Browsing by Subject "Hispanic and Luso Literatures, Cultures & Linguistics"
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Item The acquisition of Spanish vowels by native English-Speaking students in Spanish immersion programs.(2010-06) Menke, Mandy R.Native-like pronunciation is necessary for membership into some social groups and to be considered a legitimate speaker of a language. Language immersion education aims to develop bilingual individuals, able to participate in multiple global communities, and while the lexical, syntactic, and sociolinguistic development of immersion learners is well documented, their phonological skills are not. This study set out to address this gap by investigating immersion learners' pronunciation of Spanish vowels, a sound class known to lead to a foreign accent, comparing the vowel productions of native English-speaking learners in one-way (foreign language) immersion and two-way (bilingual) immersion programs to those of their native Spanish-speaking peers and their teachers. A total of 85 immersion students participated in this study. A cross-sectional sample of students from each of the program/language groups was taken; students from each of four grade levels (first, third, fifth, and seventh) participated. Students completed an animal picture sorting task in pairs during which their speech was audio and video recorded. Up to twenty tokens of each of the five Spanish vowels, for a possible total of 100 tokens per subject, were isolated and examined via spectrographic analysis in order to measure first and second formant values. The tokens examined for each vowel were balanced for their occurrence in stressed and unstressed syllables. Students also completed a written questionnaire in order to gather data about extralinguistic factors (i.e., attitudes and motivation) that have been shown to influence pronunciation. The findings indicate that the vowel productions of immersion learners differ from those of native Spanish-speaking peers. In general, the vowel space of the learner groups is larger than that of the native speaker peer group. Over time, the number of differences between one-way NES learners and native speakers increase while the number of differences between two-way NES learners and native speakers decrease. This finding suggests that there may be an effect of program model; however, differences in the ethnic background and exposure to Spanish outside of school between the two learner groups may also play a role and thus make it difficult to attribute differences solely to the effect of program model. Differences in attitude between the groups do not reach statistical significance and do not correlate with more native-like vowel pronunciations.Item Ciphering nations: performing identity in Brazil and the Caribbean.(2011-06) Wood, Naomi PueoThis dissertation explores the interaction of theories of hybridity, mestizaje, mestiçagem and popular culture representations of national identity in Cuba, Brazil, and Puerto Rico throughout the 20th century. I examine a series of cultural products, including performance, film, and literature, and argue that using the four elements of Hip Hop culture—deejay, emcee, break, graffiti—as a lens for reading draws out the intra- American dialogues and foregrounds the Africanist aesthetic as it informs the formation of national identity in the Americas. Hip Hop, rather than focus solely on its characteristic hybridity, calls attention to race and to a legacy of fighting racism. Instead of hiding behind miscegenation and aspirations of romanticized hybridity and mixing, it blatantly points out oppressions and introduces them into popular culture through its four components—thus reaching audiences through multiple modalities. Tropes of mestizaje or branqueamento—racial mixing/whitening—depoliticize blackness through official refusal to cite cultural contributions and emphasize instead a whitened blending. Hip Hop points blatantly to persistent social inequalities. Diverse and divergent in their political histories, the geographic and nationally bound sites that form the foci of this study are bound by their contentious relationships to the United States, an emphasis on the Africanist aesthetic, and a rich history of intertextual exchanges. Rather than look at individual nation formation and marginalized bodies’ performances of subversion, this study highlights the common tropes that link these nations and bodies and that privilege an alternative way of constructing history and understanding present day transnational bodies.Item The Interaction between orality and literacy in the Basque Country(2010-06) Arozamena, VanesaIn the last decades, many authors have started choosing Basque, originally an oral language, as the language in which they write their literary works. Basque culture prizes oral manifestations, like improvised verses, legends and storytelling. The value placed on orality has an influence on recent texts written in Basque in a variety of manners, as authors use the same techniques that are usually utilized in spoken language, insert oral traditions or orature in the written works and get ideas for them from stories they were told orally. At the same time as oral traditions are influencing written texts, higher levels of literacy among verse improvisers is impacting many aspects of oral manifestations. Therefore, we can say that while oral tradition has an influence on novels written in Basque, literacy affects Basque oral manifestations. The Basque culture has traditionally been perceived as a rural and uncivilized one, partly due to the fact that it has been a predominately oral culture. In present day Western societies, literacy tends to be linked to civilization, whereas orality is often associated to lack of it. While some forms of Basque oral traditions and forms of orature started having prestige only when their performers began to be educated, Basque writers often use their literary works to undermine this polarized idea about literacy and civilization and orality and lack of it. Even though it has not always been like this, nowadays, Western societies rely on the written text in order to store and transmit information, as it is seen as permanent and invariant, while the oral text would be invariable and ephemeral. Basque forms of orature, oral traditions and written literary works often show us that the written word can easily disappear, while the oral word can remain over time. In conclusion, we cannot understand orality and literacy, civilization and lack of civilization, and permanence and impermanence as opposed to each other, as all these concepts interact with each other.Item Literatura policial: gender, genre, and appropriation in Argentine and Brazilian hard-boiled crime fiction.(2011-06) Ostrom, Katherine AnnThis dissertation examines how adaptations of the hard-boiled crime genre have become tools for literary innovation and social criticism in the work of four contemporary authors. Since the 1970s, influential writers such as Rubem Fonseca in Brazil and Ricardo Piglia in Argentina have established new national variants of literatura policial as nuanced forms of protest against cultures of impunity and state terrorism. More recently, Brazilian Patrícia Melo and Argentine Claudia Piñeiro have enriched these national traditions with their own interpretations of urban violence and created new ways for women to speak in a genre that has been heavily dominated by men. As a popular genre associated with a conservative, Anglo-centric worldview, crime fiction was long ignored by critics of Latin American literature; even now that its importance is increasingly recognized, most studies have dwelt on its relationship with government and capitalism, neglecting its metafictional qualities and its critique of gender relations. By focusing both on representations of male and female characters and on various modes of discourse in the work of Fonseca, Piglia, Melo, and Piñeiro, this dissertation brings a new perspective to an undervalued body of literature.Item Re-configuring paternal legacies through ritualistic art: daughters and fathers in contemporary fiction by women of African descent.(2012-06) Pierre-Louis, Barbara GinaIn “Re-Configuring Paternal Legacies through Ritualistic Art: Daughters and Fathers in Contemporary Fiction by Women of African Descent,” I analyze three contemporary novels by Black women authors to argue that their daughter-protagonists gain a sense of their own subjectivities as women of African descent through their imaginative and creative responses to their own muted paternal histories and legacies. These responses motivate the creation of ritualistic art forms rooted in communal practices such as storytelling, sculpting, music, dance-drama, folk medicine, and traditional cuisine. In this dissertation, I use theoretical formulations developed in disciplines such as literary studies, gender studies, Brazilian regionalist studies, and African diaspora studies. These interdisciplinary approaches have allowed me to map the centrality of family, community, rituals, and art to the development of female subjectivity as represented in Marilene Felinto’s As mulheres de Tijucopapo/The Women of Tijucopapo, Edwidge Danticat’s The Dew Breaker, and Gayl Jones’s Corregidora. I define ritualistic art as any folk art form that individuals employ to achieve healing and transcendence, liberate muted histories, honor their spatial environments, and reintegrate themselves into their communities. I explore father-daughter relationships as connections that are held together by participation in ritualistic art forms that honors folk wisdom, storytelling, and vernacular utterances that are invoked through dreams, mythology, and archetypal figures of the African diaspora. Throughout the dissertation, I consider how generations of survivors, generations of families work through issues of grief, forgiveness, and the need to remember, the need to retell buried histories. I engage with these ideas within the context of the cultural productions of female artists, writers, and knowledge creators and their relationships to the legacies of their fathers. The concepts of paternal loss and paternal yearning in their various forms take a center stage in the art created by these daughter-protagonists. In the three texts examined, ritualistic art is described as practices that are multivocal, both here and there, multi-local, and multi-temporal— spanning time and space, bending and transfiguring the boundaries between the physical and the metaphysical. It is through the practice of ritualistic art that the community becomes accessible to the Afro-diasporic daughters featured in this dissertation. My point of entry into an analysis of these three texts is based on a reassessment of the muted histories of fathers who contribute significantly to female subjectivity, yet have been traditionally relegated to the margins of gender studies and other types of social research. Even today, too many members of the African diaspora are forced to experience fatherhood through absence and loss. Millions of men of African descent are violently ripped from their families as a result of state sponsored violence, warmaking criminalization, and the combined hardship of racism poverty. When black fathers are present daughters are often at a loss. Women are forced to reconcile personal, social, and political histories, with our desire, myth and longing for a “father figure.” My work privileges texts that depict daughter-protagonists as artists who use their imagination to summon their paternal legacies. In doing so, these texts also connect literary, aural, visual art forms and the ways folk artistic expressions inspire contemporary Afro-diasporic women artists to re-articulate, reinforce, and at times transgress social conventions.Item Remembering the thirteen roses: thinking between history and memory.(2010-05) Larson, Kajsa C.Remembering the Thirteen Roses: Thinking between History and Memory examines the execution of thirteen young, communist women, named the Thirteen Roses, on August 5, 1939, to show how Spaniards in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have assigned meaning to and represented the memories of those who opposed Franco during the Spanish Civil War. Through the analysis of poetry, fiction, journalism, theater, and film, my dissertation documents the ways the Roses’ memory has been recycled and transformed over time from the remembrance of a historical event to a polysemic literary and cultural trope. This trope, in the postwar years, embodied communist political ideals but, with the passing of time, was converted into a symbol for democracy and, later, into a depoliticized tale of human suffering. The development of the Roses trope alerts us to the mechanics of collective memory, a concept coined by Maurice Halbwachs to explain how ‘memory’ is a socially constructed notion that is experienced within a group. The recollection of the women’s execution serves as a case study for how society manipulates and assigns different meanings to collective memories over time, highlighting the manner in which collective memory is both a cultural and discursive construct. Memories, like that of the Roses, intersect and negotiate specific political, historical, social, and cultural objectives in a social context. Remembering the Thirteen Roses combines history, memory studies, and literary scholarship to deepen our understanding of Spain’s recent social and political movements in favor of the recuperation of historical memory of the Spanish Civil War, as it is reflected in the ever-evolving representations of one tragic event.Item Rethinking disappearance in Chilean post-coup narratives.(2011-05) Howe, Alexis LynnThis dissertation explores Chilean narratives produced since the 1973 coup d'état (from the dictatorship and post-dictatorship periods) and analyzes representations of disappearance, which range from the institutionalized practice of enforced disappearance during the dictatorship, to the erasure of inconvenient histories and memories during the transition to democracy, and the persistent vanishing of marginal subjects in neoliberal democratic Chile. Focusing on the work of Ana Vásquez, Luz Arce, Ariel Dorfman, Roberto Bolaño, and Diamela Eltit, who present disappearance in numerous forms and in a variety of genres (novels, testimonio, drama, film, and texts that blur generic boundaries), I argue that, as one of many authoritarian continuities in democratic Chile, disappearance persists in the present. My study begins to articulate other manifestations of disappearance that extend beyond the notion of enforced disappearance as a phenomenon contained during the dictatorship period, and constitutes a space for rethinking disappearance in neoliberal democracies.