Department of Languages, Linguistics and Comparative Literature

Both Calixthe Beyala's Le petit prince de Belleville, published in France in 1992, and Cynthia Shearer's The Celestial Jukebox, published in the United States in 2005, explore similar questions regarding the place of immigrants in increasingly multicultural societies. Gilles Deleuze and Fâelix Guattari's concept of - smoothness and - striation illuminates the settings of these two texts, helping demonstrate that the Parisian neighborhood of Belleville presents a striated space dominated by State constraints, from which the residents yearn to break free, and the fictional town of Madagascar, Mississippi consists of relatively smooth space that allows for local improvisation and engenders insecurity. The stories of Loukoum and Boubacar illustrate how these two characters negotiate their respective spaces, with Loukoum creating a position thoroughly between striated majority French culture and the smoothness of his diasporic sphere and Boubacar functioning as a rhizomatic nomad, embarking on an autonomous journey of discovery.

Locus of an author poses questions of intentionality, how intention is discovered, expressed, hidden, revealed and interpreted. The purpose of the study is to find and apply productive interdisciplinary concepts in intentionality detection, decoding and evaluation in fictional texts. The investigation integrates traditions in literature, linguistics, cognitive science and creative writing, posing a pragmatics of intent that complements and complicates precepts in reader reception-based constructivism. Basic to a vision of pragmatic strategies: 1) situating effect and affect in an embodied mind; 2) acknowledging mutual and/or oppositional intentionalities which an embodied author and embodied reader bring to the process of fictional communication; 3) accepting language as communication that requires cognitive translation of consensually-agreed upon symbols into private representations in an embodied mind; 4) assuming that an author's fictionalizing consciousness is more discernible w hen it is navigating tensions of selection, proportion, intervention and perspective. Perceptual and close reading of J.M. Coetzee's Foe yields descriptive problematics. Analytical readings in a neglected byway of I.A. Richards' New Criticism provide pragmatic cues for detecting and evaluating intentionalities in prose. Three cross-disciplinary strategies emerge to enhance perceptual and close readings of fictional texts: 1) awareness of priming effects in form and content; 2) identification of markedness patterns; and 3) perception of tensible connections in prosaic language and artistic devices.

The Sephardic ballad collection contains ballads of varying themes, many of which have been forgotten in Spain, where they were originally sung by Jews, Christians, and Muslims. A popular theme within this genre is that of women committing adultery and transgressions which in many of the ballads is punishable by death. A brief history of the Sephardic Jews and their literary and oral tradition is included. An emphasis is placed on women's role in ballad tradition and the importance of transculturation and mimesis within the oral tradition, both significant to the survival of a tradition that has been continued for over five centuries, encompassing various regions around the world. The analysis focuses on two ballads in particular ; the "Celestine Romance", which shares a similar plot to La Celestina, written by Fernando de Rojas, and the ballad of "The Adulteress", a popular ballad within several traditions.