Thesis (Ph. D.)--Michigan State University. Hispanic Cultural Studies, 2008. / Thesis in Spanish; abstracts in English and Spanish. Title from PDF t.p. (viewed on March 30, 2009) Includes bibliographical references (p. 433-461). Also issued in print.

This thesis explores structures of melancholy in five of Kurt Vonnegut's early novels, Player Piano, The Sirens of Titan, Mother Night, Slaughterhouse-Five and Breakfast of Champions. The thesis attempts to give new readings to each of the novels by drawing on critical approaches to melancholy and by viewing each text as being subject to contemporary cultural influences. In particular, the thesis maps how each of the novels comments on human progress through a combination of historical, scientific, cultural, social and political paradigms. In the chapters on The Sirens of Titan and Mother Night the protagonist is seen as suffering from a number of melancholic complaints that are closely related to schizophrenia, while the narratives as a whole exploit this splintering of the self to suggest a variety of allegorical readings. The chapters on Player Piano, Slaughterhouse-Five and Breakfast of Champions discuss how the Puritan foundations of American culture play a major part in the construction of the self through the establishment of the Protestant work ethic. These chapters also attempt to expose how many of the ideological concepts that adhere to work, progress and capitalism have melancholic consequences for all involved. Throughout the thesis the relationship between reality and representation, language and authority is seen as being crucial to understanding the depth of Vonnegut's early novels and the way in which each novel deconstructs established values and subverts readers' expectations. Occasionally, the thesis discusses the novels' poststructural concerns as appearing to precipitate melancholy within both readers and characters. However, the thesis also explores how melancholy has been seen historically to galvanise the soul and build up, from the depths of depression, a renewal of spirit. Overall, the thesis shows how melancholy is a constituent part of Vonnegut's novels, connecting his work to the tradition in American melancholic writing created by the founders of the nation. This thesis traces the persistence of this melancholic note within selected Vonnegut novels and its connections with other themes identified within his work.

This thesis examines the widespread use of bestial imagery in satirical verse, prose and prints published between 1789 – 1820, through a study of Shelley, Spence, Gillray, Gifford, Robinson, Catherine Ann Dorset, Thelwall, Eaton, and Wolcot. The thesis asks why these writers and printers used animal metaphors so frequently, but moreover, what impact the use of this imagery had on the political landscape of satire in the period. Recent criticism has focussed on the historical and political contexts of Romantic-era satire, and this thesis follows that criticism with an historicist methodology, combining literary, historical and political approaches. Furthermore, the thesis analyses verse, prose and pictorial satires as contributing to the same political discourse and as doing so in closely related cultural arenas. This thesis claims originality on the basis that not only the use of animal imagery has a significant impact on how both contemporary and modern readers interpret its political meanings and contexts, but also that this is an argument that has not yet been posited by other critics. In addition, this thesis argues that through bestial metaphors, satirical writers and artists create a community wherein imagery is exchanged, developed and manipulated, and that this practice of cultural exchange significantly shapes those satires’ historical contexts. Each of the thesis’ five chapters focuses on a major satiric animal metaphor, whereby close readings of satires are offered alongside wider political and historical contexts. Consequently, this thesis provides a map of the most common satiric animal metaphors and their concomitant politics, and in doing so creates a new critical framework in which the growing interest in Romantic- period satire can be further developed.

“Jazz-Shaped Bodies” addresses representations of the city in black transnational literature, with a focus on sonic schemas and mapping. Drawing on cultural geography, posthumanist thought, and the discourse of diaspora, the thesis examines the extent to which the urban landscape is figured as a panoptic structure in twentieth and twenty-first century diasporic texts, and how the mimetic function of artistic performance challenges this structure. Through comparative analysis of works emerging from and/or invested with sites in American, Canadian, and Caribbean landscapes, the study develops accretively and is structured thematically, tracing how selected texts: map the socio-spatial dialectic through visual and sonic schemas; develop the metaphorical use of the phonograph in the folding of space and time; revive ancestral memory and renew an engagement with the landscape; negotiate and transcend shifting national, cultural, and geographical borderlines and boundaries that seek to encode and enclose black subjectivity. The project focuses on literary works such as James Baldwin’s intimate cartographies of New York in Another Country (1962), Earl Lovelace’s carnivalising of city space in The Dragon Can’t Dance (1979), Toni Morrison’s creative blending of the sounds of black music in Jazz (1992), and the postbody poetics of Wayde Compton’s Performance Bond (2004), among other texts that enact crossings of, or otherwise pierce, binaries and borderlines, innovating portals for alternative interpellation and subverting racially hegemonic visual regimes concretised in the architecture of the city. An examination of the specificity of the cityscape against the wider arc of transnationalism establishes how African American, AfroCaribbean, and Black Canadian texts share and exchange touchstones such as jazz, kinesis, liminality, and hauntedness, while remaining sensitive to the distinct sociohistorical contexts and intensities at each locus, underscoring the significance of rendition — of body, space, time, and sound — to black transnational writing.

The announcements concerning the introduction of modern languages in Key Stage Two in England (https://www.education.gov.uk/schools/teachingandlearning/ curriculum/national curriculum2014, [accessed 8 March 2013]), although not a new initiative, have renewed the need to train generalist primary teachers in teaching modern languages. Following an initial announcement of the introduction of the English Baccalaureate, the poor outcomes achieved by England in the European languages survey (COE, 2012) and the news that modern languages would be part of the primary curriculum (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-18531751 [accessed 21 June 2012]) contributed to refreshing the agenda of languages in the country and the role of early second language learning appears to be slowly resurrecting. In order to provide trainee teachers with the skills necessary for teaching young learners modern languages, this study focuses on increasing subject knowledge and pedagogical competence in a short time by developing trainees’ reflective practice, broadly following the tradition of strategy-based instruction (Macaro, 2001; Cohen, 2007; Oxford, 2011), but within a social constructivist understanding of learning using collaboration. The research, which follows a mixed method case study approach, proposes and trials a teaching approach that incorporates language learning strategies in a collaborative manner. The design of a revised strategy-based approach has a three-fold purpose: (i) to enable primary trainee teachers to develop the linguistic skills necessary to teach another language through the use of the linguistic knowledge they already possess in their own mother tongue (Saville-Troike, 2012); (ii) to use self-regulation to build confidence and competence in the target language; and (iii) to enable trainees and pupils to develop their language learning autonomy. Results indicate that, within the case studies reported here, such an approach seemed to be an effective way of learning and teaching another language simultaneously for adults, as it provided ab-initio language learners with a basis for the development of linguistic skills thus increasing their capacity for languages. Whilst there is no claim to generalisation here, the studies indicate that using language learning strategies may create and sustain interest and engagement in the subject—a condition that has been identified as critical to the success of any teaching approach. Whilst the results were positive in terms of developing acceptable levels of linguistic competence in adult learners over a short time, the use of a strategy-based method with children did not prove satisfactory, perhaps because of the high metacognitive demands placed on them when they had not yet developed high level abstract thinking, particularly the amount of prior knowledge needed and the language required to verbalise complex cognitive processes.

The thesis is divided into three sections. The first section discusses the manuscript Marcianus graecus 524, the second looks at the Greek text of the dedicatory epigrams on works of art from the same manuscript, and the third puts these texts in their context. In the first part, the compilation of the manuscript is analysed. I suggest that the manuscript was copied mainly by one individual scribe living in Constantinople at the end of the thirteenth century. He copied the quires individually, but at some point he put all these quires together, added new quires, and compiled an anthology of poetry. The scribe’s connection to the Planudean School and the Petra monastery in Constantinople is discussed. Although their relationship remains inconclusive, the manuscript provides evidence regarding the literary interests of late-thirteenth-century intellectuals. The second part contains thirty-five unpublished dedicatory epigrams on works of art. New readings are offered for the text of previously published epigrams. The third section analyses the dedicatory epigrams on works of art in their context. The first chapter of this section discusses the epigrams as Gebrauchstexte, i.e. texts with a practical use. The difference between epigrams intended to be inscribed and epigrams intended to be performed is highlighted. In the next chapter of this part, La poésie de l’objet, the composition of the dedicatory epigrams is discussed. The conventional character of the epigrams suggests that the poetics express the ritual aspect of the epigram. The last chapter considers the texts from a more pragmatic angle. After a short discussion of the objects on which the epigrams were written, the mechanisms of the twelfth-century art market are presented based on evidence taken mainly from the epigrams. At the end of this part, conclusions are drawn on the understanding of these texts in the twelfth century.