This work analyzes the theme of the Eternal Feminine and its significance within Goethe`s famous drama Faust. The first chapter delineates and explores the various rich definitions of the Eternal Feminine found in the realms of theology, philosophy, and literature. The chapter concludes with the assertion that although the definitions of the Eternal Feminine are myriad and complex and that there is no one clear definition, that a careful inspection of these definitions allows one to ascribe to the concept of the Eternal Feminine certain characteristics. Thus, the Eternal Feminine is Beauty, Truth, Good, Love. The second chapter addresses in detail the theme of evil as represented in Faust with the purpose to show that the Goethe`s Eternal Feminine is a form of salvation and therefore cannot be understood without a discussion of the theme of evil to which it acts as an antidote. The chapter proceeds with the analysis of the role of the Eternal Masculine or the Father Figure as represented in Faust and its relation to the Eternal Feminine in the drama. The third chapter focuses on the various representations of the Eternal Feminine in Faust (as the Perfect World of Platonic Ideals (Eros), as the Indian Feminine Goddess, the Fruitful Mother Nature, and the Sublimated Sexual Energy). Finally, the Platonic and Pagan elements in Goethe`s idea of the Eternal Feminine are examined and contrasted with the Christian idea of salvation. A conclusion is asserted that Goethe`s Salvation via Eternal Feminine is the return to the pre-Christian search for life`s meaning and redemption from suffering and evil. / A Thesis submitted to the Department of Modern Languages and Linguistics in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts. / Spring Semester, 2012. / March 15, 2012. / Eternal, Faust, Feminine, Goethe / Includes bibliographical references. / Christian Weber, Professor Directing Thesis; Birgit Maier-Katkin, Committee Member; Reinier Leushuis, Committee Member.

This dissertation examines the experiences of young Frenchwomen from the northeastern département of Moselle who, following the surrender of France to the invading Germans in 1940 and the de facto annexation of Moselle into the Third Reich, were forcibly conscripted into German labor organizations devoted to the wartime support of the Nazi State. Their experiences, part of France's Second World War history has been largely forgotten if not occulted altogether. Research into the malgré-elles, as they refer to themselves, led me to recognize that their story is intimately tied to the history of Moselle and its occupation by Germany twice in a hundred years; one occupation having lasted almost fifty years. My research in the field included the interviewing of fifteen malgré-elles dispersed over most of north and central Moselle. An initial analysis of the interview data permitted the identification of experiences typical of a young malgré-elle, illustrated by the personal itinerary of one of my most informative interviewee. On further analysis, a hypothesis was formulated concerning the possible influence of cultural and especially linguistic backgrounds on the attitudes of malgré-elles toward their experiences. While interview data are somewhat mixed, it appears that malgré-elles from the German-speaking group were slightly less negative in regards to their experiences than their Francophone peers, while the common experiences of the members of both groups, forced to function in a coercive environment in Germany, tended to narrow this gap. / A Dissertation submitted to the Department of Modern Languages and Linguistics in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. / Fall Semester, 2012. / September 21, 2012. / Includes bibliographical references. / Alec Hargreaves, Professor Directing Dissertation; Eric C. Walker, University Representative; William Cloonan, Committee Member; Aimée Boutin, Committee Member.

This study examines the role of the language cue on language selection in the Bilingual Language Production (BLP) Model, (Hermans, 2000; Poulisse & Bongaerts, 1994) and its relationship to the Language Mode (LM) model, (Grosjean, 1998). In order to examine the role of phonology in second language (L2) production, two groups of native English speakers, one less proficient and one more proficient in Spanish, were compared in a picture naming task and a translation task. In the first task, picture naming, participants named pictures in both English and Spanish while two phonological cues were presented auditorily. The cues were top-down (i.e. environmentally-driven) or bottom-up (language-driven). In the second task, participants translated from English to Spanish and from Spanish to English, also while environmental and language-driven auditory cues were presented. The environment-driven cue was designed to activate a language-specific environment (e.g. English or Spanish music played in the background. The bottom-up language-driven distractor was designed to activate the internal representation of a target item by using the item's onset and vowel (e.g. [wu] for women or [mu] for mujer),. Distractors were either related to the target item by language (e.g. hearing the Spanish sound [mu] when producing mujer), unrelated by language (e.g. hear the Spanish sound [mu] when producing woman), or neutral (e.g. hearing [du], an unrelated sound in Arabic when producing woman). The results showed that all learners, regardless of proficiency, were affected to some extent by both the internal and external phonological cues. However, the cue effects were context dependent, e.g. dependent on the language of production and proficiency. Specifically, facilitory effects were found when external and internal cues matched for language, but when cues were not matched there were observed inhibitory effects. Moreover, all participants were affected by the neutral distractor for both reaction time and accuracy, such that reaction times were increased and accuracy was reduced. I consider the implications of these results per the specific predictions of the BLP and LM, as well as their theoretical implications for future models of bilingual production. / A Dissertation submitted to the Department of Modern Languages and Linguistics in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. / Summer Semester, 2012. / June 6, 2012. / Bilingualism, Phonology, Proficiency, Psycholinguistics, Spanish, Top-down / Includes bibliographical references. / Gretchen Sunderman, Professor Directing Dissertation; Michael Kaschak, University Representative; Carolina González, Committee Member; Michael Leeser, Committee Member.

Gis'le Pineau a 't' d'crite comme une nouvelle voix guadeloup'enne dans le mouvement de la Cr'olit'. Comme les repr'sentants de ce mouvement, elle s'attache ' inscrire le peuple de son 'le au c'ur de son 'uvre litt'raire et utilise un langage parsem' de cr'ole et un style cr'olis'. Sans pour cela renier son appartenance ' la Cr'olit', Pineau insiste cependant que son projet d''criture, son combat, est ailleurs: dans l'humain, et plus pr'cis'ment dans l'expression de la condition f'minine. Les personnages de Pineau sont en effet presque toujours des femmes guadeloup'ennes qui 'voluent dans l'espace de son 'le mais aussi en France m'tropolitaine ou bien encore dans le va-et-vient entre les trois p'les majeurs qui ont fa'onn' le pass' et la culture des Antilles: l'Afrique, les Antilles et la France. Les voix masculines n'en sont pas absentes, et jouent parfois un r'le crucial, mais elles sont pour la plupart filtr'es par les voix f'minines. La litt'rature des Antilles exprime avant tout une qu'te identitaire. Chez Pineau, et d'autres 'crivaines antillaises, cette qu'te s'articule souvent autour de la maternit'. C'est ce que nous proposons d'explorer dans cette 'tude. Nous d'montrerons que la figure maternelle s'affirme dans l'adversit': elle n'est plus cantonn'e au refus de soi et de la maternit'. Cependant, nous 'tablirons que l'image de la m're biologique demeure probl'matique: sa qu'te identitaire inachev'e, elle reste distante, voire absente, en particulier dans la relation m're/fille. La m're biologique est n'anmoins d'mystifi'e et le lien ' la m're est inscrit comme essentiel dans la recherche identitaire de la fille. Mais nous verrons que c'est le lien que la m're de substitution et la m're spirituelle vont tisser avec leurs filles qui devient le lieu privil'gi' de la construction identitaire. / A Dissertation submitted to the Department of Modern Languages in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. / Fall Semester, 2008. / May 30, 2008. / Includes bibliographical references. / Antoine Spacagna, Professor Directing Dissertation; Peter Easton, Outside Committee Member; Aimée Boutin, Committee Member; Lori Walters, Committee Member.

A central issue in second language acquisition (SLA) research is the relationship between morphosyntactic and lexical-semantic knowledge among L2 learners. It has been proposed that, L2 language acquisition starts with transfer of L1 semantic and morphosyntactic processing strategies; however, it has been observed that, at lower proficiency levels, the language processor may not have sufficient resources to transfer and use L1 morphosyntactic cues such as agreement morphology, case markers, etc. to process the L2. Therefore, this dissertation investigates whether L2 learners default to more local and lexical-semantic parsing (i.e. universal parsing) at the beginning stages of second language acquisition. This dissertation examines the processing strategies of two groups of L2 learners (L1 English - L2 Spanish and L1 Spanish - L2 English) on two experimental tasks: a self-paced listening task and a sentence interpretation task. The results suggest that L1 transfer does not occur at the beginning stages of acquisition; that is, the beginning L2 learners in this study were not able to process agreement cues; thus, they did not demonstrated the ability to integrate grammatical information encoded in verbal morphology in real time processing. Instead, the results indicated that L2 learners, regardless of L1, defaulted to local and lexical-semantic strategies (e.g., first-noun strategy) to process the L2 at the beginning stages of acquisition. These results lend support to the First Noun Principle (VanPatten 2007) and are discussed in term of the representational and processing problem of L2 acquisition. Implications for models of L2 sentence processing (Input Processing and the Competition Model) are also presented in this dissertation. / A Dissertation submitted to the Department of Modern Languages in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. / Spring Semester, 2013. / December 7, 2012. / English, L2, Processing, SLA, Spanish, transfer / Includes bibliographical references. / Michael J. Leeser, Professor Directing Dissertation; Sande Milton, University Representative; Carolina Gonzalez, Committee Member; Lara Reglero, Committee Member; Gretchen Sunderman, Committee Member.

Previous research (Van Heste, 1999; Van Hell & De Groot, 1998; Van Heuven, Dijstra & Grainger, 1998) has shown word comprehension behaves in a non-selective fashion and that bilinguals show sensitivity to one language's word features during word processing in another language. The majority of the previous studies have focused on investigating how lexical processing occurs among bilinguals. The present study, explores how trilinguals process words in comparison to bilinguals. In addition it focuses on observing how trilinguals process words in typological similar languages such as Spanish and Portuguese. In this study, a group of bilingual speakers (n=54) (First Language (L1) English and Second Language (L2) Spanish) and a group of trilingual speakers (n=66) (L1 English/Spanish, L2 Spanish/English, L3 Portuguese) completed a lexical decision task in Spanish. The stimuli in the experiment were manipulated to appear similar to words in various languages. The logic was to test whether the presence of a third language would affect processing in a second language. Participants were exposed to real and pseudo words in 8 different categories divided by 4 languages (Spanish, Portuguese, German and Basque) and their task was to decide whether the words presented were real Spanish words. Reaction times and accuracy were analyzed among both groups and across word type. It was predicted that trilingual participants would show sensitivity to words in Spanish and Portuguese (real and pseudo words) and would present longer reaction times and less accurate results to process words in Portuguese or resembling Portuguese because of the parallel activation of the L3. The results do indicate that the activation of Portuguese affected trilinguals ability to judge words in Spanish. Moreover, the additional language activation of Portuguese affected trilinguals' ability to simply accept words in Spanish as real words. In other words, the L3 affected the L2 in a detrimental way. Additional analysis investigating language learning factors (such as heritage speaker status and polyglot status) shed some light on the complexity of the L3 effect present in the trilinguals. The present findings are analyzed in light of Van Heuven and Dijkstra's (1998) model of Bilingual word recognition (BIA). / A Thesis submitted to the Department of Modern Languages and Linguistics in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts. / Spring Semester, 2013. / March 25, 2013. / Bilingualism, Portuguese, Psycholinguistics, Second Language Acquisition, Spanish, Trilingualism / Includes bibliographical references. / Gretchen Sunderman, Professor Directing Thesis; Michael Leeser, Committee Member; Peggy Sharpe, Committee Member.

Die Arbeit beschäftigt sich mit Gabriele Münters Position und Rolle als einzige weibliche Mitbegründerin der expressionistischen Künstlergruppe Der Blaue Reiter. Zu Beginn wird der künstlerische Hintergrund Münters dargelegt. Weiterhin werden die Ursprünge und Leitlinien des Expressionismus besprochen, wobei auf die Bedeutung und Zielsetzung dieser Kunstform eingegangen wird. Zudem werden die noch recht traditionellen Rollenmuster der Zeit sowie die herablassende Sicht auf die Frau, der kein kreatives Schaffen zugemutet wurde, aufgeführt. Ferner befasst sich die Arbeit mit der Künstlergruppe Der Blaue Reiter. Sie hebt Münters Stellenwert hervor und argumentiert, dass es durch sie überhaupt zur Gründung der Gruppe kam. Es wird auβerdem Münters künstlerisches Werk, das von Porträts, zu Landschaftszeichnungen bis hin zu Hinterglasmalerei reicht, untersucht. Die Arbeit bespricht, wie Münter trotz ihres engen Verhältnisses zum Mitbegründer des Blauen Reiters, Wassily Kandinsky, ihre künstlerische Eigenständigkeit bewahrt hat und ergründet, warum die Kritiken und Rezensionen sehr unterschiedlich ausfielen. Es wird gezeigt, wie sie innerhalb der Vorstellungen des Blauen Reiters, die sich auf das ,,Primitive" und den inneren, instinktiven Eindruck beziehen, ihre künstlertische Arbeiten im Sinne des Expressionismus weiterentwickelte. / A Thesis submitted to the Department of Modern Languages and Linguistics in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts. / Spring Semester, 2013. / March 29, 2013. / Includes bibliographical references. / Birgit Maier-Katkin, Professor Directing Thesis; Christian Weber, Committee Member; Stephanie Leitch, Committee Member.

ABSTRACT This project analyses the multi-functional Spanish SE and features of verb morphology that this particle forces on verbs of reflexives, passives and impersonals . The generative framework has been adopted to examine the acquisition and processing of SE at two proficiency levels (intermediate and advanced), through completion of a self-paced reading as an online task.The project contributes to the existing debate between two competing theories; the Failed Functional Features Hypothesis, FFFH, (Hawkins & Chan, 1997), which is contrary to the possibility of feature resetting in the second language, and the Full Access Full Transfer Theory, FAFT, (Schwartz & Sprouse, 1994, 1996), which differs from the former in its final acquisitionaspect by arguing that a learner can acquire new features of a different value in the L2. Reflexive, impersonal and passive structures with SE were approached as very different constructions as to verbal features. This project follows Mendikoetxea's (2008) proposal that the verb of impersonals is defective or devoid of person and number features, as it is not in agreement with any element of the sentence. Passive sentences are seen as partially defective structures, lacking person, but not a number feature. Mendikoetxea's (2008) analysis of impersonals and passives was adapted to reflexives to contrast how reflexives with SE do contain a person and number feature, as the verb agrees at all times with the subject of the sentence. Results of the self-paced reading measure support FAFT. The advanced learners patterned with the native speakers in taking more time to read reflexives and passives, the structures with features. This project proposes that processing difficulties with SE in real time relate to verbal features, and not order of instruction, or frequency of appearance in Spanish. The more the features that need to be checked, the longer the processing time on the given structure. / A Dissertation submitted to the Department of Modern Languages in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. / Summer Semester, 2013. / April 19, 2013. / Features, Impersonal, Pedagogy, Processing, Reflexives, Syntax / Includes bibliographical references. / Michael Leeser, Professor Directing Dissertation; Lara Reglero, Professor Co-Directing Dissertation; Michael Kaschak, University Representative; Gretchen Sunderman, Committee Member; Carolina González, Committee Member.

Latino/a writing has become one of the fastest growing literary expressions in the United States. The success of this literature relies not only on the quality of the texts written by authors of Hispanic background, but also on the diverse and rich topics this literature proposes. Latino/a discourse legitimizes the continuous presence of Latino communities in the United States and celebrates the hybrid ethnical background that distinguishes Hispanic culture. The multicultural and multiethnic context in which Latino/a writings take place affects the feminine perspective inherent in the texts by women writers in the United States. The feminine identity is not only an issue of being woman but of being part of the Latino community within the American experience. Through their texts, Latina writers validate the feminine discourse from their privileged position as part of the American mainstream and in relation to the United States and Latin America's literary tradition. The dissertation titled "Palabras de mujer: convergencias en el discurso femenino en la narrativa caribeña de origen hispano escrita en los Estados Unidos" examines the feminine discourse in the narratives by women writers from the Hispanic Caribbean whose literary lives take place in the United States. The research focuses on the writings of three women authors from Cuba, Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico. The texts examined are: Dreaming in Cuban and The Agüero Sisters, by Cristina García; Something to Declare and How the García Girls Lost Their Accents, by Julia Álvarez, and Silent Dancing, The Line of the Sun, and The Latin Deli by Judith Ortiz Cofer. The chapters of the dissertation explore the following topics: the connections between national literature written in Latin American countries and Latino/a writings, and their relationship with cultural identity issues; the emigration process and its consequences; the reconstruction of national memory; and the discourse of the feminine body as part of the construction of Latina women identity. These topics are examined from a cultural studies perspective giving special attention to the multicultural and multiethnic context in which Latina writings take place. The research portrays Latina writers from the Hispanic Caribbean as a bridge that connects, through feminine discourse, Hispanic ethnical background with American cultural practices. / A Dissertation submitted to the Department of Modern Languages and Linguistics in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. / Fall Semester, 2003. / November 5, 2003. / Latina Literature, Julia Alvarez, Judith Ortiz Cofer, Cristina Garcia, Latina Identity, Immigration, Memory, Latina Writing / Includes bibliographical references. / Roberto Fernández, Professor Directing Dissertation; Virgilio Suárez, Outside Committee Member; Santa Arias, Committee Member; Brenda Cappuccio, Committee Member; Delia Poey, Committee Member.

This dissertation is a translation and critical study of the play María la mosca by the Spanish playwright Miguel Sierra. The study is subdivided into three parts. The first provides an introduction to Sierra's career and work. It identifies the playwright as one who wrote and produced his work in the new democratic Spain that emerged after the death of Franco. With the exception of one musical comedy, Sierra wrote in the tradition of social realism, exemplified by playwrights such as Buero Vallejo and Sastre in the early part of their careers. Sierra's work is distinguished by its extensive use of humor, which he very often employs in the service of social satire. The second section of the study examines in depth María la mosca, a play that provides a graphic portrait of the world of prostitution in Barcelona during the early 1960s. The third and final section discusses some of translation theory's major issues (such as equivalence, cultural translation and fidelity) and the translator's application of them to the presented translation. / A Dissertation submitted to the Department of Modern Languages and Linguistics in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. / Spring Semester, 2011. / March 25, 2011. / Includes bibliographical references. / Ernest Rehder, Professor Directing Dissertation; Virgil Suarez, University Representative; Brenda Cappuccio, Committee Member; Juan Carlos Galeano, Committee Member.