“The Problem of Immigration and Contemporary Spanish Detective Fiction” examines the viability of the detective genre as a forum to dispute the commonly held perception of contemporary immigration to Spain as a problem. Focusing first on popular series of the Transition and Disenchantment periods that followed the death of Francisco Franco, I identify the detective novel, and in particular the hard-boiled variety on which the Spanish tradition is based, as an ideal space for discussions of otherness. In the 1990s, as large-scale immigration to Spain became an increasing reality, North Africans, Latin Americans, and Eastern Europeans joined minority groups already marginalised within Spain and became the focus of well-known authors such as Jorge Martínez Reverte, Arturo Pérez-Reverte, and Andreu Martín and relative newcomers Yolanda Soler Onís, José Javier Abasolo, Lorenzo Silva, and Antonio Lozano. All use the conventions of the detective genre––suspense, pursuit, intrigue––to address misconceptions about immigration and to reveal that the ultimate culprits in these stories are ill-willed traffickers, corrupt security agencies, and the widespread apathy of parts of the Spanish population and its government. Through the twists and turns of their storylines, these politically committed authors show that while immigrants may be forced to inhabit Spain’s underbelly, they are not single-handedly responsible for Spanish society’s perceived demise. My dissertation is informed by a multi-disciplinary approach that draws on media, cultural, socio-anthropological, and postcolonial studies. The connection between crime literature and the mass media is especially intriguing given the latter’s power of influence over the conceptualisation of immigration. The detective texts juxtapose the media of the post-modern electronic information age, which is by definition frontier-less, with a nation designing ever-stronger borders. While analysing the various borders that divide a national and global society in the entangled tale of immigration to Spain, and the discursive roles they play within the codified genre of crime fiction, I argue that these authors use the conventions of their medium to provide internal views of the process of immigration as an alternative to the voyeuristic daily reporting that otherwise threatens to desensitise the Spanish public to the topic altogether.

Made available in DSpace on 2015-04-14T13:37:42Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 409584.pdf: 20249199 bytes, checksum: 76b4f5f1c9ac1b03ff5d5d0b2a132e41 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2009-01-13 / As rela??es intertextuais entre a pe?a As bodas de F?garo, escrita por Pierre Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais, em 1784, e a ?pera hom?nima composta por Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, dois anos depois, sob adapta??o de Lorenzo da Ponte. O trabalho est? dividido em tr?s partes, denominadas de atos. O autor procura demonstrar que a censura, ao inv?s de sufocar o talento criador, apenas o incentiva a buscar meios de burl?la. Lorenzo da Ponte, mesmo tendo alijado da adapta??o as partes mais ofensivas ? nobreza, preservou o car?ter subversivo da obra de Beaumarchais; e Mozart, ao contr?rio do que muitos imaginam, n?o era ignorante, ou mesmo indiferente, ao significado de suas ?peras. S?o analisadas tamb?m as rela??es entre m?sica e literatura, com base no libreto de Lorenzo da Ponte e na m?sica de Mozart.

In Italy the first half of the Cinquecento was marked by both flourishing artistic innovation and deep-seated religious uncertainty, the latter revealing itself most clearly in a widespread impetus towards reform. The relationship between these two cultural spheres--long a fraught problem in art historical scholarship--is made visually manifest in the religious works produced by the Florentine painter Jacopo da Pontormo. By re-examining Pontormo's three monumental religious commissions--the Certosa del Galluzzo (1522-27), the Capponi Chapel (1525-28), and the choir of San Lorenzo (1545-1557)--this dissertation maps the complex dialogue between artistic and devotional practice that characterized this era. Further, in highlighting the active role of the painter in this dynamic I propose a not only a new understanding of Pontormo, but also enrich our current notions of artistic agency in the Renaissance period. The foundation of these arguments derives from a re-evaluation of the specific historical context on the one hand, and the implementation of a broader framework of visual culture on the other. Taking its cue from Giorgio Vasari's 1568 edition of The Lives of the Artists, modern scholarship has tended to view much of the art from the early sixteenth century through a post-Tridentine lens; paintings are labeled controversial or heretical, when in fact such notions would not have been relevant in these earlier decades. Published five years after the conclusion of the Council of Trent, Vasari's Lives is predominantly characterized by the author's own attempts to codify artistic pedagogy and style in the service of the Medici Duchy, whose newly consolidated ties with the papacy were of primary importance. A further difficulty presented by following Vasari's example is the relatively narrow view of the artistic environment that his account affords. Aimed as it was towards the social elevation of the individual Renaissance artist, Vasari's narrative undervalues the importance of other genres and media--such as prints, Mystery plays, terracotta sculptures, and sacri monti--to the work of well-established painters like Pontormo. Each chapter examines a single, monumental project, delineating the artist's responsiveness to, and engagement with, the unique devotional and artistic challenges inherent to the individual commission. Chapter One resituates Pontormo's use of the maniera tedesca within the broader contexts of northern devotional practices and the parallels they form with affective strategies employed by other genres including sacre rappresentazioni and sacri monti. Chapter Two focuses on the painter's decision to portray himself the guise of Nicodemus, and the ways in which this identification evoked an entire web of historical associations--linked to hagiographic tradition and local legend--that would have been accessible to contemporary viewers. Finally, in Chapter Three I investigate Pontormo's pictorial approach, which combined an overarching diagrammatic simplicity with a complex, allusive figural language, as a means of communicating to the different levels of Florentine society that would have been his audience in this important parish church.

This dissertation considers the relation between literary documents and public identities, and how U. S. culture is reflected and transfigured by poetry in the United States after 1960. Concerned with epideictic communication in public contexts, this study looks at how private interventions in public spaces can shape attitudes toward cultural phenomena. A secondary concern elucidates the ways literary texts are valued in English departments, bearing critical reflection on rhetorical, literary, and creative pedagogy. Insofar as the epideictic mode prepares individuals for a decision-making process in current democratic situations, this dissertation considers recent examples of strategic public engagements, and provides rhetorical readings of key situations in American social and cultural life since 1960 to illustrate how such methods can bring rhetoric and literature together in contemporary public contexts. The first of these studies inspects the correspondence and poetry of Robert Duncan and Denise Levertov during the Vietnam War over the uses of poetry as a public document. Public identity and U. S. social practices are explored in the following chapter with the 1970s and ’80s poetry of Lorenzo Thomas and Edward Dorn, whose poems participate in the articulation of tensions between private and public life. Chapter 4 argues that Charles Olson’s poems and letters appearing in the editorial pages of The Gloucester-Daily Times in the 1960s effectively helped bring civic attention to the transformation of public space in Gloucester, Mass. While he interpreted the changes he perceived in Gloucester through literary and historical theories, he framed them within rhetorically motivated communication strategies to deliver new perceptions of what constituted civic value. Chapter 5 concludes by examining more recent attempts by poets to influence public reflection on crucial events that led to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan through digital media, public performance, and civic encounters mediated by fugitive texts. The opening and final chapters introduce my methodology and present the problem of poetry in public contexts, and advocates for reflection within English departments on the rhetorical value of literary texts. / text

“The Problem of Immigration and Contemporary Spanish Detective Fiction” examines the viability of the detective genre as a forum to dispute the commonly held perception of contemporary immigration to Spain as a problem. Focusing first on popular series of the Transition and Disenchantment periods that followed the death of Francisco Franco, I identify the detective novel, and in particular the hard-boiled variety on which the Spanish tradition is based, as an ideal space for discussions of otherness. In the 1990s, as large-scale immigration to Spain became an increasing reality, North Africans, Latin Americans, and Eastern Europeans joined minority groups already marginalised within Spain and became the focus of well-known authors such as Jorge Martínez Reverte, Arturo Pérez-Reverte, and Andreu Martín and relative newcomers Yolanda Soler Onís, José Javier Abasolo, Lorenzo Silva, and Antonio Lozano. All use the conventions of the detective genre––suspense, pursuit, intrigue––to address misconceptions about immigration and to reveal that the ultimate culprits in these stories are ill-willed traffickers, corrupt security agencies, and the widespread apathy of parts of the Spanish population and its government. Through the twists and turns of their storylines, these politically committed authors show that while immigrants may be forced to inhabit Spain’s underbelly, they are not single-handedly responsible for Spanish society’s perceived demise. My dissertation is informed by a multi-disciplinary approach that draws on media, cultural, socio-anthropological, and postcolonial studies. The connection between crime literature and the mass media is especially intriguing given the latter’s power of influence over the conceptualisation of immigration. The detective texts juxtapose the media of the post-modern electronic information age, which is by definition frontier-less, with a nation designing ever-stronger borders. While analysing the various borders that divide a national and global society in the entangled tale of immigration to Spain, and the discursive roles they play within the codified genre of crime fiction, I argue that these authors use the conventions of their medium to provide internal views of the process of immigration as an alternative to the voyeuristic daily reporting that otherwise threatens to desensitise the Spanish public to the topic altogether.

Lo studio intende rileggere criticamente le fonti contemporanee e appena successive alla stesura dell'Apocalypsis Nova, attribuita al beato Amedeo Menez de Sylva, inserendole nel più ampio dibattito sulla profezia e sulle attese apocalittiche della fine del XV secolo. / This study is a critically re-read of the contemporary sources of the Apocalypsis Nova, attributed to Blessed Amedeo Menez de Sylva. The sources are inserting in the broader debate on prophecy and apocalyptic expectations of the late 15th century.

Welche Rolle spielen die Medien in Deutschland? Welchen Anteil haben sie am Vertrauensverlust in der Gesellschaft und an der Spaltung, die überall zu beobachten ist? Damit möchte ich mich heute beschäftigen.

The aim of my PhD thesis is to analyse the representation of the veneral desease in the Renaissance medecine and the reaction of the italian literature to the plague. To assess these questions, the analysis of literary texts required the study of the historical context, whit a particular attention to the history of medecine and the history of ideas. In view of its interdisciplinary purpose, the thesis has been divided into four research areas : the autobiographical tales of the poets affected by the syphilis (Antonio Cammelli, Niccolò Campani, Agnolo Firenzuola), the burlesque poetry in praise of the veneral desease (Giovan Francesco Bini, Agnolo Firenzuola, the Grappa, Giovan Francesco Ferrari and various popular printed booklets or pamplets), the relationship between a certain misogynist medicine and the satirical literature (Pietro Aretino, Francisco Delicado, Maestro Andrea Veneziano, Lorenzo Venier and some anonymous poems) and the presence of the syphilis in the epic production (Girolamo Fracastoro, Giovanni Giorgini, Tommaso Stigliani, Giovan Francesco Lalli). The thesis is followed by an Appendix A, composed of eight unpublished literary texts, and by an Appendix B, consisting of twenty-four images that accompany and enrich the reading of the different chapters. / La presente ricerca ha lo scopo di fornire una mappatura della diffusione del motivo del mal francese nella letteratura del pieno e del tardo Rinascimento italiano. A questo proposito si sono presi in considerazione i testi letterari e medico-scientifici redatti a partire dallo scoppio dell’epidemia, il 1494, fino agli anni ’30 del Seicento. Le linee tematiche individuate sono state: il racconto testimonianza dei poeti «infranciosati», che intreccia generi e codici retorici differenti (Antonio Cammelli, Niccolò Campani, Agnolo Firenzuola), la produzione satirico-burlesca di capitoli in lode di «cose ignobili», che crea una sorta di filone interno alla letteratura dedicata al mal francese (Giovan Francesco Bini, Agnolo Firenzuola, il Grappa, Giovan Francesco Ferrari e altre «pelate»), il rapporto tra un sapere medico misogino e una certa letteratura anticlassicista, (Pietro Aretino, Francisco Delicado, Maestro Andrea Veneziano, Lorenzo Venier), e il legame che unisce l’epos alla narrazione del mal francese (Girolamo Fracastoro e Giovan Battista Lalli). Data la generosità del corpus analizzato e il dialogo costante tra le istanze letterarie e quelle del sapere medico, la ricerca è stata condotta utilizzando sia i metodi interpretativi della critica stilistica sia gli apporti della storia della medicina e della storia delle idee. A questo proposito si è dimostrato che il mal francese poteva diventare l’occasione privilegiata per una riflessione sul moderno, ma anche allegoria politica della corruzione degli Stati italiani all’indomani della discesa di Carlo VIII. Inoltre, la natura venerea aveva dato adito da una parte a un riaggiornamento dei topoi misogini sia in campo medico che in quello letterario, e dall’altra alla nascita di scritture autobiografiche che raccontavano le conseguenze personali e sociali della condizione di infranciosato.

Gegenstand der Arbeit sind Darstellungen, die dem Umfeld zweier Heiligenkulte in Florenz angehören und auf Bestellungen der Medici, ihrer Freunde und Verbündeten zurückzuführen sind. Den ursprünglich römischen Kult seiner Namenspatrone, der hll. Cosmas und Damian hat erst Cosimo de’ Medici in Florenz bekannt gemacht. Dabei erwies sich das Fehlen einer nennenswerten Florentinischen Tradition als maßgeblicher Faktor seiner Wirkkraft. Fra’ Angelico, Filippo Lippi und andere Künstler konnten formal neuartige Bildlösungen entwickeln, deren Inhalte sich als Projektionsflächen der politischen und geistigen Florentiner Eliten eigneten. Cosimo etablierte auf diese Weise ein Netzwerk persönlicher Repräsentation, das nicht allein die Barriere zwischen privatem und öffentlichem Raum zu durchdringen vermochte, sondern auch demonstrativ über die in Florenz herkömmliche Beschränkung auf das eigene Stadtviertel hinausgriff. Mit dem Generationswechsel nach Cosimos Tod erforderten die veränderten Machtverhältnisse auch einen Wechsel in der Strategie des Kults. In der zweiten Hälfte des 15. Jahrhunderts tritt ein anderer Kult, jener der hll. Drei Könige in den Vordergrund. Dieser besaß im Gegensatz zur Verehrung von Cosmas und Damian in Florenz eine eigenständige, spezifisch republikanische Tradition. Unter deren Schutz konnte eine kontinuierliche Politisierung althergebrachter Rituale und die Übernahme der Kontrolle durch die Medici stattfinden. Auch in diesem Fall zeigt die Analyse der erhaltenen Darstellungen, dass sie den Auftraggebern als Loyalitätsnachweis dienten und die Zugehörigkeit zum Klientel der Medici und damit der städtischen Eliten markierten. Noch in der Mitte des 16. Jahrhunderts griff Herzog Cosimo I. auf strategische Elemente und Motive des Kults zurück, nun zunehmend aus dem sakralen Kontext gelöst und Bestandteil höfischer Panegyrik. / The Images observed here are mainly of two religious cults commissioned by members, friends and allies of the Medici family. In the early 15th century Cosimo de’ Medici following the example of his father introduced his patron saints, Cosmas and Damian into his native city of Florence. Prior to this the cult of these saints was of no vital importance outside Rome. Thus there was no eminent pictorial tradition of their images which proved an important factor in the cult’s success. Fra’ Angelico, Filippo Lippi and other artists were able to develop a new imagery that allowed members of Florence’s political and humanistic circles to identify with. Cosimo established a network of personal representation which did not only penetrate the barriers between private and public space but ostentatiously reached beyond the customary boundaries of a family’s home quarter. After Cosimo’s death in 1464 political instability resulted in a change of strategy. In the second half of the 15th century a different cult, that of the Three Magi, moves into the center of medicean interest. Contrary to Saints Cosmas and Damian the cult of the Magi had an ancient and marked republican tradition in Florence. Under cover of this tradition the Medici party managed to take over control of the confraternity of the Magi and wield its influential instruments to their own benefit. As with images of Saints Cosmas and Damian those depicting the Adoration of the Magi were used as a confirmation of loyalty to the Medici and their faction. Even in the 16th century Duke Cosimo I. went back to elements and motifs of his predecessors’ strategy. Rather than reviving the cult of Saints Cosmas and Damian however they are used to give evidence of political and dynastical continuity.

This thesis examines the missionary work of the Italian Capuchin Lorenzo da Brindisi. Renowned in his own day as a preacher, Bible scholar, missionary, chaplain, and diplomat, as well as vicar general of his Order, Lorenzo led the first organised, papally-commissioned Capuchin mission among the non-Catholics of Bohemia in the Holy Roman Empire from 1599 to 1602, and returned there, again under papal mandate, from 1606 to 1613. This thesis examines Lorenzo’s evangelistic and polemical activities in Central Europe in order to shed light on some of the ways the Capuchins laboured in religiously divided territories to confirm Catholics in their faith and to win over heretics. The introduction explains, principally, the thesis’s purpose and the historiographical background. Chapter one provides a brief biographical sketch of Lorenzo’s life followed by details of his afterlife. Chapter two examines his leading role in establishing the Capuchins’ new Commissariate of Bohemia-Austria-Styria in 1600, and specifically its first three friaries in Prague, Vienna, and Graz. Chapter three treats his preaching against heresy. Chapter four focuses on how Lorenzo, while in Prague, involved himself directly in theological disputations with two different Lutheran preachers. The first dispute, with Polykarp Leyser, took place in July 1607, and dealt with good works and justification. The second, with a Lutheran whose name is not known for certain, and which occurred in August 1610, concerned Catholic veneration of the Virgin Mary. Chapter five analyses the Lutheranismi hypotyposis, Lorenzo’s literary refutation of Lutheranism following additional contact with Polykarp Leyser in 1607. The conclusion considers briefly the effectiveness of Lorenzo’s apostolate and closes with a review of the thesis as a whole.