My dissertation analyzes the way in which Latin American novelists use the Faustian tradition to symbolize the inclusion of marginal groups into mainstream cultures. The establishment of a national culture that holds citizens together depends on its ability to subsume different cultural sources and to assign to each one of them a space within the nation. This stratification of culture is the result of the negotiation of authority within hegemonic groups. In my dissertation I trace the negotiation of authority in the aesthetic choices that authors make when it comes to compose a new rendition of the myth of Faust. The study of works produced between 1956 and 1967 allows me to focus on the height of the internationalization of Latin American literature. The works that constitute the main corpus of my study are: João Guimarães Rosa's Grande Sertão: Veredas (1956) from Brazil, Miguel Ángel Asturias's Mulata de tal (1963) from Guatemala, and José Donoso's El lugar sin límites (1957) from Chile. As a way to trace the issues at stake in these works back to the nineteenth century, I also include a chapter on the Argentine poem entitled Fausto (1867), composed by Estanislao del Campo. This enables me to present early stages of the Faustian tradition in Latin America, and how it relates to the conflict between city and rural regions. My dissertation not only interprets Latin American texts within their context, but also explores the way in which lettered urban groups integrate an international tradition in the evaluation of these contexts. My dissertation presents the way in which authors from this part of the world intervene in well-established Western literary traditions and not only read their reality from this stand point, but their realities modify the reach of traditions such as that of the man who sells his soul to devil.

Previous accounts of preverbal subjects in Spanish and European Portuguese (EP) in the literature have debated the syntactic position of these elements. According to some analyses, preverbal subjects are canonical arguments appearing in an A-position (e.g. Goodall 2001, 2002; Suñer 2003 for Spanish; Duarte 1997; Costa 2004 for EP). Other analyses propose that preverbal subjects are non-arguments appearing in a left-peripheral - perhaps CLLD - A'-position (e.g. Uribe-Etxebarria 1990, 1995; Ordóñez & Treviño 1999 for Spanish; Barbosa 1996, 2000 for EP). Although Galician is an ideal language for insight on this debate due to linguistic ties with EP and political ties with Spain, Gupton (2006) obtained inconclusive results regarding the status of preverbal subjects in Galician. As the literature on Galician lacks descriptions of preferred word orders according to discourse context, I collected quantitative and qualitative experimental data to describe the syntax-information structure interface in Galician. The vast majority of speakers of this minority language are Spanish-Galician bilinguals with (self-reported) high levels of competency in both languages. This is of relevance because a variety of bilinguals, including heritage speakers, attrited L1 speakers, and those who have been claimed to have incompletely acquired the heritage language have been shown to exhibit instability and optionality at the linguistic interfaces, in particular at the syntax-discourse pragmatics interface (e.g. Hulk & Müller 2000; Sorace 2005 among numerous others), which is the subject of investigation in this dissertation. The data collected indicate a marked preference for SVO in a wide variety of discourse contexts, a preference that differs from those claimed to apply in similar contexts in Spanish (e.g. Ordóñez 1997, Zubizarreta 1998, Casielles 2004). Assuming that the presence of clitics implies the projection of f (Raposo & Uriagereka 2005) and the extension of the preverbal field into the left periphery, the cliticization data gathered for Galician in main clauses, subordinate clauses and recomplementation contexts suggest a number of preverbal positions in which preverbal subjects, affective phrases, and Topic elements may appear, one of which I suggest is Spec, DoubledFceP, following Martín-González (2002), but with proposed modifications. The data also suggest necessary modifications for López's (2009) syntax-information structure interface proposal in Romance, which suggests a reduced, syncretic left-peripheral position (Spec, FinP) in which CLLD Topics, wh- elements, and Fronted Focus elements appear and are assigned [+c] (contrastive) by the Pragmatics module. Within the preverbal architecture I propose, preverbal subjects and other left-peripheral elements coincide, but in a variety of syntactic positions. Therefore, for pragmatic feature assignment to successfully assign [+c], Pragmatics must distinguish between preverbal subjects and other left-peripheral phrases.

The roles of phonetics (e.g., Jun 1995, Holt 1997, Steriade 2001) and Articulatory Phonology (AP, Browman and Goldstein 1986, et seq.) in both the diachronic evolution of and synchronic analyses for phonological processes are relatively recent incorporations into Optimality Theory (OT) (Prince and Smolensky 1993/2004, McCarthy and Prince 1993/2001). I continue this line of inquiry by offering an AP-based OT proposal of three fricative-vowel assimilations in Latin American Spanish: /f/>[x] velarization (fui [xui] "I went"), /f/>[phi] bilabialization (fumo "I smoke") and /x/>[ç] palatalization (gente [çente] "people"). In this dissertation, I pursue three main objectives: to update and clarify via empirical study and spectral analysis the available data; to account for the crosslinguistically recurrent phonological patterns that affect fricative-vowel sequences; and to explain the above processes' genesis and diffusion in Latin American Spanish by integrating the first two goals into an Optimality Theoretic framework. Concerning the first task, data for the three processes are culled primarily from sociolinguistic corpora (Perissinotto 1975, Resnick 1975, Sanicky 1988, inter alia). Lacking from these accounts are detailed phonetic analyses. To fill this gap, I report on a four-part perception and production study designed to update the descriptive facts and provide spectral analyses for the allophonic variants. Regarding the second goal, I show that fricatives are susceptible to regressive consonant-vowel assimilation given the recurrence of assimilatory patterns nearly identical to the Spanish processes under investigation in disparate languages throughout the world. I argue that articulatory and acoustic facts conspire to render place features in (non-sibilant) fricatives difficult to recover given the vast interspeaker, intraspeaker and crosslinguistic variability in production (e.g., Ladefoged and Maddieson 1996) and the greater reliance on fricative-vowel transitional cues as opposed to cues internal to the frication on the part of the hearer (e.g., Manrique and Massone 1981, Feijóo and Fernández 2003). To that end, I argue that the sound changes originate(d) with the hearer's misperception of a speaker's extremely coarticulated target (Baker, Archangeli and Mielke 2011, inter alia). The dissertation concludes with a proposal adapting Jun (1995) that encodes the above articulatory and acoustic facts into an AP-based, typologically-minded OT approach that accounts both diachronically and synchronically for /f/ velarization, /f/ bilabialization and /x/ palatalization in Spanish (updating previous analyses by Lipski 1995 and Mazzaro 2005, 2011).

The significant cultural impact of HIV/AIDS has led to the production of an impressive amount of scholarship in the US and Northern Europe since the outbreak of the epidemic in 1980. In contrast, the study of the cultural representations of HIV/AIDS has been largely overlooked in the realm of Spanish literary criticism. The purpose of my dissertation is to address that void through the analysis of a representative corpus of texts and artistic works from different periods and genres that acknowledge the impact of the epidemic in Spain. More particularly, this dissertation analyzes Spanish literary and artistic representations of HIV/AIDS through a critical comparison with other written materials produced in the 16th and 17th centuries as a reaction to the syphilis epidemic that hit Europe at the time, also known as the Great Pox. The corpus of texts used in this dissertation includes Francisco Delicado’s La Lozana andaluza (1528); two short novels by Miguel de Cervantes (1547-1616); individual poems and collections of poetry by authors such as Francisco de Quevedo (1580-1645), Anastasio Pantaleón de Ribera (1600-1629), Aníbal Núñez (1944-1987), or Galician-language poet Lois Pereiro (1958-1996); as well as artistic works and performances by AIDS activist Pepe Espaliú (1955-1993). I explore this corpus through an interdisciplinary approach bringing into play, among others, historical and medical discourses, biopolitics, sociology of literature, semiology, as well as theories about violence and empathy. In my comparative examination of these authors’ representations of disease, I argue that contemporary writers approached HIV/AIDS using a framework inspired on the aesthetic and epistemic strategies developed in the 16th and 17th centuries in the context of the emergence of the Baroque. This framework allowed modern authors to confront the uncertainties caused by Post-Modernity and HIV/AIDS, and inspired them to depict the pandemic by means of metaphor and indirectness. The ultimate goal of my research is to uncover variables that will help to enlighten the well-documented historical trend to stigmatize sexual transmitted and infectious diseases. My work also sheds light on the reasons behind the slow emergence of epidemic diseases as objects of cultural debate in Spain, as well as on the social, political and ethical consequences of this slowness. Finally, I argue that there are some specifically artistic and literary responses to the Great Pox and HIV/AIDS that can help to understand the nature of these diseases and to distinguish discriminatory usages of these phenomena.

This dissertation analyzes symbolic and political discourse in the works of three controversial intellectuals who participate in the contemporary debate on nationalisms in Spain. Basque poet and essayist Jon Juaristi (b. 1951), after brief involvement in ETA during the late 1960s and early 1970s, evolved into one of Spain's most outspoken critics of Basque nationalism, a position that led to death threats from ETA and eventually his permanent abandonment of the region. After founding his theater company Els Joglars in 1962, Catalan playwright Albert Boadella (b. 1943) used it as a vehicle to fight the Francoist dictatorship and promote a Catalan nationalist agenda. However, he eventually reversed his position on the issue of Catalan and Spanish nationalisms and became a political enemy to many in his home region. Finally, Basque filmmaker Julio Medem (b. 1958) caused outrage throughout much of Spain in 2003 with a documentary film exploring the clash between Spanish and Basque identities. In my examination of Boadella's and Juaristi's autobiographies and Medem's documentary I explore the ways each author portrays himself as subverting, transgressing, or transcending the sub-state nationalisms that are virtually hegemonic in their regions, and I reveal how each author's treatment of gender, especially his representations of masculinity, either undermines or substantiates the purportedly "non-nationalist" position he stakes. I argue that Juaristi's and Boadella's restrictive, traditionalist gender constructions reveal conservative Spanish nationalist discourses which prevent them from surpassing the rigid power structures that nourish the opposition between Spain's center and periphery, while Medem's cinematic work does present the possibility of breaking free from the boundaries of the conflict of national identities through the transcendence of patriarchal nationalist symbolism - both Basque and Spanish.

In this creative project, I combine non fiction prose and poetry in an organic way. Prose is framed in the form of letters that I wrote for real people telling them about my life experiences in Iowa City, and some reflections about past events that I came up with while living here. Poems are the result of a more refined way of expressing how I felt about the subjects on the letters. Love, rejection, and my struggle with writing are some of the trending topics the reader will find in this work.

Orientador: Angélica Terezinha Carmo Rodrigues / Banca: Maria Helena de Moura Neves / Banca: Rosane de Andrade Berlinck / Banca: Taísa Peres de Oliveira / Banca: Flavia Bezerra de Menezes Hirata-Vale / Resumo: O objetivo deste trabalho é discutir as construções formadas pelos verbos ir/vir seguidos de infinitivo, relacionando-as à construção prototípica de finalidade, a oração adverbial final, demonstrando a rede construcional (TRAUGOTT; TROUSDALE, 2013) formada por essas construções. Mais especificamente os objetivos deste trabalho são a CMCP (Construção de Movimento com Propósito), formada por dois verbos, onde V1 é um verbo de movimento orientado e V2 é um verbo em forma infinitiva (ORÉFICE, 2014), CPP (Construção Perifrástica de Passado), cuja semântica indica um deslocamento temporal ao momento anterior à fala, e CFV2 (Construção Focalizadora da Ação), a qual indica focalização da ação verbal expressa pela construção, dando ênfase à ação de V2. Esta tese, embasada nos pressupostos teóricos do Modelo Baseado no Uso, por meio do processo de construcionalização (TRAUGOTT; TROUSDALE, 2013), apresenta a hipótese de uma rede construcional das construções supracitadas, relacionando-as, de forma hierárquica, às construções de finalidade prototípicas (adverbial final). Nossas análises, feitas de forma qualitativa e quantitativa, são embasadas em dados de fala, coletados no Corpus do Projeto Iboruna. / Abstract: The goal of this work is to discuss the constructions formed by the verbs ir/vir (to go/to come) followed by infinitive, in its relationship with the prototypical construction of purpose, final adverbial clause, showing the constructional network (TRAUGOTT; TROUSDALE, 2013) formed by this constructions. More specifically the goals of this work are CMCP (Construction Motion Cum Purpose), formed by two verbs, where V1 is a oriented motion verb and V2 is a verb in the infinitive form (ORÉFICE, 2014), CPP (Past Paraphrastic Construction), whose semantics indicates a temporal displacement to the moment before the speech, and CFV2 (Action Focused Construction), which indicates focalization of the verbal action expressed by construction, emphasizing the V2 action. This thesis, supported by theoretical assumptions of Usage-Based Linguistics, by means of the process of construcionalization (TRAUGOTT; TROUSDALE, 2013), presents the hypothesis of a construcional network of the constructions mentioned, relating then by hierarchical form with the prototypical purpose constructions (purpose clause). Our analysis, made in qualitative and quantitative way, are supported in spoken data, collected in the corpus of Iboruna Project. / Doutor

This thesis examines the account of the discovery of the Amazon River written by Gaspar de Carvajal in the sixteenth century. In his Relación del descubrimiento del famoso río grande que, desde su nacimiento hasta el mar descubrió el capitán Francisco de Orellana, Carvajal describes the nine-month journey in which Orellana and his men crossed South America from the Andes to the Atlantic Ocean. In makeshift boats, they traveled through the river that we now know as the Amazon. The fact that the river has kept the name of the mythical warriors of European classical culture shows how the Amazon region has been, for the past five centuries, a mixture of legends from the new and the old worlds. Therefore, I analyze how the myth of the Amazons came to be such an intrinsic part of the New World. In order to do so, I trace the origin of the myth in Ancient Greece and how the Amazons made it into the Spanish books of chivalry during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. These books were widely read by the conquistadors, who then thought they had found these mythical warriors in the heart of the unfathomable Amazon jungle. There are two other myths that were of particular importance in Orellana's expedition, the "Cinnamon Country" and "El Dorado," which I also analyze. Finally, I recount the history of the manuscript, which was not known until the nineteenth century, and how Carvajal used a large variety of sources, as well as an amalgam of American indigenous terms, to write his chronicle. In an appendix at the end of this study, I have included my transcription of the manuscript, which is the first semi-paleographic transcription of Carvajal's account.

It is imperative that educators understand the current state of heritage language education because many locations have experienced large increases in their heritage language populations in recent years. This study reports on the findings of a statewide survey of secondary Spanish teachers in Utah regarding the instruction of Spanish heritage language students. Their perspectives give insight into Spanish Heritage Language (SHL) education in both traditional Spanish foreign language and heritage language classes. The information gathered describes the availability of specialized courses, the prevalence of SHL students in Spanish classes, and these students' backgrounds. It also describes the characteristics of Spanish teachers in terms of their beliefs and attitudes related to teaching SHL students and their preparation for doing so. Other issues considered include placement, materials, creating specialized classes, instructional approaches and accommodations, areas of emphasis, and teachers' perceptions of the effectiveness of both their traditional and specialized Spanish classes in meeting SHL students' needs. Results indicate that specialized classes are not yet widely available in Utah, many teachers lack training to work with SHL students, and SHL students come from a variety of backgrounds. In traditional Spanish classes, teachers use many approaches to accommodate SHL students, and their schools have a variety of experiences in attempting to create specialized classes. Teachers of specialized Spanish classes report that their schools vary in whether or not they offer classes that are differentiated by levels, and that their classes' principal objectives typically include literacy and grammar. These teachers also typically perceive that their Spanish classes are more effective in meeting SHL students' needs than do teachers of traditional Spanish classes. In addition, this study includes many recommendations to improve Spanish heritage language instruction.

Though Horacio Quiroga is better known for his jungle tales, he was also a prolific film critic. Writing in the early days of silent cinema, Quiroga channeled his love for the new art into a series of four short stories about film: "Miss Dorothy Phillips, mi esposa" (1919), "El espectro" (1921), "El puritano" (1926), and "El vampiro" (1927). These stories not only reveal Quiroga's passion for the cinema, but also showcase the power of film to affect the spectator. The theoretical basis of my study comes from the Deleuzian concept of affect, being defined as the invisible force or intensity which exists in bodies and can also be transmitted between bodies that have differing capacities for acting on each other. In the case of the cinema, the film and the spectator are the two bodies that participate in this transmission of intensities. In the first chapter, I discuss how "El puritano" reveals that film's resurrected images can be more powerful than the originals. Then, I analyze "El espectro," which serves as an example of how film's mimetic qualities increase its power to affect spectators and produce in them visceral reactions. Particularly striking in this story is the filmic gaze of an on-screen actor, a gaze which transmits affect to the other characters. In the second chapter, I analyze "Miss Dorothy Phillips, mi esposa," particularly how it theorizes the erotic gaze of filmed actresses. Then I discuss "El vampiro," in which I study the relationship of two men with the filmed image of a beautiful Hollywood actress. In the story, an inventor is able to "move" film in such a way as to create a spectral woman who can interact with others. However, by the end of the story it becomes clear that it is the film—personified by this spectral woman—that holds the true power in this relationship of bodies.