and transcending text patterns, and to describe Loslabern in accordance with the diversity of readers’ intuitions. In doing so, the thesis points at new directions in linguistics as well as literary studies.

The new cataloging code Resource Description and Access (RDA) provides a system of instructions for recording relationships between related resources by means of a controlled vocabulary of relationship designators. The purpose of this two years master’s thesis in Archive, Library and Museum studies is to examine the construction of this system, as well as its theoretical foundation. One theoretical point of departure is the necessity of operational definitions for consistent identification of bibliographic relationships. Another such point of departure is that the theoretical model on which RDA is based (the FRBR model) is not a complete description of the biblio­graphic universe, but merely a limited representation of a set of assumptions about that universe. The thesis first examines Barbara B. Tillett's and Richard P. Smiraglia's theories and taxonomies of bibliographic relationships. The analysis shows that, in spite of their claims to provide a theoretical basis for consistent treatment of bibliographic relationships, neither Tillett nor Smiraglia offers operationally applicable definitions. The thesis then turns to RDA in order to examine the instructions and the list of relationship designators. After an introductory survey of RDA chapters 24 to 28, the possibility to record relationship designators at different entity levels is discussed. Remarkably, RDA neither provides instructions for how to choose between the entity levels, nor does it point out what this choice signifies. Finally, a selection of relationship designators representing content relationships is examined. The selected designators are analysed and compared to corresponding categories in literary theorist Gérard Genette's attempt to classify intertextual relationships. The analysis shows that though some of the selected designators are satisfactorily operationalized, most are not.

Today it is common to state that we are living in an information overloaded society. But there are many different definitions of what can be said to constitute Information Overload and there is a lack of substantial research on the subject. Conclusions in the available literature on Information Overload are often drawn on anecdotal evidence and carries a dramatized picture of the causes and effects of the phenomenon. With the tools of discursive analysis this two years master’s thesis explores how the phenomenon Information Overload is portrayed in six popular science books that deals with the subject: Alvin Toffler (1970) Future Shock, Orrin Klapp (1986) Overload and Boredom, Richard Wurman (1989) Information Anixety, Andrew Keen (2007) The cult of the amateur, Maggie Jackson (2008), Distracted and Nicholas Carr (2010) The Shallows. The result of the analysis shows that there is a common discourse of how the subject of Information Overload is represented, which stretches in and between the books intertextually. In this study that discourse is called the dystopian discourse of Information Overload. It is structured by a unified use of narratives, concepts, themes, metaphors and statements and by its separation from the opposite utopian discourse of Information Overload. In the final discussion the results of the analysis are compared to postmodern theory, a problematisation of the concept of distraction and to the Swedish government’s 2012 investigation of reading habits of young people in the country. The conclusion of the study is that the two binary discourses discovered in the analysis – the dystopian and the utopian – should be avoided in the debate and research on Information Overload. Instead the discussion should be influenced by pluralism, complexity and awareness.