‘You, my body, and my mind, one of these will go’: Madness as Disguise in Samuel Beckett's Murphy and Endgame

ithin the wide topic of disguise in literature, we could signal a subcurrent which can be found in a number of literary texts: the idea of madness as a disguise, i.e. the creation or invention of a ‘false self’ as a mask which is presented to the world and which conceals the real self. In The Divided Self (1960), R. D. Laing deals with the “personality, false self, mask, front or persona that (...) [schizophrenic] wear” (73). Using as a basis Laing’s theories on schizophrenia and the creation of a false-self system, we will analyze two works by Samuel Beckett: Murphy and Endgame, where we find the uses of madness as disguise in a series of ways: through the usage of ‘disguised’ language (what we could refer to as schizophrenese) which acts as a mask for real meaning; through odd ‘schizophrenic’ behaviour on the part of the characters (which screens real intentions), and, mainly, through the creation of a ‘false self’ which acts as a disguise and barrier between the inner self and the real world. These two works by Samuel Beckett, where real intentions and meanings are continuously concealed and disguised in a desperate attempt to preserve the inner self, lend themselves to an analysis of madness as disguise, precisely the one we attempt to carry out in our paper.

The Ultimate Secrecy: Feminist Readings of Masculine Trauma in Vietnam War Literature

It is a widely acknowledged and often unquestioned fact that patriarchy and its modes of behaviour and social organization favour the appearance of trauma on the weakest (and defenceless) members of society: women. In the last decades, trauma seems to have taken the baton of typically female maladies such as 19th c. hysteria or 20th c. madness. Feminists in the 20th c. have long worked to prove the connection between the latter affections (and their reflection in literary texts) and patriarchal oppression or expectations of feminine behaviour and accordance to roles and rules. With Trauma Studies on the rise, the approach to the idea of the untold as related to femininity is manifold: on the one hand, is not trauma, which precludes telling about one’s own experience and keeps it locked not only from the others, but also from ourselves, the ultimate secrecy? On the other hand, when analyzing works that reflect trauma, one is astounded by the high number of them with a female protagonist and an almost all-female cast: in this sense, a ‘feminist’ reading is almost compulsory, in the sense that it is usually the author’s assumption that patriarchal systems of exploitation and expectations favour traumatic events and their outcome (silence and secrets) on the powerless, usually women. Often, traumatic texts combine feminism with other analytical discourses (one of the topics proposed for this panel): Toni Morrison’s study of traumatic responses in The Bluest Eye and Beloved cannot be untangled from her critique of slavery; just as much of Chicana feminism and its representations of rape and abuse (two main agents of trauma) analyze the nexus of patriarchy, new forms of post-colonialism, and the dynamics of power and powerlessness in ethnic contexts. Within this tradition that establishes the secrecies of trauma as an almost exclusively feminine characteristic, one is however faced with texts which have traumatized males as protagonists: curiously enough, most of these characters have suffered trauma through a typically masculine experience: that of war and its aftermath. By analyzing novels dealing with war veterans from Vietnam or the Second World War, the astounding findings are the frequent mixture of masculine or even ‘macho’ values and the denial of any kind of ‘feminine’ characteristics, combined with a very strict set of rules of power and hierarchy that clearly establish who is empowered and who is powerless. It is our argument that this replication of patriarchal modes of domination, which place the lowest ranks of the army in a ‘feminine’ situation, blended with the compulsory ‘macho’ stance soldiers are forced to adopt as army men (as seen, for example, in Philip Caputo’s Indian Country, Larry Heinemann’s Paco’s Story or Ed Dodge’s DAU: A Novel of Vietnam) furthers the onset and seriousness of ulterior trauma. In this sense, we can also analyze this kind of writing from a ‘feminist’ point of view, since the dynamics of über-patriarchal power established at the front at war-time deny any display of elements traditionally viewed as ‘feminine’ (such as grief, guilt or emotions) in soldiers. If trauma is the result of a game of patriarchal empowerment, how can feminist works, not only theoretical, but also fictional, overthrow it? Are ‘feminine’ characteristics necessary to escape trauma, even in male victims? How can feminist readings of trauma enhance our understanding of its dynamics and help produce new modes of interaction that transcend power and gender division as the basis for the organization of society?

Las poéticas explícitas de Antonio Colinas

Poets' thoughts about poetry have long been the subject of much attention. Since Classical Antiquity this has given rise to powerful reflections about literature, influencing texts which would then become part of academic discourse. However, these have also been used to help to explain or exemplify questions the academic discipline of Literary Theory have failed to address properly, since such questions related to the process of creation justifiably give attention to the writers' own experiences of such a process. Nevertheless, although the content of texts in which poets explain their own creation or specify key aspects of the literary process has been taken into account, there has not been any systematic study of the formal aspects of the discourse coming from the creator. The reason lies in the fact that the discourse of the creator takes different and variant directions that complicate its definition and distinction in relation to other kinds of similar texts. The first part, theoretical in nature, has emerged from the study of explicit poetics by numerous authors, as well as from critical bibliography. This seeks to identify common characteristics of these texts. Conversely, the second and third parts aims to find the individuality of Colinas' poetics, which manifests itself fundamentally in its content. Because of this, it is the study of the core parts of Colinas' poetic thinking expressed in the trends of his explicit poetics that will constitute a substantial part of this section of research...

Thematic patterning in English and Spanish: contrastive annotation of a bilingual newspaper corpus for liguistic and computational applications

Thematization is recognized as a fundamental phenomenon in the construction of messages and texts by di erent linguistic schools. This location within a text privileges the elements that guide the reader in the orientation and interpretation of discourse at di erent levels. Thematizing a linguistic unit by locating it in the rst-initial position of a clause, paragraph, or text, confers upon it a special status: a signal of the organizational strategy which characterizes di erent text types playing a role as a variable in the distinction of registers, text types and genres. However, in spite of the importance of the study of thematization for message and textual structuring, to date there are no linguistic studies that have undertook the task of validating its aspects in a comparative manner, either for linguistic or computational purposes. This study, therefore, lls a research gap by implementing a methodology based on contrastive corpus annotation, which allows to empirically validate aspects of the phenomenon of Thematization in English and Spanish, it also seeks to develop a bilingual English-Spanish comparable corpus of newspaper texts automatically annotated with thematic features at clausal and discourse levels. The empirically validated categories (Thematic Field and its elements: Textual Theme, Interpersonal Theme, PreHead and Head) are used to annotate a larger corpus of three newspaper genres news reports, editorials and letters to the editor in terms of thematic choices. This characterization, reveals interesting results, such as the use of genre-speci c strategies in thematic position. In addition, the thesis investigates the possibility to automate the annotation of thematic features in the bilingual corpus through the development of a set of JAVA rules implemented in GATE. It also shows the e cacy of this method in comparison with the manual annotation results...

Ideología y narrativa: la función significativa, el pensamiento estetizante y las relaciones humanas

This research deals with the study of ideology in the novel. Our motivation has philosophical implications and refers to fundamental and foundational issues of literary theory and aesthetics in general. Thus, the definition of the object of study for a correct formulation of these questions, as appropriate, represents the first difficulty of this research. The concept of ideology is of a problematic nature due to the polysemy of the term and the Marxist pejorative use associated to it. In our work, however, we understand ideology in a general and literal way: study and system of ideas. This research seeks to justify the study of ideology and its relevance in the investigation of narrative text as a system of ideas for understanding the world that determines the individual's relationship with it within the novel. The epistemological approach of our research relates the concept of ideology in terms of literary hermeneutics, critical theory, and dialogic criticism, linked trough the critical inquiry and the signifying function of ideology. Furthermore, the ideological representation of the signifying function in literary texts responds to aesthetic criteria, and therefore aesthetics constitutes the specificity of the methodological approach of this study. Bakhtińs essential text on literary theory, "The Problem of Content, Material and Form in Verbal Arts", allows us to develop an understanding of the literary phenomena based on the concept of aestheticided thought. The main references to establish the foundational criteria of our investigation based on the hermeneutic-aesthetic relationship are P. Ricoeur, M. Bakhtin, and J. Habermas...

Dios y la dama como referentes en la poesía amorosa española (siglos XV-XVII). A propósito de la hipérbole sacroprofana

In this dissertation I will study the phenomenon of the hipérbole sacroprofana in different Castillian writers of the 15th to the 17th centuries, in order to show in what does this fact consists, and how it has to be sorted out. Thus, I will also show how this tendency unfolds and how the use of either one or another resource leads the hipérbole towards different expressive horizons. Although the hipérbole sacroprofana is usually detected by most of scholars, it has never met proper attention, so that it has turned into a jumble in which the most disparate instances of a lady’s praise. Yet, an accurate analysis of this phenomenon reveals that this is not the case, and that this resource has manifold aspects and varying intentions and expressive ways as well. In this dissertation, where some five thousand hipérboles are analysed, I point out the various kinds of instances, and I classify them according to their expression and their literary-intellectual interweaving. Besides I monitor this fact to explain how hipérbole varies with the passage of times. By so doing a deficiency in the history of literary criticism, which mistook and likened all sorts of hipérboles in poetical texts, is eased. So we can see that, in its origins, hipérbole was confined to using sacred terms in profane poems out of their context (which I call hipérbole léxica o de inserción terminológica). This resource was effectual insofar as the use of words religiously connoted carried along devout attitudes towards poems of earthly love so that the lady and the feeling that the author professed became “adulterated” by Christian attitudes...

Narrativa de tradición oral maya-tojolabal

For this research, a literary study of the oral tradition in the Maya-Tojolabal culture was carried out through an examination of a collection of 37 texts. The texts were audiovisually recorded through interviews with 17 Tojolabal informants from six communities in the state of Chiapas, Mexico. The Maya-Tojolabal people, found in the southeast of Chiapas, speak one of the Mayan languages of Mexico. One of their cultural expressions is traditional narrative, which is constituted by several versions of stories that men and women with expertise in traditional storytelling maintain alive. However, this oral tradition has been neglected by academia, and the very few studies on this tradition are primarily focused on either the historical, anthropological or linguistic aspects. The literary approach to this phenomenon has largely been relegated to articles that do not offer the possibility of any critical formalsemantic study of the stories that they publish. Nonetheless, there are some exceptional cases, which are considered in detail in this research. Like any collective art, the narrative in the Tojolabal oral tradition manifests in various forms, meanings, and mechanisms that are shared by all members of the community. In addition to being an artistic expression, the narratives are also a reflection of the values and beliefs shared by the group...

El tratamiento estético de la figura de la prostituta en la lírica modernista española

This PhD thesis sets out to show, firstly, that Spanish modernist poets are lavish in their sublimation of the figure of the prostitute in their lyrical compositions. It argues that ultimately, they do not do this randomly or arbitrarily, but in response to a series of mechanisms that turn this sublimation into an investigation within the modernist movement. The need for a study such as this one seems indisputable, as not very much work has been done on this topic in Spanish literature, unlike in other literatures (particularly Latin American literature, precisely in the same turn-of-the-century period and in connection with Modernism). What little work has been published on the treatment of the figure of the prostitute in turn-of-the-century Spanish literature refers to narrative prose, notably the realist and naturalist novel, as well as the short story. Also, such work usually lacks a general theoretical framework, as it deals with one novel, one author, or in the case of greater generalisation, a specific type of novel. The study of this figure in literary texts involves studying Modernism itself, as it neatly draws together the panoply of topics so dear to Modernism, namely, the erotic, the marginal, the feminine, the cursed and Culturalism...

Sintaxis del discurso en Dt 4, 1-40

Dt 4, 1-40 it a Biblical text particularly relevant, both for its location and sense within the Deuteronomy book, as well as for its relation with the overall Deuteronomist literature. However, we do not handle in-depth and extensive studies of this text, with exception of the works published by G. Braulik516, D. Knapp517 and K. Holter518, and other exploratory studies much thoroughly investigated, as well as small monographic ones specified in a particular matter. On the other hand, the investigation of the text has been focused mainly around the historical and theological analysis of it, with the purpose to determine the time in which the text was introduced in the total of the book, as well as to weight the significance of the different stratum of the text, its sources... For this reason, other medium of approach to the text has been left aside, or had been used only as instruments to be served to the main purpose of this study. This has been for instance the study of the literary analysis. Nevertheless, during these last years, the literary investigation of the biblical texts (linguistics, narrative, rhetoric, comparative literature...) has gained boom, and had allowed a great appreciation of these texts, overall its historical or theological relevance. Dt 4, 1-40 has been benefit from all of it. The studies dedicated to the literary analysis of Dt 4, 1-40 show considerable patterns on the ways they had been carried. We have analysed them from the syntax and narrative points of view, fields very little investigated up to now. We believe it is necessary to study the text from these two perspectives to appreciate the wealth of this literary composition beyond the topics covered on it, and to contribute this way to a deep investigation of such a significant text in shape and content for the present Biblical Philology. The final objective of our study it is to arrive to a full comprehension of the thematic and literary unity of the text through its syntactic and narrative analysis, and, at the same time, to determine the mutual and necessary relationship that exist between one to another in this line of investigation...

Propuesta de un análisis metafórico-poético en una novela de ciencia ficción: 2001, una odisea del espacio

The aim of this doctoral thesis is to analyse both the text (production) and the set of cognition processes which facilitate the understanding of a masterpiece of Science Fiction: 2001, A Space Odyssey from a new perspective. Unlike other literary theories, texts in cognitive poetics (i.e. Structuralism, Generative Linguistics, Literary Criticism) are projected on the readerś minds by means of cognitive procedures. Cognitive poetics uses tools of cognitive science in order to understand literature (and in this particular case, Science Fiction). This has lead to a great change in our understanding of texts, literary and otherwise. This literary analysis was carried out on the Science Fiction genre based on the assumptions of cognitive poetics. Due to the peculiar kind of subjects touched upon by this genre, it has been theorised that the type of metaphor used for both its creation and style are rather different from other genres. Science Fiction coincides with other genres of writing in that it contains its own specific ways of providing language with a meaning while making it so innovative that many literary theories point out that it is written differently or that it is necessary to possess single reading codes in order to be fully understood. The methodology used for this thesis required a metaphorical basic and poetic conceptual analysis according to the poetical metaphor theory developed by Lakoff and Turner (1989). The aim of this metaphorical study is to analyse the basic and conceptual structure of 2001, A Space Odyssey by A. C. Clarke. The parameters of literary conceptualization of Science Fiction established by Peter Stockwell in his Poetics of Science Fiction (2000) were also applied in order to analyse this novel. The ICMs (Idealised Cognitive Models) were then examined to determine the presence of isomorphism related to the production level...