Écfrasis y Lecturas Icono-textuales en las "Leyendas" de Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer

The relationship between literature and the visual arts is ancient and it has been studied from different conceptual frames. Scholars agree that both have a descriptive function and therefore share the common goal of portraying a fictional or nonfictional reality. Based on this correspondence between two different modes of artistic expression, the Roman poet Horace coined the well-known simile ut pictura poesis --as is painting so is in poetry-- which in turn functions as the theoretical underpinning of ekphrasis, a rhetorical device through which one medium of art tries to describe the essence and form of another medium of art, with the purpose of enhancing the original work described. Spanish post-romantic poet and writer Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer (1836-1870) mastered this rhetorical strategy by expertly weaving all of his artistic interests into his prose. The purpose of this dissertation is to analyze how Bécquer makes his readers both see and hear through his prose. My semiotic research encompasses the various forms of ekphrasis used by Bécquer in the “Leyendas”. It shows how both images and symbols produce in readers sensory experiences that enhance their role as active participants in the creation of meaning. Thus, Bécquer´s prose is like a painting which not only tells a story, but also reflects reality through the eyes of the reader’s imagination. By using these ekphrastic strategies in his collection of short stories, Bécquer makes words, paintings, and music converge and collide with iconography, visual culture, and intertextuality. These components must be read, seen, heard, and understood to be more than just complementary to the text, but rather crucial elements, equal in importance to verbal expression. This analysis shows how Bécquer’s “Leyendas” not only tackle notions such as fantasy, figuration, and imagination, but also the importance of the reader´s gaze. Bécquer integrates processes such as imaginative action, iconization and visualization, into a semantic web whereby the reader creates his own particular hermeneutic image.

A semantic paradigm for intelligent data access

An implementation of Sem-ODB—a database management system based on the Semantic Binary Model is presented. A metaschema of Sem-ODB database as well as the top-level architecture of the database engine is defined. A new benchmarking technique is proposed which allows databases built on different database models to compete fairly. This technique is applied to show that Sem-ODB has excellent efficiency comparing to a relational database on a certain class of database applications. A new semantic benchmark is designed which allows evaluation of the performance of the features characteristic of semantic database applications. An application used in the benchmark represents a class of problems requiring databases with sparse data, complex inheritances and many-to-many relations. Such databases can be naturally accommodated by semantic model. A fixed predefined implementation is not enforced allowing the database designer to choose the most efficient structures available in the DBMS tested. The results of the benchmark are analyzed. ^ A new high-level querying model for semantic databases is defined. It is proven adequate to serve as an efficient native semantic database interface, and has several advantages over the existing interfaces. It is optimizable and parallelizable, supports the definition of semantic userviews and the interoperability of semantic databases with other data sources such as World Wide Web, relational, and object-oriented databases. The query is structured as a semantic database schema graph with interlinking conditionals. The query result is a mini-database, accessible in the same way as the original database. The paradigm supports and utilizes the rich semantics and inherent ergonomics of semantic databases. ^ The analysis and high-level design of a system that exploits the superiority of the Semantic Database Model to other data models in expressive power and ease of use to allow uniform access to heterogeneous data sources such as semantic databases, relational databases, web sites, ASCII files, and others via a common query interface is presented. The Sem-ODB engine is used to control all the data sources combined under a unified semantic schema. A particular application of the system to provide an ODBC interface to the WWW as a data source is discussed. ^