Department of Languages, Linguistics and Comparative Literature

The traditional, realist, dramatic concept of coherent character identity is ruptured by the two plays Les Chevaliers de la table ronde and El publico. Cocteau's and Lorca's works, which are usually labeled as surrealist due to their apparently disjointed nature, are actually embodiments of the poet-playwrights' continuing attempts to reveal that identity, including gendered identity, is a performance. The metadramatic elements of the plays such as discourse, costumes and gender are unstable and voluntarily changeable; they have repercussions beyond the proscenium. Cocteau and Lorca invite their audiences to consider the performative nature of their identities.

The Cold-War mother lived in an era of angst, animosity, and anxiety. The immigrant mothers of the Beats not only had to grapple with the demands of her children, but also had to take on the post-Freudian demands of their new society. This anxiety tainted her mind, her milk, and consequently her children's writing. The works of Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and Gregory Corso exhibit the dramatic effect that their mothers had on their life and cathartic writings. Mothers were the wellspring and crumbling foundation of these writers as well as the muse who inspired them to beatness.

The search for all sources of The Romaunt of the Rose, the fourteenth-century English version of Le roman de la Rose, focuses on Geoffrey Chaucer. The authorship controversy is so divisive that prominent medievalists like Huot, Hult, Robertson, and Badel write long volumes on the Roman's influence without mentioning the Romaunt. Comparing Geissman's list of rime-borrowings with both poems' concordances is the only way to end the debate, because Chaucer is the likeliest author and one must start with the most compatible French and English texts. At present, the best way to test Geoffrey Chaucer's authorship of the Middle English Romaunt is through close examination of the French rime-borrowings most orthoepically comparable in both languages that the Middle English writer occasionally chose to translate rather than borrow. This selective borrowing suggests the translator's attempt to bring each term slowly into the English mainstream, by using it at first only in its literal sense.

The "cuckold" is the prototype of the consenting husband in Quevedo's time. He represents the hypocrisy, the vanity, and, most of all, the moral decadence of Spanish society in the 17th Century. Quevedo expresses his great disillusion with the amoral behavior of his people and, through his satire, attempts to give a lesson on morality. Quevedo was able to transfer onto his work Spanish ideas and realities, giving them a serious character as that of an ascetic or a politician, with the pessimistic and sarcastic tone typical of his satire. Two important and influencing factors on his work and his way of looking at life were the family and cultural environment he was exposed to and the effect of his physical defects, which he succeeded in compensating due to his energetic personality. Quevedo used conceptism as his literary style, applying his genius to the creation of metaphors, taking the Spanish language to its maximum expression as no one else had done before him.

Les Mouches is a modern reconstruction of the ancient myth embodied in the The Oresteia of Aeschylus. Jean-Paul Sartre not only rewrote the legend of Orestes; he remodeled it. Orestes is not just a new man; he is his own man. The play, therefore, is not a mere pastiche in modern dress. Sartre infuses Orestes with an unprecendented "Existentialist" consciousness, and this transformation adds new complexities to the ancient text. This Existentialist reworking of Hellenistic images is distinguished from the classically "tragic" elements in Aeschylus as well as later modifications in Sophocles and Euripides. Sartre's early introduction into the lore of Hellenism is considered, and a discussion of Sartre's theoretical and philosophical perspective on theater suggests which Greek elements Sartre was disposed to incorporate into his script.

This thesis investigates the acqusition of certain negative and interrogative structures by adolescent Spanish-speaking ESL students in a bilingual community. These ESL learners demonstrated two unexpected negating strategies using not plus the verb and never plus the verb. They likewise used does/did as an overgeneralized question marker. Age of first exposure to English did not appear to be a significant factor in the acquisition of the English auxiliary, and the students' acquisition of negative and interrogative structures appeared to be delayed in this bilingual environment, despite ESL instruction.

De Beauvoir's Existentialist works , primarily Pour une
morale de l'ambiguite and Existentialisme et la sagesse
des nations, and her feminist work Le Deuxieme sexe,
affirm that women are fully as capable of attaining
Existentialist authenticity and liberty as men. The
novels, however, portray women who often fail the
Existentialist ideal, and always fail the feminist ideal.
Indeed the major novels, including L'Invitee, Le Sang
des autres, Les Mandarins, suggest an almost inverse
relationship between feminist convictions and personal
success. Having chosen not to depict female characters
as social activists or revolutionaries but as women in
love, de Beauvoir presents unhappy lovers unable to
achieve independence from the dominant male. In accord
with Existentialist precepts of realism, De Beauvoir's
fiction illustrates not her feminist ideal hut her view
of women's contemporary condition.

In 1903 Emile Fabre, consummate theater technician, presented his adaption of Balzac's La Rabouilleuse at the Odeon Theater in Paris. The novel appealed to Fabre's naturalist interest in the worlds of family and finance, and Fabre based the action on the intense conflict among three characters for the inheritance of a dim-witted old man. Fabre amplified Balzac's theme of of the debilitating effects of money on families, and on society at large. This vying for inheritance becomes not only a game played for high stakes, but also a life-and-death struggle among beasts of prey. many of the alterations that Fabre made in adapting the novel into a play were necessitated by the change of literary genre, as in eliminating characters or creating composite figures. Many of the additions were made for purely theatrical reasons, enabling Fabre to present his money theme while, at the same time, holding his audience's interest until the final curtain. Other changes stemmed from Fabre's almost exclusive attention to finance, and his desire to stress its moral and political implications.

This study attempts to discover and quantify the extent to
which selected Black English features are present in the English of
a group of United States Hispanic Children in south Florida. The
five features are /r,l/ simplification, consonant cluster simplification,
past tense verb marker reduction, copula deletion, and inverted
embedded questions. The best indicators of Black English influence in the young
Hispanic children's English are found to be regular past tense verb
endings, third person singular present tense forms of be, words containing
a preconsonantal l, present tense plural forms of be, and an
words containing voiced consonant clusters, respectively. A hierarchy
of factors contributing to the overall Black English influence is
constructed. Relevant literature is reviewed.

This edition was prepared as an independent or classroom study tool, in Spanish, for students of contemporary Spanish drama. The introduction includes a brief chapter on Valle-Inclan's biography. the following chapters focus their attention on the evolution of the author's style from his early period up to the esperpentos. the opinions of critics are mentioned throughout to familiarize the reader with authoritative references as well as with his work. Once the esperpento period is reached, one chapter is devoted to the treatment of the represented in Luces de bohemia. Finally the play is annotated in English and the difficult vocabulary is glossed. Amplifications at the end of each scene give additional, valuable information. More than fifty sources were consulted and/or quoted. By using this edition the reader deals with only one volume representative of what many references had to say about Valle-Inclan, his times, his works, the esperpento, and Luces the bohemia.