In the portrayal of the Galician people Pardo Bazán's naturalistic pessimism is more evident than in her descriptions of customs or landscape. Her characters are stifled and often shattered by living conditions. The environment weighs heavily upon them, bringing forth the more despicable aspects of human behavior. In spite of this, she succeeds in probing the soul of her countrymen and giving them life in her short stories.

A study of the literary techniques used by Mariano José de Larra and Ramón de Mesonero Romanos.

This study shows similarities in the attitudes of and literary influences upon Maurice Maeterlinck and Nathaniel Hawthorne, especially in Maeterlinck's drama Pelleas et Melisande and Hawthorne's novel The Scarlet Letter. Circumstantial evidence indicates Maeterlinck's familiarity with Hawthorne's novel. Since no previous comparative study of Pelleas et Melisande and The Scarlet Letter exists, the works themselves are the major sources of information.

This is a study of the Byzantine novel or Milesian tale in Spain during the 17th century. It contains a brief comment about the origin of this literary mode and the significance of the two adjectives Byzantine and Milesian. Two novels of the Hellenistic originators of this form are discussed. Four Spanish Byzantine novels are considered in chronological order, with summaries and analyses, with particular attention to their similarity to or modification of the prototypes. It is concluded that this particular aspect of 17th century Spanish fiction is a deliberate imitation of the Hellenistic models, modified by the Spanish authors by the addition of original and contemporary ideas. No longer a popular genre, the Byzantine novel made a significant contribution to the development of the modern Spanish novel.

Four themes dominate Balzae's Pere Goriot: Paris, ambition, money, superman. Paris is described physically, socially and morally all strata of society are cruel and corrupt. The contrast between poverty and luxury arouses the ambition of young provincial Rastignae. While his ambition is mainly social, most of the characters of the novel have financial ambitions; money is their only valued Vautrin would kill and Goriot's daughters would reduce their father to pauperism for profit. Beth Vautrin and Goriot are presented as supermen, but while the former is a strong-willed ruthless ex-convict, the latter is a monomaniac, utterly blinded by paternal love. The four themes reflect contemporary society as well as Ralzac's own life and character. They recur throughout the Comdie Humalne but are skilfully condensed in Le Pere Goriot.

This paper is a study of the major influence of the German philosophy, Krausism, in the writings of Benito Perez Galdds. The study is an analysis of the effects of this ideology on Spain and her people, as illustrated in the works of the most representative writer of the nineteenth century in that country. Also included is a discussion of historical incidents of the period which is necessary to place the acceptance of both this philosophy and the works of Perez Galdos in its proper perspective.

This thesis is an examination of the printed media in France (1955-1963), as represented by two mainstream newspapers: Le Monde (left-centrist) and Le Figaro (right-centrist). Using these newspapers, as well as Gallup polls recorded at the time, this study explores correlations of what was reported in newspapers and how French public opinion evolved during the course of the war. These two major sources of information are shown to have given contradictory information, thus accounting for some of the paradoxes found in public opinion polls. Specifically, the paradoxes analyzed in the study concern the Front de Libération Nationale (FLN) and the Pieds-Noirs (the European population of North Africa).

This study of the graphic field in notes on space, undated (log 3) focuses on how the white emptiness of a page plays a structural role in the articulation of dissociated fragments of notes. According to the criteria of three theorists (Genette, Lapacherie, Baetens), the distinction between non-linear and tabular proves to be non-exclusive in this particular work. Ostensibly, this non-figurative writing instigates interactive contemplation and lends itself to multiple entries, like an object one contemplates from every possible visual perspective without ever constructing a representation or image. The poetic form that du Bouchet explores renders perceptible the latent materiality of all text.

This study analyzes students' use of the French second-person pronouns tu (T) and vous (V) in small-group (2-3 students) inter-learner online chat sessions. The influence of internal linguistic factors (i.e., turn type and morphosyntactic environment) on learners' appropriate vs. inappropriate use of these pronouns is considered. The study also investigates the influence of Instructional Level on tu-vous use and the extent to which students from different instructional levels provide various types of peer assistance (e.g., lexical, morphosyntactic, and sociolinguistic/pragmatic) . Pronoun use was extremely unstable for learners of all levels, and a Kruskal-Wallis analysis revealed that Instructional Level did not significantly affect appropriate T/V use overall. Instructional Level and Syntax did, however, significantly affect interrogative T/V use, as shown through multivariate analyses. Peer-assisted performance was limited to lexical retrieval. Pedagogical recommendations are presented for teaching and learning second-person pronouns in French.

This study of the variable use of ne in synchronous electronic French discourse follows the methodological guidelines and the theoretical framework proposed and subsequently elaborated by Labov for analyzing variable features of language. This thesis provides a quantitative variable rule (i.e., VARBRUL) analysis including age as a factor group (i.e., independent variable), thereby making a new contribution to this area of inquiry. The data (50,000 words from the vingtaine 'twentysomething' channel and 50,000 words from the cinquantaine 'fiftysomething' channel) are a subset of 100,000 words from a corpus of one million words collected in 2008 by the thesis director from the public chat server EuropNet. This study aims to answer the following overarching question: To what extent does age-compared to other factors-influence the variable use of ne in verbal negation in synchronous electronic French discourse? In order to answer this question, and possibly others, the VARBRUL analysis will include age, subject (e.g., noun vs. pronoun), type of second negative particle (e.g., pas 'not', jamais 'never', personne 'no one'/'nobody', and so forth), as well as verbal mood/tense.

Written in French, this thesis presents a comparative and intertextual study on the theme of « windows » in four poems by Charles Baudelaire, Stéphane Mallarmé, Marie Krysinska and Guillaume Apollinaire. Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867), Stéphane Mallarmé (1842 -1898), Marie Krysinska (1857-1908) and Guillaume Apollinaire (1880-1918) use « windows » as a common theme in their poetry. My study compares this common theme found in four poems: (1) “Les fenêtres” by Charles Baudelaire in Spleen de Paris XXXV, 1869. (2) “Les fenêtres” by Stéphane Mallarmé in Le Parnasse Contemporain, 1863/66. (3) “Les fenêtres” by Marie Krysinska in Rythmes pittoresques, 1890. (4) “Les fenêtres” by Guillaume Apollinaire in Calligrammes (1913-1916), 1918. I focus on what distinguishes these fours poems by following the evolution of poetical forms between symbolism and futurism/surrealism. The common theme (“windows”) provides an opportunity to better underline the formal heterogeneity which separates these different “poetical avenues”: with Baudelaire, the newness of prose poetry; with Mallarmé, the symbolist renewal of a more classic form; with Apollinaire, a form of simultaneity inspired by futurism. The comparative analysis brings to light the original value of the poem written by Krysinska, whose works have not greatly captivated the attention of critics.

The political ideologies that Martí envisioned of an America free from the inherited yoke of European ideals were taken by Fidel Castro as an anti-imperialist discourse. Therefore, Marti’s political vision on the power that the United States began to carry out at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century was an excellent strategy to establish the anti-imperialist character of the Cuban revolution. Since 1961, Castro set Martí as the face of his Marxist-Leninist ideology to institute his anti-American philosophy; Castro created a myth of Marti’s persona, and converted him into the bastion of his political ideology. As a result, Castro distorted the revolutionary ideas of Marti’s. Castro proposed his ideas out of context and portrayed the incorrect idea of this great thinker and poet. Martí’s human ethic and love for the independence of Cuba placed Martí as a liberator of revolutionary and progressive ideas of his generation. Martí was not thought as a dictator and never was a man who lacked democratic values. The expressed analytical assimilation of Martí on his sociopolitical and economic juncture that was presented in America and Cuba was used to trace the political anti-imperialist propaganda by the dictatorial regime …

The unfolding of eroticism always has been controlled socially; its expression forbidden for the women and accepted for the men. Ernestina de Champourcín’s poetry is an example of the presence of eroticism and the Avant-Garde in Spanish poetry. Champourcín becomes a member of the Generation of ‘27 after appearing in the prologue of Gerardo Diego’s anthology, Poesía Española Contemporßnea (1934). According to this thesis, the shortage of studies on her work is due to her exile, not to the Spanish Civil War. The exposition celebrates the life and work of Champourcín and studies the relationship between the Avant-Garde and sensuality in her poetry and in poems of Pedro Salinas and Vicente Aleixandre. It compares their individual handling of the Avant-Garde, the sexual act, and love, and concludes that Champourcín’s poetry is as Avant-Garde and erotic as the works of her companions of the Generation of ‘27.