The importance of the letter as a means for social, personal and intellectual expression for humanists has been highlighted in various studies. For those studies, its value resides in its effectiveness in responding more directly to the presence of a new pool of readers giving rise to a new cultural type, transforming it into the emblematic genre of the humanists. I am interested in considering the influence of epistolary models in the New World, because, as these models were transferred to a new context, they acquired new forms that responded to the needs of communication, representation, symbolization and, finally, a new rhetoric. For the purposes of this dissertation, I will depart from the conception of the letter in the New World as a “polysynthetic” genre; that is to say, inasmuch as I wish to respond to the plurality of communicative needs that arose from the new contexts that were unforeseen by the humanist rhetoric, I will consider the letters from the New World as emerging from and forming part of other genres: accounts, petitions, diaries, among others. The starting point for this dissertation is the thorough reading and analysis of eleven unpublished letters, all written by women, currently located at the Archivo General de Indias in Seville and sent from the Rio de la Plata during the XVI and XVII centuries. In my investigation, I intend to demonstrate how the authors used the writing of such documents as an empowering practice. Secondly, I will prove that these first epistles, written from America, do not necessarily belong to the ars epistolandi, but to the ars dictaminis. Furthermore, this change in disctinction requires a critical review of the current state of classical letters. Finally, I maintain that these letters provide a space for the emergence of the authors‟ identity. In other words, I understand and ground the conclusions of this work on the fact that space culturally shapes gender, but that gender acts in the production of such spaces as well. The participation of female authors by means of these letters merges them with that spatiality in a process both of production and reproduction, since, as a conscience building act, the “I” is turned into text in order to discuss on/about the space.

This research provides one account of the complex relationship between differentiated experiences of deprivation and the dominant poverty construct in the Jamaican context. It is based on research conducted over a period of nine months in a Jamaican ¿squatter¿ community, Windsor, in the Parish of St. Ann. The study is organised into two ¿positional¿ chapters (conceptual framework and methodology) and four direct ¿response¿ chapters that demonstrate the ways in which the official poverty approach (from concept to policy) resonates with the living experiences of individuals. The ¿response¿ chapters step back from debates on the measurement of poverty so as to critically and reflexively consider the construct¿s conceptual and definitional antinomies. This is done through: (i) an excavation of a partial social history of poverty discourses in Jamaica; (ii) an evaluation of problems with knowledge production in the participatory method; (iii) an examination of the implications of the abstraction of the poor from spatial relations; and (iv) an exploration of different ways in which individuals ¿picture¿ living in their surroundings. The conclusion drawn is that it is necessary to begin engaging in a multidisciplinary project which accounts for difference within the poverty construct. This is because, insofar as it is possible, the removal of the most extreme forms of deprivation is not in itself sufficient for the eradication of the social relations that give rise to these privative ¿conditions¿. There instead needs to be critical engagement with relations of deprivation as resident in the social body as a whole in conceptualising poverty.

Juan Rulfo and João Guimarães Rosa stand at a literary crossroads, the intersection where traditional regionalists and celebrated Boom-era novelists meet. Although Rulfo and Guimarães Rosa chose the Mexican Llano Grande and the Brazilian sertão of Minas Gerais as the settings of their most celebrated novels, they go far beyond the techniques of traditional regionalism by distancing themselves from their national literatures. They universalize their narratives by incorporating universal religious themes, including the symbol of the cross. The symbol of the cross/crossroad has been analyzed and alluded to in a handful of essays on Pedro Páramo and Grande sertão: Veredas but has never been applied comparatively or in depth, beyond a connection to Hermes, Greek god of the crossroads. Rulfo and Guimarães Rosa use the spatial organizing power of the cross-and by extension, the crossroad-to highlight the importance of racial and religious mixing to Mexican and Brazilian identity, determine narrative structure, and strengthen mythic, religious, and epic themes. The motif allows the reader to transcend (although not eradicate) a geographical conception of setting. Instead, the reader recognizes the construction of a mythic space that intertwines national history with primordial creation stories, modern heroes, and ancient religious symbols.

Scéla Muicce Meicc Da Thó (SMMD; The Tale of Mac Da Thó's Pig) is a humorous Old Irish myth that takes its cues from its Ulster Cycle cousins, notably, An Táin Bó Cúailnge (The Cattle Raid of Cooley). The connective tissue is its cast, plot structure, and the author's mastery of cultural and storytelling traditions. SMMD is brief and rapid, which aids its near-absurdist representation of masculinity, kingship, and honor in heroic saga culture. This thesis uses postcolonial and medieval literary scholarship to analyze medieval and modern depictions of the Ulster Cycle. Contemporarily, the Irish Republicans and Loyalists evoke the image of Ulster boy-hero Cú Chulainn to express their sense of cultural ownership. Chapter One contextualizes the Ulster Cycle, SMMD, and its issue of hyper-masculinity to expand traditional scholarship and interpretation by analyzing how SMMD's humor operates culturally while demonstrating Bourdieu's social capital. This study also considers modern Ireland's murals, some of which draw on medieval themes and contribute to a global understanding of its colonial struggle. There is a spatial quality to these representations that reinforce border sensibilities à la intimidation via images of masculinity that resemble bragging contests in the Ulster Cycle. Chapter Two further interprets medievalism in modern Ireland using the onomastic dindshenchas toward a spatial reading of SMMD relative to public representations of Ulster's boy hero. Overall, this work calls attention to the ongoing issue of medievalism as propaganda. Ireland and the children of its diaspora maintain complicated relationships with its colonial history. Thus, this work's secondary goal is to provide a deeper context to this rather fragmented issue in a way that advocates for the nuance necessary when studying three postcolonial communities on one island.

This thesis takes a feminist and spatial approach to the analysis of ire'ne lara silva's collection of short stories flesh to bone, a continuation of the Anzaldúan body of thought. The thesis introduces two aspects–spiritual and spatial–to the wounds suffered by the Chicana collective Self which can be found within the characters and plotlines of lara silva's stories, and which had previously been outlined by Anzaldúa herself. This thesis also explains in depth the steps necessary to achieving the never-ending Coyolxauhqui Imperative, which is Anzaldúa's idea that to heal the collective Self, individuals must continue to create and tell the stories of our ancestors and ourselves as survivors instead of victims. Throughout this analysis, it is elucidated that lara silva has created herself a new theory to add to the Anzaldúan framework, called Tomiccama Tomiccanacayo, which translates from Nahuatl to mean: "We are protected by the hands and bodies of our ancestors". Thus, this thesis finds that, within flesh to bone, this new theory is asserted as a method of continuous healing and as an addendum to Anzaldúa's Coyolxauhqui Imperative. This study adds lara silva into the Anzaldúan academe and explains her words' significance to Chicana spatiality. My argument for the existence of lara silva's theory is important because of a continued necessity for collective female healing and the creation of art reaffirming the female Self to new generations of daughters becoming women.

This study aims to look at how atmospheres impact library rooms at the public library of Umeå and the public library of Östersund. The theoretical framework is based on Tuan’s theory of ”Space” and ”Place” as well as earlier research on atmosphere in library environments. The empirical material is a selection of observations and surveys made at the two libraries, in the facts department and the daily newspapers room. The method that is used is autoetnographical analysis made with thick description.  This study argues that atmospheres can change rapidly in different library rooms at different times, which impacts the library user in many ways. This purpose is achieved by using five atmospheric themes; light, sound, architecture, furnishings and human impact. The result indicates that library users were impacted by these five atmospheric themes albeit in different ways, depending on the room, the time and the subjective experience of the library user. This knowledge is useful for future library operations, due to the fact that atmosphere impacts the experience of a public library. The study articulates that The International Federation of Library Associations (IFLA) should include the importance of atmosphere in the IFLA manifesto.

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This thesis investigates the role of the term plot in mediating relations between architecture and narrativity. Examining organisational strategies in the creation of real and virtual spaces, it identifies literary works by novelists who have resisted, or subverted, plot conventions in fiction (Joris-Karl Huysmans, Edmond de Goncourt, Xavier de Maistre and Neal Stephenson), and introduces architectural spaces such as Thomas Edison’s film-studio Black Maria, and the plotless productions of early cinematography, to juxtapose concepts of plot and spatiality in a study of the production and consumption of pre-digital virtual spaces. Plot here relates therefore both to narrative sequentiality and spatial organisation – from "storyline" to "ground plan". The "plotless" narrative structure of Huysmans, Goncourt and de Maistre focuses on the interaction between man – the "writerin- residence" – and his domestic interior, functioning as an excitant or stimulant for the production of both material and imagined spaces. The media culture of late 19th century society saw the first significant attempts at moving image technology and its related spatialities – the Black Maria, the kinetoscope, the kinetograph, and the films produced by these, which had yet to find a narrative form. The architecture of the plotless novels and the proto-cinematic experiments of the late 19th century modulate between physical reality and fiction. They are ripe in their descriptive narrativity, expanding in the imagination of the consumer. Stephenson’s imaginative transposition of book media into a "Primer" – a new form of narrative media that develops its narrative content directly from the environmental context of its reader – concludes the discussion of the thesis, highlighting interrelations between fictive and real space, influencing both writer and reader. The refusal of narrative plot deprives the reader of causality, but emphasises the fictitious spatial creation in which the reader becomes immersed. These spaces, by virtue of their disengagement from plot, allow us to revisit the possibilities of virtual space without common preconceptions concerning the creation or experience of digital mediating technology.

Le Dasein ne pourra jamais « être » son « là ». Une telle remarque pourra surprendre. Toutefois, dès lors que la totalité ou la plénitude d'un « là » soient pensées, ce dernier se révèle transi de néant. Or, parler du néant implique une méthode propre, car c’est l’absence de tout « phénomène ». Devons-nous plutôt, et « déjà », constater la mort de la phénoménologie, son incapacité de « dire » ce qui est radicalement « sans » phénomène, même à entendre ce qu’elle nous aura enseigné ? C'est alors une Méthode du Néant qui se « donne » – ou plutôt « qui se sera déjà donnée », maintenant, comme dans l’Histoire – comme reste irréductible, têtu et tenace. Ce Néant implique qu’il est tant sans « temporalité » que sans « spatialité ». Il nous importe, par conséquent, de pouvoir « penser » le « non-lieu » et d’entendre à nouveaux frais ce que l’histoire nous en informe, notamment dans la pensée de Sohravardî. Le paradoxe est que cette histoire est peut-être elle-même hors histoire. / The Dasein cannot « be » its « be-ing-there ». Such a proposition may surprise us. However, where the totality of a « there » is considered, the latter reveals itself as kneaded by « nothingness ». Further, nothingness would imply its own method. Here, one is dealing with the absence of all phenomena. Should we, and « already », find in favour of the death of phonemenology, of its incapacity to « say » what is radically « without » phenonmenon, even where we are to heed what this tradition has taught us ? A Method of Nothingness, the kind which is sought here, seems to propose itself – or rather « has already proposed itself », as it is within History – as an irreducible, stubborn and tenacious one. Nothingness does imply the absence of « temporality » as well as « spatiality ». Consequently, we are driven to « think » the « no-where » and to heed afresh what history has taught us, namely the thought of Sohravardî on the matter. The paradox is this may bring us outside history itself.