String Literature is a popular form of poetry produced mainly in the northeastern section of Brazil. Heir to the orality of the Portuguese ballads, cordel took root particularly in the northeastern country side of Brazil and for historical and social factors spread throughout the country. This study intends to revisit the main studies done on string literature to analyze its development in Brazil, to highlight cordel's enormous contribution as popular art, memory and identity, in the construction process of the Brazilian Northeastern people.

La adquisición de una segunda lengua requiere principalmente tiempo de exposición y práctica. El tiempo disponible en una clase típica de escuela secundaria es insuficiente para lograr competencia lingüística. Es necesario ampliar el tiempo de práctica con actividades que los alumnos puedan realizar fuera del aula. Este trabajo propone el uso de tareas escolares alternativas que los estudiantes pueden elegir de acuerdo a sus intereses. El tiempo dedicado a la práctica independiente es utilizado como medida de evaluación en contraste a la cantidad de ejercicios completados. Con el propósito de encontrar las actividades preferidas por los alumnos, se analizaron los datos obtenidos de las experiencias de práctica independiente de 112 estudiantes ELE del segundo año de secundaria. Estos resultados sugieren que los participantes prefirieron utilizar juegos multimedia en español, en sus teléfonos móviles, en donde pudieron practicar principalmente vocabulario, porque eran divertidos, entretenidos y flexibles a su horario. También se encontró que aquellos participantes que pasaron más tiempo practicando, fueron a su vez los que eligieron una mayor variedad de actividades. Teniendo en cuenta estas preferencias, se plantean sugerencias para la aplicación de tareas escolares electivas. Se propone utilizar actividades alternativas como los juegos multimedia, que satisfagan a su vez las preferencias de los alumnos y las demandas de los profesores.

In the years following the military dictatorship in Argentina many novels were published that spoke about the violence, terror, and traumas experienced during the Junta's rule. These texts deal with the theme of memory and retell the traumas of the past as a form of mourning. Such novels look back to the past in an effort to redeem it. In this essay I explore the use of the confessional mode in postdictatorial literature as a vehicle for the task of mourning. In two of his novels, Qué solos se quedan los muertos (1985) and Cuestiones interiores (2003), Argentine author Mempo Giardinelli employs the confessional mode to tell the stories of two guilt-ridden protagonists who resort to writing in search of redemption. Giardinelli's use of the confessional mode highlights two aspects of confession that in actuality deny its completion. While confession aims to alleviate the guilt felt by the confessant and to provide him with a sense of self-understanding in light of his sins, the confessional act subverts these very purposes. The confession requires one to speak of guilt in order to arrive at a state of innocence, which only engenders more guilt and perpetuates the confession. Moreover, in confession the subject that speaks is also the object that it creates in speech. Confession as an attempt to present oneself as a coherent object to be understood and in turn to validate ones notion of identity involves a doubling effect of the self-inherent in language that reveals the impossibility of attaining an unmediated access to the self. These two aspects of the confessional act constitute the failure of confession to allow the confessant to attain the redemption and absolution they seek. I argue that the confessional mode serves as an ideal vehicle for the task of mourning and that the inherent failure of confession is comparable to what Idelvar Avelar calls the “interminability of mourning” (5). These two processes constitute a tool of memory needed in post dictatorial Argentina as a way to conserve the past and redeem it from oblivion.

Monsters are disruptive characters, who cross boundaries and blend categories. They come in various kinds: Non-human monsters, such as Dracula, created-by-human monsters like Frankenstein, human monsters like Hitler, and more-than-human monsters such as the X-men. These monsters can either be dangerous or helpful to humanity. Dangerous monsters appear as infectious, viral forces, while helpful monsters are inoculative forces for positive change. In either case, they penetrate the borders set up between normatively separate categories. Critics and authors have long realized the connection between heroes and monsters, often portraying them as necessary to one another, as two sides of a single coin. However, this analogy is lacking, because it does not allow for the possibility that a single character can display varying degrees of both heroism and monstrosity. Mario Yerro and Bruna Husky present such characteristics in Yeti and Lágrimas en la lluvia, as evidenced by their physical appearance, their relations to scapegoats, the porosity of species and other boundaries, and the decisions they make in regards to the Other.

Although the purpose of this study is to concentrate on an analysis of Paz’s book of essays, El laberinto de la soledad, published in 1950 and revised and expanded in 1959, this writer feels that it would be in order to give a summary-listing of his poetry and other works. The reader will thus not only be able to follow the events of the author’s life, but he will also be able to grasp the details of his development as a writer and to understand his purpose in writing El laberinto de la soledad.

This study has been prepared as a teacher’s guide in the use of transformational grammar to teach a few grammatical structures in ALM Spanish Level Two. It is intended to aid the Spanish teacher in analyzing specific grammar points within the grammar section of the text. In essence, the present study has been prepared for the Spanish teacher who has a limited knowledge of linguistics or transformational grammar.

This study was designed to understand the experience of being a service study abroad student. It examined feelings, perceptions and attitudes that developed as students from Brigham Young University participated in a service-centered study abroad program to Guadalajara, Mexico. The study enumerates participants' initial, developing, and final impressions during service study abroad and shows that students go through an extensive process of discovering, reformulating, and solidifying their attitudes and perceptions as they interpret their experiences. The study examined factors related to language and culture, but focused on the service component of the program. It found that service study abroad participants feel their experience is more successful when they perceive that the service they render is needed, service assignments align with personal interests, duties are clearly outlined, and meaningful responsibilities are assigned.

The present research consists of a comparative study of Brigham Young University's Golden Age Comedia (GAC) and Golden Age Theater Production (GATP) courses. The two courses cover much of the same academic material, but one of the differences between the two approaches to the teaching of Golden Age literature is that the GATP course incorporates a theater production and outreach component. Although this outreach program has been seen as intuitively and anecdotally effective, there has been no prior attempt to document student motivation for choosing this course over the traditionally taught course (GAC), nor to discover any of the outcomes experienced by university students who participate in it. Similarly, there have been no studies conducted to compare the educational outcomes of the two approaches. Therefore, the present empirical study was conducted with the goal of determining student motivation and expectations for course selection, academic outcomes of each approach, and whether any additional intellectual or personal growth was experienced by students in the GATP course. This study revealed that there indeed are differences in the motives and expectations behind students' decision to enroll in the GAC course rather than the GATP course, and vice versa, and that each course yields different outcomes for those students. Students receiving instruction through the GATP Outreach program appear to be able to attain a similar mastery of the course material as those in the GAC course. Furthermore, through the inclusion of the outreach program, students are able to acquire additional skills and enriched attitudes that have the potential to prepare them for future studies and life experiences. For universities interested in implementing a similar production and outreach program, this study provides evidence that such a course can indeed provide an alternative path to the teaching of Golden Age literature at the university level and that it proves to be an attractive alternative to certain students that is worth their time and effort.

This study seeks to describe what I term the ethics of haunting, as related to trauma and memory, by analyzing Juan Rulfo's Pedro Páramo. It does not claim to be representative of ghosts and haunting as a whole, but more specifically to illustrate various manners in which the return of the ghost and its subsequent haunting are motivated by an ethics of memory in Rulfo's novel. Within this framework I explore remembrance as a medium of exchange between the living and the dead, haunting as a method by which gaps in the historical archive can be filled, and the psychoanalytic notion of incorporation as way to remember the ghost.

The United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) estimates that tens of millions of homeless children spend a large portion of their lives on the streets, where they are exposed to all forms of abuse and exploitation. In Brazil, approximately eight million children are in this situation. Despite the prolonged and increasing gravity of this situation, there are few and only partial studies showing how these children have been represented in Brazilian literature. Brazilian authors ignored the problem almost completely until the decade of 1960, with the exception of Jorge Amado and a few others. Since then João Antônio, Rubem Fonseca, Clarice Lispector, José Louzeiro, Chico Buarque de Holanda, and Paulo Lins, among many others have chosen to make street children characters in fiction. Many of the greater successes in Brazilian literature during the past years directly or indirectly address the theme of street children. This thesis documents the gradual inclusion of the sociological phenomenon of street children—so long ignored in Brazilian society and even more so in imaginative literature—into the Brazilian literary canon and suggests that the consciousness-raising activity of these writers is a profound contribution to any eventual solution to this problematic demographic. Our review is a historical one, beginning with the first years of Brazilian colonization and running through to the twenty-first century.