Department of Languages, Linguistics and Comparative Literature

Silenced for almost half a century, testimonies of those who lost the Spanish Civil
War are now surfacing and being published. The origin of this dissertation was the
chance discovery that Martín Herrera de Mendoza, a Spanish Civil War exile living in the
United States, was truly a Catalonian anarchist named Antonio Vidal Arabí. This double
identity was a cover for the political activist dedicated to the fight for change in the
anarchist workers’ union CNT (National Confederation of Workers) and the FAI
(Federation of Iberian Anarchists). He founded the FAI chapter in Santa Cruz de Tenerife
and planned a failed assassination attempt on General Franco’s life in an effort to avoid
the military takeover in 1936.
This dissertation is the reconstruction of Antonio Vidal Arabí’s life narrative. It is
based on the texts written during his seventeen-month stay as a refugee in Great Britain.
Copies of his writings were left in a suitcase with a fellow anarchist who he instructed to
have sent to his family upon his death. In 1989, “The English Suitcase” was delivered to his children in Barcelona. Based on his own account, this study follows his service as an
intelligence agent for the Spanish Republic during the War. When it was over, he
attempted to evacuate his family from France, to save them from the threat of the Nazi
invasion and reunite with them in England or America.
The analysis of the letters he wrote to his wife and children in France documents
how he hid from Franco’s spies using his dual identity. In his letters, always signed as
Martín Herrera de Mendoza, he invents a persona in order to help his family. The present
study narrates his transformation into the persona he created and the events that brought
about his translation into his “other.” Antonio Vidal Arabí’s bilinguism and biculturality
is underlined as the main factors in his change into Martín Herrera de Mendoza. His was
a voyage into exile documented by his own words; a story of survival and reinvention.

Within the Caribbean, the islands of Guadeloupe and Martinique are unusual: they are French overseas departments and thus also European Union members. As such, they must assimilate to French national culture even though their heterogeneous populations, mainly descendants of exploited imported labour, have their own unique island identity. Their heavy economic dependence on France and the effects of modernization and globalization pose further identitarian challenges for them. Franco-Antillean literature clearly reflects this long-standing identity confusion. This thesis explores two very recent novels— Toxic Island by Guadeloupean Ernest Pépin and L’Empreinte à Crusoé by Martinican Patrick Chamoiseau— and their divergent stylistic treatments of individuation. Both are inspired by Édouard Glissant’s theories of Relation and Tout- Monde; both engage questions of language, orality, the island space, race, the subject of alterity and the role of the arts and artists in identity formation. Yet both are also marked by distinctly unique forms of ambivalence.

Birth across borders: a comparative study of Guatemalan Maya maternal care in San Miguel Acatán and Palm Beach County

This qualitative study was conducted to develop a better understanding of the
place of praxis in higher education women’s studies programs in the U.S. Built upon
theories of feminist pedagogy, feminist praxis, activism, experiential education, and
academic service-learning, the research explores how praxis is reflected and taught in
women’s studies programs, how these programs impact students’ understanding of
feminist theory and practice, and what factors affect the implementation of action-oriented
pedagogy. Examples of several action-oriented projects that have successfully
been implemented in women’s studies courses are offered, and a case study demonstrates
the impact of these projects. The methods used include document review of women’s
studies mission statements and syllabi, and interviews with women’s studies faculty and
alumnae. The interview data were coded and analyzed using a grounded theory approach.

Rafael Leonidas Trujillo (1891-1961), the ruthless Dominican Republic ruler
dominated his island’s politics for over thirty years. In his acclaimed 2000 novel, The
Feast of the Goat, Peruvian Nobel laureate Mario Vargas Llosa creates Urania Cabral, a
49-year-old émigrée who at 14 left her nation after becoming Trujillo’s sexual victim.
The novel, told from many perspectives, focuses on her return, the dictator’s last day, and
the story of the four conspirators waiting to ambush him the night of May 30th 1961.
My study analyzes the complex narrative structures of the novel as masterful
“rupturing” techniques. Through these the reader pieces together the broken body politic
of a traumatized nation as Urania reconstructs in painful detail how the impotent dictator
digitally rapes her to ensure her body bears the mark of his brutal anger and frustration.

A sequence for materials in English beginning reading lessons is proposed
for native speakers of Mikasuki. This sequence utilizes to the greatest
possible extent the native linguistic background of Mikasuki-speaking
students while including most of the skills taught to native English
speakers in traditional materials. The presentation is based on two
criteria: 1) an analysis of the phonological similarities and differences
between Mikasuki and English, and 2) a linguistic approach to beginning
reading instruction, which emphasizes the gradual and systematic introduction
of regular sound-spelling patterns. Using these criteria it is
possible to order the presentation of English phonemes and graphemes in
terms of their predicted difficulty for the Mikasuki-speaking student.
These are systematically presented to improve the Mikasuki-speaker's
chances of establishing a, positive achievement base at each stage of
the learning process.

This small-scale study investigated the extent to which negotiations of meaning during methodologically focused communicative partner-activities were concerned with a grammatical target structure, the dative case following spatial prepositions in German. In addition, the impact of the negotiation of the target structure on subsequent learner performance was investigated. The subjects, beginning-level students of German, participated in two two-way information-gap activities, preceded and followed by the same grammaticality judgment test. The interaction was audiotaped and transcribed. The improvement in accuracy between the pretest and the posttest was calculated and correlated with the number of negotiation moves. The results indicate that the subjects negotiated meaning, including form, frequently. However, no significant change in the subjects' subsequent performance was observed.

Like most nineteenth-century French realists, Maupassant's interest in positivistic models of the human being, from Darwinian evolution to the new psychologies, led him to scientific readings, detailed documentations of "milieu," and contemporary subjects which he then treated with literary techniques drawn from both the realist Flaubert and the naturalist Zola. It is in extending these techniques to the fantastic, however, that Maupassant achieves an original and highly effective amalgam best characterized as "Le Naturalisme fantastique."

The annihilation of women's artistic creativity in selected works by the Mexican writer Elena Poniatowska is a result of societal conditioning. Two short stories from Lilus Kikus and the short novel Querido Diego, te abraza Quiela portray the process of deterioration and demeaning obliteration of women's creative faculties, as they are conditioned to accept the conventional roles of wife and mother. Poniatowska's texts posit that, upon assuming these roles, the exercise of the creative artist's use of her imagination is postponed or detrimentally transformed forever. In the selected texts, women's artistic creativity is chronicled first at its best while the characters are girls or adolescents. The neglect, procrastination, and attention to domestic and repetitive tasks as opposed to the pursuit of their creative vein is observed in the adult women characters. Poignantly portrayed is Quiela, Diego Rivera's common-law wife of ten years, who destroys her life and creative power by trying to be the perfect wife. These literary works speak forcefully to the social issues and institutions that place women artists in a bind; are the roles of artist, mother/wife incompatible?

Lituma en los Andes tackles the universal substance of myths, its atavistic stock of culture, prejudice and superstitions, which applied to the complex Peru uncovers taboos and reveals a political statement, whose non-fictional counterpart can be found in La utopia arcaica: Jose Maria Arguedas y las ficciones del indigenismo, by the same author. This thesis uses a mythological and archetypal approach to prove that the narration--whose underlying element are Andean myths--is structured as the mythological adventure of a hero who must comply with the archetypal rites of passage: separation, initiation, and return. Lituma's trials lead him to a social and spiritual maturity and to discover the mysterious ancestral Peru, disdained by the more westernized Peruvians of the coast. The Andeans' fear of foreigners is represented by the myth of the pishtaco or throat-cutter, counterpart of the classical Minotaur. The encounter of the two scissioned worlds is only possible through love and friendship, in the framework of a pluralistic society, which is suggested by the novel's resolution.