Discursive Models Research Articles

Testing Major Linguistic Politeness Theories against the Marital Relationships of Bilingual (Urdu and Punjabi) Speaking Pakistani Couples

The study aims to investigate the first order account of (im)politeness in the intimate relationships of married couples in the context of urban Pakistani society and with respect to four competing (face-saving, discursive, frame-based and rapport management) models of politeness. The study participants comprised 21 of those urban Pakistani bilingual (Urdu and Punjabi speaking) couples who sought psychological marital counselling from the researcher after being affected mainly by linguistic impoliteness and their training in linguistic politeness helped them out. Placed within the constructivist qualitative research paradigm and grounded in ethnography and phenomenology, findings of the study reveal that the phenomena under investigation should be studied within a more general framework, the discursive model emerges to be the most robust in its applicability though.

Demythologization and existential theology: formation of paradigm

The author Strielkova Yuliya A. in the article «Demythologization and existential theology: formation of paradigm» analyzed the conception of the demythologization of Sacred Scripture and Sacred translation as a fundamental setting not only within the dialectical theology of the twentieth century, but also for contemporary searches for the forms of correlation of philosophy and theology in the context of the scientific world pictur. The author outlines the heuristic potential of a reinterpretative approach to the concept of demythologization, considered beyond the conceptual and chronological framework of dialectical theology. Also, attention was focused on clarifying the heuristic content of the concept of "demythologization" for the modern philosophical and theological tradition, as well as the nature of its genetic connection with the existential paradigm of philosophizing and christology. Particular attention is paid to the paradigmatic and formative aspects of the phenomenon of demythologization; the role of language practices and discursive models in the development of the contemporary picture of the world is accentuated

Periodización y diacronía de los marcadores discursivos de distanciamiento: la etapa del español moderno

AbstractThe aim of this paper is to show the relevance of the first centuries of the modern age, especially the XVIII and the XIX centuries, for the history of the Spanish language as far as the creation and consolidation of new discourse markers are concerned. The development of new genres and discursive models involves different ways of constructing the discourse as well as the necessity of incorporating new markers to implement different discursive functions. In some cases these innovations are realized via grammaticalization through expansion processes fostered by a semantic change which itself has been created by the conventionalization of inferences associated to a construction. In other cases, the above-mentioned innovations are directly incorporated by adaptation or borrowing words from other languages in which they already had a fully-developed discursive function. In order to prove these claims, the author focuses on the analysis of a set of distance reformulative markers that emerged in the first centuries of the modern age and which show these processes in a manifest way.

Testing Major Linguistic Politeness Theories against the Marital Relationships of Bilingual (Urdu and Punjabi) Speaking Pakistani Couples

The study aims to investigate the first order account of (im)politeness in the intimate relationships of married couples in the context of urban Pakistani society and with respect to four competing (face-saving, discursive, frame-based and rapport management) models of politeness. The study participants comprised 21 of those urban Pakistani bilingual (Urdu and Punjabi speaking) couples who sought psychological marital counselling from the researcher after being affected mainly by linguistic impoliteness and their training in linguistic politeness helped them out. Placed within the constructivist qualitative research paradigm and grounded in ethnography and phenomenology, findings of the study reveal that the phenomena under investigation should be studied within a more general framework, the discursive model emerges to be the most robust in its applicability though.

Психолінгвістичні універсалії розуміння молитви "Отче наш" (дискурсивний підхід)

У статті теоретично та емпірично обґрунтовується дискурсивний підхід до дослідження особливостей розуміння молитви як базового жанру релігійного дискурсу. Релігійний дискурс розглядається як активна рецепція, передавання та/або творення (співтворення) релігійних текстів у певних їх контекстах (широких соціальних, зокрема, комунікативних, а також індивідуальних життєвих ситуаціях), що пов’язане з конструюванням релігійно релевантних дискурсивних моделей реальності та її складових через сукупність відповідно зорієнтованих понять і висловлювань (тверджень). У свою чергу, підбір, формулювання таких висловлювань, а також їх розуміння розглядаються як наслідок відповідних активних виборів суб’єкта релігійного дискурсу (індивідуального або колективного). У зв’язку з цим обґрунтовується, що молитва включає у себе, поряд із системою узагальнених, традиційних своїх значень (теологічний та лінгвістичний рівні аналізу), також індивідуальне, контекстуально зумовлене сприйняття та осмислення конкретним своїм суб’єктом (психологічний та психолінгвістичний рівні аналізу). На прикладі канонічної молитви «Отче наш» та зустрічних релігійних дискурсів (продуктів її розуміння) респондентів із різними рівнями релігійної активності (низьким, нижчим за середній, вищим за середній, високим) виокремлено базові категорії, крізь призму яких відбувається розуміння молитовного дискурсу: 1) «Буття та його загальні атрибути»; 2) «Бог, Його ім’я та атрибути»; 3) «Людина та її повсякденне буття»; 4) «Молитва та її складові»; 5) «Належне (духовне)»; 6) «Заборонене (гріховне)». Також констатовано наступні загальні тенденції (від найнижчого до найвищого рівня релігійної активності): істотне зростання – кількості слів, кількості речень і середньої кількості слів у реченні, слабке зростання – показників емоційної напруженості, а спадання – показників лексичної різноманітності та лексичної щільності релігійних дискурсів досліджених українців.
 Література
 References
 
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 Серкин В.П. Методы психосемантики: Учеб. пособие для студентов вузов. М.:Аспект-Пресс, 2004.Serkyn, V.P. (2004). Metody Psikhosemantiki [The Methods of Psychosemantics]. M.:Aspekt-Press.
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 Спилка Б., Лэдд К. Л. Психология молитвы. Научный подход. Харьков:Гуманитарный центр, 2015.Spilka, B., Ladd, K. L. (2015). Psikholohiya Molitvy. Nauchnyi podkhod [The Psychologyof Prayer: A Scientific Approach]. Kharkiv: Humanitarnyi Tsentr.

The Public–Private Dichotomy in Fascist Corporativism: Discursive Strategies and Models of Legitimization

The twentieth century starts with a rediscovery of the collective dimension that legal modernity had compressed. The vivid debate that came with the fascist corporatist experiment is an interesting observatory that lets us read this process against the light. According to the major part of Italian legal culture the corporatist cultural project seems to forewarn a new framework of the connections between public and private spheres, state and society, law and economics, statism and pluralism. Corporatism, which did not intend to build a non-statual model of authority, was an answer to the need to attribute legal value and legal autonomy to economic and social actors that weren’t adequately represented in the political and normative circuit. The paper is aimed at retracing some of the discursive strategies that characterized the corporatist experiment and the different legitimization models that were proposed by legal theory in order to rebuild the dichotomy between public and private spheres.

ПРАГМАТИЧЕСКИЕ МОДЕЛИ ДИСКУРСИВНОЙ АНАФОРЫ В МОНОЛОГИЧЕСКОМ ТЕКСТЕ

The aim of the article is to determine the pragmatic particularities of the monologist text thematic organization based on the discursive anaphora models. This aim predetermines the tasks connected with 1) outlining the conception of the theme as a textual segment manifesting sustained dependence on the fictional monologist text discursive scheme; 2) considering the fictional text monologist sphere based on the role the thematic components play in it; 3) revealing the referentially dependent anaphoric linguistic expression sequences which form the thematic components within the frameworks of the monologist text discursive scheme with regard to the communicative specifics of the text. The conclusions made in the article allow to get closer to a fuller understanding of how the cohesion relations and the anaphoric relations modeled by the thematic components facilitate the reader’s task on integrating the utterance discursive characteristics into a more global interpretative structure. It is proved that both phenomena forming the symbiosis realize the function of sustaining the meaning continuality and the referential plane of the connected utterances in the monologist text. This statement outlines the scientific significance of the research conducted. The practical significance of the article is determined by the possibility of using its basic results for further development of the problem of the «informational packing» for the utterances belonging to the monologist conversational genres, for revealing the mechanisms of the fictional text organization as the whole. The theoretic deductions achieved in the article could be used in teaching the contemporary Russian language in higher educational establishments, stylistics of decoding, special courses in philological hermeneutics and the courses devoted to the discursive basics of the monologist text organization.

Discapacidad: una construcción narrativa excluyente

<p align="justify">La identidad que la cultura atribuye a las personas con discapacidad está sustentada en narrativas de exclusión que se traducen en modelos discursivos de discriminación y abuso de poder, representados en normas y estereotipos excluyentes que niegan sus capacidades y atentan contra su reconocimiento para participar en condiciones de igualdad en la vida social y política. En este sentido, el análisis de las narrativas excluyentes permite develar dichas prácticas discriminatorias. El documento se encuentra estructurado en tres partes: 1) "La discapacidad, una construcción social traducida en normas y estereotipos excluyentes"; 2) modelos discursivos de la discapacidad, que parte de la pregunta ¿cuáles son los discursos que han intentado definir a la discapacidad?, y 3) la escuela como escenario para la transformación de narrativas excluyentes en narrativas de la diversidad y el respeto por los derechos humanos. El artículo se propone analizar la categoría <em>discapacidad</em> desde un marco discursivo de las narrativas de la exclusión, en la construcción de las identidades de las personas con discapacidad.</p>

Phrenologizing Opera Singers: The Scientific “Proofs of Musical Genius”

In some descriptions from the first half of the nineteenth century, scientific categories are used syncretically to explain opera singers' talents, including their innate and acquired dispositions, and their effects on audiences. Phrenology sought to read on the surface of skulls the developments of cerebral zones that corresponded to various instincts, or to affective and intellectual faculties. According to the partisans of this “only true Science of the Human Mind,” one could thus explain any aspect of human activity and life. Franz Joseph Gall's followers applied these theories to music and musicians, which constituted one of their privileged fields of observation, still largely unexplored by historians and philosophers of science. The singer united the qualities of the musician and actor, and stimulated abundant illustrative material—biographical and anecdotal, portraits, busts, and prints. Phrenologists thus fueled specific discursive models of observation and enunciation among early-nineteenth-century operatic audiences, which reflected and nourished the media doxa. A series of French and English texts highlight the phrenological and physiological “conditions” necessary to become an opera singer, and the combinations suited to a particular type of music. These sources contributed to the processes of operatic creation and reception, and to the forging of new interpretations of singers' public images, as both exceptional artists and socially normalized individuals.

A structural-cognitive semiotic analysis of the Qur'anic story "Joseph and his Brothers"

Previous work on the semiotics of Qur'anic narration is fairly sparse (cf. Hassanein, 2009b). In this paper I try to provide a semiotic analysis of the Qur'anic story Joseph and his Brothers, employing a model developed by Grambye and Sonne (2003a). The model draws heavily on the theories of structural-cognitive semiotics (Greimas, 1983; Brandt, 2004) and narratological terminology (Prince, 2003) and illustratively analyses the story's descriptive, narrative and argumentative propositional content, as well as enunciation, and discourse. The three facets of propositional content are examined in light of 3-D, transport, and thematic models, respectively. Enunciation and discourse are tested against enunciative and discursive models, respectively. The application of the general model offers a rich and insightful analysis of the story's text in a religious context, with particular focus placed on enunciation to serve a religious purpose. I find the model efficient in analysing narratives in a genre other than the folktale for which it was developed and I am thus recommending testing it against other narrative texts to figure out what it can further reveal.

Feminine trouble: The removal of femininity from feminist/lesbian/queer esthetics, imagery, and conceptualization

Synopsis This article utilizes the femme figure to examine the ways in which feminist, lesbian, and queer paradigms encourage and at times even pressure women to reject femininity in order to be included in these domains, and to expose the femme's potential in turn to put pressure on the boundaries of gender and sexual categories. While lesbian–feminist politics of the 1970s as well as radical feminist theories of the 1980 drove many femmes to convert to androgyny, other influential lesbian and queer representations and discursive models similarly led to a privileging of butchness and female masculinity and corresponding stigmatization and indeed exclusion of femininity and femmeness. The article argues that the denial of the femme is grounded in a reproduction of the dichotomy between feminism and femininity and the coupling of lesbianism with masculinity, both of which are based on misogynistic premises, and suggests a reconceptualization of the femme as a position which challenges not only the heteronormative sex–gender–sexuality continuum, but also some of the feminist, lesbian and queer trends aspiring to subvert it.

MAJNUN STRIKES BACK: CROSSINGS OF MADNESS AND HOMOSEXUALITY IN CONTEMPORARY ARABIC LITERATURE

AbstractThis article examines the association of homosexuality with madness in two contemporary novels, Hanan al-Shaykh'sInnaha London ya ʿAzizi(Only in London) and Hamdi Abu Golayyel's (Julayyil)Lusus Mutaqaʿidun(Thieves in Retirement). Through a comparative reading of the figure of Majnun, an impassioned lover and mad rebel, I argue that literary articulations of queer desire operate as embodied resistance to social and political normativity, both in the Arab world and in the diaspora. Discussing the aesthetic transformation of the contemporary novel and drawing on the Arab-Islamic literary and philosophical tradition, I critically engage Michel Foucault's reading of sexual and epistemological developments in light of current debates about Arab homosexuality. I show how discursive models of sexuality are situated in modernity's intertwinement with other structures of power and systems of belief, crossing cultural contexts and linguistic registers.

Singer-Machines: Describing Italian Singers, 1800-1850

Puppets, automata, electric creatures: in numerous descriptions from the first half of the nineteenth century, Italian singers were presented as singing and acting machines. Whether mechanical or electrical, such models do not merely reflect the technologies of the time and their circulation across a wider discursive field; nor do they simply illustrate a special case of cultural appropriation of science and technology in the emergent discipline of music criticism, in search of specialized tools and terms with which to describe operatic performance. Although mechanical models were usually used satirically to condemn specific singing or acting practices, and electrical models to applaud others, they were not limited to mere pejorative or laudatory criticism. Italian opera singers, whether compared to mechanical machines or considered as truly electric instruments, were discursively transformed into technical objects and thus acquired stronger aesthetic, cultural and social meanings. In her introduction to the recent issue of Opera Quarterly devoted to opera and machines,1 guest editor Bonnie Gordon proposed “decenter[ing] opera, [moving] away from thinking of it as dependent mostly on the subjective experiences of composers, performers, and audiences … moving from a subject- to an object-oriented approach.”2 Problematizing the relationship between musical performance and machines implies, however, a full analysis and historicization of discursive fields and their various intricacies. “Machines are social before being technical,” wrote Gilles Deleuze.3 The singer-machine is thus “simultaneously and inseparably a machinic assemblage and an assemblage of enunciation.”4 The present article will concentrate on precisely this discursive assemblage. Rather than reconstituting “mechanical” or “electric” acting and singing practices, or linking them to real technological uses in or outside theaters, I intend to focus here on the singer-machine by analyzing specific discursive models of description and observation in use among early nineteenth-century operatic critics.5

The Paradox of Dialogue

The Council of Europe's 2008 White Paper on Intercultural Dialogue signalled – with a measure of deep concern – the limits of multiculturalism and its attendant problems of identity politics, communal segregation, and the undermining of rights and freedoms in culturally closed communities. The White Paper proposed the replacement of the policy of multiculturalism with a policy of intercultural dialogue. The article in response reflects on the paradoxical nature of all discursive models of dialogue, including that of the Council of Europe, and suggests in its place a dramaturgical model of dialogue. All forms of dialogue that rely on discursive interaction run into the problem of incommensurable values, principles and ultimate authorities. From Weber and Kelsen to Castoriadis and Lyotard, this problem has been well assayed. It is not surmountable by the length, relative intensity or presumptive civility of a dialogue. Neither ‘willingness to listen’ nor ‘open-mindedness' – let alone ‘debate’ and ‘argument’ – can solve the deep, difficult aporias of fundamental value conflicts. Nor can appeals to human rights, democracy and the rule of law, though the Council of Europe believes otherwise. We live in a world where liberal values of these kinds are routinely contested by militant pre-enlightenment communities. Dialogue can make no substantive difference to this. What then can? Historically and structurally, patrimonial cultures are only transformed under dramaturgical conditions. The article explores how the modern society of strangers mobilizes role playing, public acting, dramatic dialogism and various types of social dramaturgy (afforded especially by the anonymous theatre of its cities, markets and publics), and causes thereby the ironic incorporation or else the gradual withering-away of patrimonies, patriarchies and other kinds of pre-enlightenment communities.

The fate of a migrant language in Northern France (1880–1914): Flemish in song repertoire

New research on the history of nineteenth-century Flemish migration into the North of France shows ample evidence of a complex pattern of transfer procedures taking place between the source and target cultures, both via institutions such as newspapers, magazines and associations and via practices such as popular theatre, almanacs and songs. The strong local embedding of migrant communities within a specific urban setting, i.e. industrial cities (Roubaix, Tourcoing, Lille), as well as the strong integration policy of the target culture, explain how and why Flemish cultural items are transferred and undergo a process of formal and functional hybridisation with the available institutional, linguistic and discursive models of the target culture. The following paper examines one type of transferred items, i.e. Flemish language elements, that are given particular emphasis in popular songs constructed by Flemish second-generation migrants. The analysis of these songs aims to show how procedures such as codeswitching and codemixing are used by migrant singers in order to construct a new hybrid language that may escape both uniform rejection and assimilation by the target culture.

The naked word: The trans-corporeal ethics of the protesting body

This essay brings feminist corporeal theories and material feminisms to bear upon the many naked protests occurring worldwide, asking how the naked body functions within these events. While most feminist corporeal theories remain within the demarcation of the Human, the naked protests considered here extend human corporeality into actual places, enacting nakedness as an ethical performance of vulnerability–the allied, mutual vulnerabilities of human/animal/environment. Taking up the concept of intercorporeality, as defined by Gail Weiss and others, I propose the term “trans-corporeality,” which emphasizes the imbrication of human bodies not only with each other, but with non-human creatures and physical landscapes. Feminist theories of performance, particularly those of Peggy Phelan (1993) and Rebecca Schneider (1997), are crucial for understanding the possibilities for expressing this sense of trans-corporeality, which redefines the human as material, and thus requires a critique, subversion, or evasion of the dominant modes of representation and the gendered scenarios of visibility. The performance artist/activist La Tigresa, who strips for loggers to save old-growth forests, and the many Bare Witness activists who spell out words with their naked bodies perform vulnerability as a trans-corporeal condition in which the material interchanges between human corporeality, geographical places, and vast networks of power, provoke ethical and political actions. Paying attention to particular corporeal actions, activities, practices, and events can help feminist theory reconsider “the body” as more than a site of cultural inscription. Moreover, the naked protests considered here extend the parameters of the political domain by seeking an ethical recognition of vulnerable, interdependent, interwoven, human and non-human flesh. The naked protestors, significantly, carve out a space for their politics as much as they assert a voice. In doing so, they emphasize what is often occluded by discursive models–actual places, material bodies, and other matters. This emphasis on political space is not only crucial for an environmentalism that must insist upon the value of particular places, but–when recast as trans-corporeal space–also for a range of issues, including environmental justice, environmental health, and queer politics, that demand a recognition of the coextensiveness of material needs, pleasures, and dangers.

Food, publics, science

This paper draws attention to food as a site around which a historically particular form of public engagement has emerged. In the past decade, some of the most lively debates and policy actions for science and publics have focused on food related issues: first with BSE and subsequently with genetically modified organisms. Even though much of the literature surrounding publics and science acknowledges that the very definition of "publics" is shifting, little attention has been paid to food as a significant arena in which publics are engaging in politically motivated challenges to techno-scientific practices, policies and institutions. Taking food seriously means contextualizing publics as well as extending discursive models of democratic engagement to embrace consumer practices.

Serving Don Juan: Decorum in Tirso de Molina and Molière

Although from quite different methodological and disciplinary perspectives, both Larry W. Riggs and George Mariscal identify a definitive marker of the modernity generally ascribed to sixteenth-and seventeenth-century western Europe: a convergence of and competition between rival discourses (and, implicitly, the ideologies informing such discursive models) with both epistemological and ontological implications. (1) Both Spain and France witnessed the emergence and establishment of public theaters and professional theater industries in the midst of this sea change, and in each country authors of popular comedy drew upon such discursive plurality to entertain their audiences--as well as to comment on or critique the broader society in which dramatist, actor, and audience found themselves. This comparative study posits the importance of the neoclassical precept of decorum in our efforts to trace the ways in which this broader cultural shift translates to early modern theatrical practice. Decorums usefulness as a tool for navigating the complex web of intersecting modes of discourse at the early modern playwright's disposal is proposed by way of case-study, namely through the two versions of the Don Juan myth penned by Tirso de Molina (in El burlador de Sevilla, 1630) and Moliere (in Dora Juan ou le Festin de Pierre, 1665). A focus on the servants attending to the plays' title characters, and on the master-servant relationship formed in each text, illuminates the fundamentally different ways in which the two playwrights negotiate the discursive heterogeneity that decorum was meant to systematically address. Early modern dramatists' conception of and their means of linguistically representing it were largely dictated by decorum, in essence a neoaristotelian precept whose call for a unity of character or social verisimilitude is both literary and social, insofar as it prescribes a hierarchical social order both for the spectacle onstage and for the audience witnessing it. The master-servant relationships that are discursively represented by Tirso and Moliere constitute divergent of decorum in terms of the socially and culturally marginal figure of the servant and his ethical position vis-a-vis the noble protagonist. While the socially marginal voice of Tirso's Catalinon continues to be read as a kind of conscience in the play, (2) I will qualify such a reading in light of the insights gained from a comparison to Moliere's Sganarelle--a role originally performed by the playwright himself. Indeed, we will see that the relationship between the servant's voice and his claims to moral authority is precisely where, in different ways, both Tirso and Moliere situate the comic tension and dramatic irony of their plays. The moral dimension of the two works--in both cases punctuated by Don Juan's eventual demise in an act of divine justice--has dominated readings of the plays at least since the heyday of the New Criticism, especially in the case of El burlador de Sevilla. Indeed, since the Spanish Romantic playwright Jose Zorilla rewrote the story as an archetypal conflict between good and evil in which Don Juan Tenorio is spared damnation at the last minute, the Don Juan legend has been read in such exemplary terms. Despite the more satirical and comic presentations of the story by Byron, Moliere, and Tirso, the notion of Don Juan as moral exemplum has been retroactively applied to their works. I would argue that this mode of reading tempts the twenty-first-century critic to underestimate the degree to which the codes, conventions, and aesthetic concerns of early modern comedy would serve as a filter through which any ostensibly moralist critique would be represented onstage and interpreted by an early modern audience. While by no means denying the presence of a moral problem in the Tirso and Moliere plays, this study proposes a more nuanced analysis of their comic treatment that considers more carefully the voices from which such a moralist critique is enunciated. …

Discursive Democracy and New Labour: Five Ways in Which Decision-Makers Manage Citizen Agendas in Public Participation Initiatives

New Labour's conceptualisation of public participation in local government creates a tension in public participation practice. Government legislation and guidance require local authorities to develop and provide citizen-centred services, engage the public in policy-making and respond to the public's views. Seen in this light, New Labour policy draws from radical democratic discourse. However, local authority staff are also expected to act in accordance with the direction set by their line managers, the Council and the government and to inform, engage and persuade the public of the benefit of their authority's policies. In this respect, New Labour policy draws from the discursive model of civil society, conceptualising public participation as a method for engendering civil ownership of the formal structures of representative democracy. Tension is likely to arise when the ideas, opinions and values of the local authority differ from those expressed by the participating public. This paper uses a local ‘public participation’ initiative to investigate how the tension is managed in practice. The study shows how decision-makers dealt with the tension by using participatory initiatives to supply information, understand the views of the public and encourage public support around pre-existing organisational agendas. Problems occurred when citizens introduced new agendas by breaking or manipulating the rules of participation. Decision-makers responded by using a number of distinctive methods for managing citizens’ agendas, some of which were accompanied by strategies for minimising the injury done to citizens’ motivations for further participation. The paper concludes that New Labour policy fails to deal with the tensions between the radical and discursive models of participation and in the final analysis draws mainly from the discursive model of participation. Furthermore, whilst New Labour policy promotes dialogue between the public and local authority, it does not empower local authority staff to achieve the goal of citizen-centred policy-making.

Re-Framing Discourse: Women before Their Public in Maria de Zayas

As the critical anthology edited by Amy Williamsen and Judith Whitenack, The Dynamics of Discourse, and other recent publications have clearly established for Zayas scholarship, one of the most crucial problems addressed in her novela collections is the function of discourse itself in the work of the author.1 Beginning with the paratextual materials with which she presents both volumes to her reading public, followed by her creation of the frame narrative's literary sarao, and in the repeated telling of their own and others' tales by sarao participants, we find that Zayas focuses our attention on the exercise of discursive agency by voices. Mirroring her authorial stance, the frame and novela characters work to present their stories to a demanding audience and, by so doing, attempt to establish themselves as active subjects in a competitive artistic milieu. In their studies of various novelas, critics have shown that the representation of discourse in Zayas's works involves the appropriation of discursive models from the masculine world of letters and the performative reworking of them. Her narratives question the logic of these models, often placing them in the service of alternative, unexpected ends, and in the process they ironize the disparity between the social principles and the such models support. The project of self-authorization undertaken by Zayas and her narrators confirms Susan Lanser's argument that female voice ... is a site of ideological tension made visible in textual practices (6-7), for we find in the novela collections a poetics whose narrative structures as well as ideas substantially alter models appropriated from the masculine realm of letters.2In this essay, I would like to revisit the relationship between Maria de Zayas's own successful, self-reflective discursive function in the first volume, Novelas amorosas y ejemplares, as a published writer who directs her words to a potentially censorial, male-dominated public of literati and the apparently frustrated discursive function of the frame tale protagonist, Lisis. While the late Ruth Anthony El Saffar and others have seen in Lisis's troubled love life a reflection of the personal experiences of or known to Zayas, less attention has been given to the common discursive function of the author and her frame protagonist, particularly in the first novelets volume, where the latter is generally viewed as suffering from an illness-induced passivity.3 Although the development of Lisis's voice is chronicled in the narrative as a troubled, often challenged process, this character mirrors specifically the authorial function of Zayas in her mimetic bid for discursive authority before an academy-like public whose male members are empowered to judge and to respond to her communications. This essay will focus on the ways that both Zayas's and her heroine's voice represent the author's concern that women learn to control their position, vis-a-vis their audience, by exercising deliberate choice in the place from which they speak or write.The represented context or place of discourse is deliberately foregrounded in Zayas's own paratextual framing of the Novelas amorosas y ejemplares, in which the author frustrates readers by leaving no biographical trail to suggest how experience might have shaped her art. I suggest that Zayas carefully censors personal information, in order to establish her identity through the act of writing itself. In contrast, for example, to Cervantes's autobiographical references to his military service and physical injury in his Novelas prologue, in Al que leyere Zayas articulates herself solely from an imaginary space delineated as the public sphere by her discursive present tense, omitting any allusion to family and her personal past.4 The author's decision to found her identity within this public domain of print culture, through a published literary work that had attributed economic value in its own right, stands in marked contrast to the places from which her characters are made to tell their stories in the frame narrative. …