Publisher's Synopsis
This is a collection of essays selected from papers given at conferences held at Wichita State University in 1986 and 1987. The literary works discussed were written in three languages, and originated in both Germanies, France, Canada, Spain, Guadeloupe, Senegal, Vald'Aoste, and Latin America from the early Renaissance to the 1980s. Both well-known writers and authors relatively unknown in the U.S. are presented. The themes and the methodologies informing their discussion vary from Wittgenstein's positivism to a discussion of silence as signifier; from archetypes to utopian consciousness; from seizing oral tradition's power of the word to a re-examination of the female rite of passage; from madness as a metaphor of powerlessness to prison imagery in Renaissance works.
