Languages, Literatures, & Cultures Theses and Dissertations
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2785
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Item Camus and Sartre: The Unsettled Conflict on Violence and Terror(2008) Ahmed, Nadine Sara; Brami, Joseph; French Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The broad purpose of this paper is to bring attention to the subject of terrorism. In the paper two plays by are compared which both treat this matter somewhat differently. The first play is "Les Mains Sales" by Jean Paul Sartre and the second play is "Les Justes" by Albert Camus. The two authors who are both descendents of the existentialist time period have quite differing views on the subject. Sartre was known for his belief in action while Camus was known to be more of a pacifist. Both of these issues are portrayed in the paper. This paper also goes one step further because it looks at the literary aspect of both plays yet also places them and their theories into today's context. Both of the plays look terrorism from the eyes of the terrorist. This is something that is not very common even today in the middle of the all the terror that exists around the globe. However the issues and theories presented here bring some insight into the terrorists mind and how that affects the world today.Item Apologies in French: An Analysis of Remedial Discourse Strategies Used by L1 Speakers(2009) Bodapati, Sandhya; Yotsukura, Lindsay; Modern French Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Speech act research has contributed much to our understanding of contextual L1 and L2 use in various languages. French, however remains largely ignored. The handful of studies that do exist are confined to a rather small set of speech acts. Although common in everyday discourse, French apologies have been underrepresented in the literature. This exploratory study attempts to observe and quantify apology strategies utilized by the French. Data were collected from L1 speakers in three phases. In Phase 1, 11 respondents provided conflict situations--used to construct a Discourse Completion Task (DCT)--that would require an apology in France. Twenty-two separate speakers completed a rating scale in Phase 2, stating their perceptions regarding sociolinguistic factors underlying the conflict situations. Finally in Phase 3, 85 respondents completed the DCT, which sought their reactions to the apology situations. Five main findings are discussed. First, L1 speakers most commonly used an explicit expression of apology or provided explanations as remedial strategies. This finding differs from previous studies on French L1 apologies in which accepting responsibility for the offense was the second most-used strategy after explicit apologies. Second, it was found that not all apology utterances performed a remedial function in all situations; certain linguistic formulae typically used to offer redress were also used as mitigators to potentially face-threatening acts such as complaining. Third, of several sociolinguistic factors operative within a situation, severity of the offense and the speaker's obligation to apologize seemed to have the most influence on apology strategy selection. Fourth, a survey of L1 speakers revealed that a majority felt it more important for an L2 speaker to be sociopragmatically competent in the target language than to demonstrate grammatical accuracy alone. Finally, the results suggest that the DCT continues to be a highly effective data elicitation instrument. In the present study, it not only facilitated quick access to a large data set, but it also allowed participants to make ancillary comments. Such insights might not have been revealed as readily through data collected in naturalistic settings through participant observation or role-plays--methods that have been deemed more reliable than the DCT.Item Desglosar la memoria. La sensibilidad del tiempo en la obra poesía de José Antonio Ramos Sucre(2009) González, Pausides; Aguilar Mora, Jorge; Spanish Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation explores the theme of memory in the poetry of José Antonio Ramos Sucre (1890-1930), a Venezuelan poet associated with the country's first literary vanguard group known as the "Generación del 18". In order to fully understand the poetry of Ramos Sucre, it is important to begin by looking at the thematic shift that occurred in his writing when his interest in the glorious past of the nation completely gave way to a poetically recreated notion of universal memory. Such displacement can be seen as a manifestation of what Walter Benjamin called "loss of experience." Through this lens, it is possible to show that the work of Ramos Sucre is part of a collective sense of grief born mainly from the Venezuelan reality of the nineteen twenties, the years during which the country was deeply entrenched in the dictatorship of Juan Vicente Gómez. The sense of grief is expressed through a poetic subject, the "I" in Ramos Sucre's poems, which is tied to a continual remembrance, and specifically to the experiences that are part of its duration. Here it becomes clear that Ramos Sucre's work was greatly influenced by the philosophy of Henri Bergson. This dissertation performs an unconventional reading of the poetic work of Ramos Sucre, in which the existence of a single self is identified, a single "I" that is capable of remembering all of his own experiences. Finally, this dissertation shows how the poetic subject in Ramos Sucre's poetry expresses his memory through writing, and how the purpose of his writing is to achieve his own oblivion. We conclude our work by considering the orphic nature of that oblivion, so that the "loss of experience", expressed through an exceptional voice of the Venezuelan vanguard such as Ramos Sucre, ends up being replaced by the need for a return to the orphic country that so captivated the imagination of the Romantic poets.Item Die Rote Armee Fraktion (RAF) als kulturelles Phänomen: Repräsentationen in literarischen Texten und anderen kulturellen Produkten(2009) Naylor, Sylvia; Frederiksen, Elke P.; Germanic Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The Red Army Faction (RAF), a radical West German left-wing terrorist group that existed from 1970 to 1998, has been the focus of numerous literary and non-literary texts. I argue that due to the appearance of the RAF in a wide variety of cultural products, such as literary texts, art, music, movies, and the media, one must now examine the RAF as a part of German cultural discourses. I analyze a broad spectrum of texts that are representative of the various portrayals of the RAF over the years, including the short story Lenau by Günter Herburger (1972), the drawing Gruppenbild mit Dame by Gerboth (1972), the film Die bleierne Zeit by Margarethe von Trotta (1981), the drama Berliner November by Holger Teschke (1987), the drama Leviathan by Dea Loher (1993), the drama Rinderwahnsinn by John von Düffel (1999), the painting Meinhof by Johannes Kahrs (2001), the film Baader by Christopher Roth (2002), and newspaper articles from the 1970s to the present. This research project presents an interdisciplinary analysis, incorporating the methodological paradigms of New Historicism and Gender Studies, in order to examine the RAF as a cultural phenomenon. I investigate the portrayal of the RAF in literary and non-literary texts since 1970 with the purpose of understanding how the representations in these texts can be interpreted as products of the political, cultural, and social environment from which they arose. This dissertation analyzes numerous aspects of the RAF discourse, including: (1) how did representations of the RAF in different areas, such as politics, literary texts, and the media contrast and/or influence each other? (2) how did portrayals of the RAF differ in West and East Germany? (3) how did representations of the RAF change over the years? and (4) how were female RAF members depicted in literary and non-literary texts and what role did gender identity in German society play in these depictions?Item Grammatical Gender Representation and Processing in Advanced Second Language Learners of French(2009) Vatz, Karen L.; DeKeyser, Robert; Michael, Erica B; Second Language Acquisition and Application; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)One of the most difficult challenges of learning French as a foreign language is mastering the gender system. Although there are theories that account for how French native speakers (NSs) master their gender system, it is not fully understood why second language (L2) learners are unable to do the same. The goal of the present study was to investigate this difference in ability between French NSs and non-native speakers (NNSs), specifically, how L2 learners of French store grammatical gender knowledge, and how their storage system relates to processing of grammatical gender in terms of the ability to realize accurate gender agreement throughout a sentence. First, a gender priming task investigated whether advanced L2 learners have developed a gender-nodal system in which gender information is stored as an inherent property of a noun. Second, an online grammaticality judgment task addressed L2 learners' gender agreement ability during processing, while taking into account (a) the role of gender cues available to the participant, and (b) non-linguistic processing constraints such as working memory (WM) through manipulating the distance of an adjective from the noun with which it must agree. In order to investigate the role of a learner's native language (L1) in gender representation and processing, participants included learners of French from three L1 groups: Spanish, whose gender system is congruent to that of French; Dutch, whose gender system is incongruent to that of French; and English, whose gender system is minimal, relative to French. A group of NS controls also participated. Results from the gender priming task indicate that the NNSs in the current study have not developed a native-like gender-nodal system, regardless of L1-L2 gender-system similarity. At-chance accuracy on the grammaticality judgment task indicates L2 gender agreement is far from native-like, even for advanced learners. Whereas the presence of gender cues was beneficial, neither WM nor L1-L2 similarity facilitated performance. The results from this study confirm previous findings on the difficulty of L2 gender agreement, and shed light on the nature of L2 gender representation as a possible explanation for this processing difficulty.Item Un lugar en el mundo: literatura, conocimiento y autonomía en tres novelas colombianas de finales del siglo XX(2009) Romero, Diana Patricia; Sosnowski, Saúl; Spanish Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In this dissertation I analyze three end-of-20th-century Colombian novels: La muerte de Alec (1983) by Darío Jaramillo Agudelo (1947), Sin remedio (1984) by Antonio Caballero (1945) and Basura (2000) by Héctor Abad Faciolince (1958). This analysis revisits the problematic relationship between literature and knowledge stemming from the loss of grounding of human action arising from modernity and exacerbated by end of 20th Century posmodernism and constructivist currents. Revisiting the Kantian concept of aesthetic autonomy, in which knowledge and art were closely linked, I propose that taking up again this relationship constitutes a search for a space in which literature can be conceived as an autonomous space as long as it is not separate from knowledge. This search makes sense in a context in which literature has lost its privileged aesthetic status faced with the attacks of the militant commitment of the 60&rsquos and 70&rsquos and with the fact that other cultural manifestations have become more popular with the advent of cultural studies and other postmodernist and poststructuralist trends. Each of these three novels emphasizes different social and aesthetic imaginaries such as the romantic aesthetic tradition, existentialist philosophy and cognitive science. These social and aesthetic imaginaries are activated by a credulity/incredulity (skepticism) mechanism that either makes possible the search for a space of autonomy in which knowledge and literature reconcile or that evinces a longing for their reconciliation. The question of the grounding of knowledge and values remains unsolved while heuristic and pragmatic solutions are offered.Item The Theme Of Nature In Victor Hugo's Contemplations(2009) Khavari, Nazanin; Brami, Joseph; French Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Title of Thesis: THE THEME OF NATURE IN VICTOR HUGO'S LES CONTEMPLATIONS Nazanin Khavari, Master of Art, 2009 Thesis directed by: Professor Joseph Brami Department of French & Italian School of Languages, Literatures and Cultures In Les Contemplations collection, Hugo is a real contemplator of nature: he describes it with all its immensity, beauty and ugliness, in different seasons and in different moments of day and night. For the description of this nature, mineral, vegetal and animal, he applies many stylistic procedures. In demand of describing everything, he becomes an admirer of mankind with all its greatness and weakness. Description of nature is often accompanied with the ones of love. It can be paternal or of any other kind. This permits him to speak about woman, adolescence and especially of his daughter. This desire to say everything about grandiose and fearsomeness of nature makes Hugo a liberator of words and the creator of the aestheticism of totality in which sublime and grotesque are intermingled, an aestheticism which announces Surrealism.Item Revolt and it expressions in the works of Williams Sassine(2009) Keita, Mamadi; Orlando, Valerie; French Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This study is an inquiry into the forms and expressions of revolt in the works of Williams Sassine. Following the chronology, I choose to begin Sassine's denunciation of the forms of domination, exploitation and alienation with the colonial period. However, beyond the colonial period, the characters of Sassine's novels often rise up against the political drift of the Third World's new independent nations. Furthermore, this study underlines the inadequacy of the education system inherited from the colonial period. In the forth chapter, I examine the question of exile, a recurrent them in the African Francophone literature. Finaly, my investigation of Sassine's novels reveals a constant quest for identity and a rejection of all foreign cultural influences.Item SEA CHANGES: ABSENCE OF THE FEMININE PRESENCE AND ITS REPLACEMENT IN VERNE'S VINGT MILLE LIEUES SOUS LES MERS(2009) Chattin, Gena Rae; Mossman, Carol; French Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The following work will examine masculine representations, the absence of feminine presence, and the elements that replace it in Jules Verne's 1870 novel Vingt mille lieues sous les mers. Maternity is of particular interest in this novel. Representations of family, when they can be found, are usually seen through inanimate objects, sterile eggs, or the corpses of mothers, potentially reflecting 19th century fears of the collapsing traditional family. To understand the implication this feminine absence and replacement, relationships between the primary male characters will be considered based on the type of masculinity each represents and how their roles affect the narrative. This will lead into a discussion of reproduction and sterility, which will dovetail into an analysis of representations of femininity and maternity with an eye toward what this says about Verne's entire body of work and future potential research in this area.Item LA THEATRALITE ET LA CRITIQUE DE LA DROITE DANS LES MANDARINS DE SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR(2009) Bayliss, Ann; Verdaguer, Pierre; French Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This thesis examines the use of theatrical forms to illustrate social criticism in Les Mandarins. Simone de Beauvoir draws from works of classic theater and literature to depict the confluence of art, politics, and money in a capital city. Henri, editor of a political newspaper and a writer, is a contemporary Alceste whose desire to live in a better world seems at odds with his impulse to abandon it. Anne, wife of the leader of a left-wing movement, and a psychologist, is a modern Marion, loving, practical, and idealistic. As they and their friends search for meaning and solvency, they struggle against pessimism, fatalism, complacency, artistic escapism, the national interest argument among nations, the military-industrial power complex, and paranoia. Their tragic missteps recall Hamlet, while their everyday life invites comparison to a medieval farce, and the lovers take their cues from Beaumarchais. For the protagonists, as for the author herself, art and writing become a reason and a vision of human solidarity, putting into question the necessity of a world order dominated by capital.