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An overwhelming consensus in feminist and poststructuralist analyses of ancient martyr accounts is that due to gendered depictions where women are cast in masculine light, these holy women unavoidably lost their identities as women. For the former, women made to be men can, rightfully, no longer be called women. For the latter, a morass of competing "texts" do away with any recognizably unified, gendered identity: "she" is replaced by an un-gendered amalgam of cultural discourses. The present study wishes to readdress this identity loss by an emphasis on the imitatio Christi. Importantly, the imitatio is a theological motive that, despite being a key characteristic of hagiographical texts, is mentioned by many modern treatments only to be effectively disavowed as salient to the construction of ancient Christian identity, male or female. By analyzing martyrological texts with the imitatio in mind, this study seeks to see if it is possible to construct a viable, historical model for a holy woman, qua woman, when her pious motivations are acknowledged as her own and not as a foreign overlay. In other words, this study wishes to be a via media. While taking into account feminist and poststructural critiques which have exposed the gendered biases of the ancient world this study also seeks to attempt a constructive inquiry as to whether the explicit pious motivations of these women might function to give them back their womanhood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Image-Documents: Found and Appropriated Images in Documentary Cinema is a conceptualization of the use of found and appropriated images--ranging from home movies to Hollywood films, from archival footage to television news--as the core of an immanent theory of documentary cinema. Through a series of conceptual encounters with central terms in documentary history and scholarship, this dissertation counters the rote critique of found footage as merely a convenient spectacle onto which documentaries graft their arguments. Combining readings of film theory, documentary criticism, continental philosophy, and contemporary theory with close analyses of specific films, Image-Documents at once lays bare the apparatus of documentary and its use of images to make truth claims, while redefining documentary outside the imperative to "represent reality." In place of the reified oscillation between critiquing documentary's rhetoric of objectivity and embrace of reflexive tactics and ethical witnessing, this dissertation argues for an understanding of documentary as a mode of expression irreducible to the accurate capture of "real" events. Image-documents are the unruly theoretical objects that articulate the documentary potential immanent to all images.

En estas páginas pretendo reflexionar sobre los adverbios de manera comúnmente denominados "adverbios de enunciación" o "adverbios ilocutivos". Con base en su comportamiento formal y en sus propiedades semántico-pragmáticas, se persigue deslindar los signos idiomáticos susceptibles de quedar encuadrados en este grupo y mostrar sus relaciones con otras clases de "adverbios oracionales". Asimismo, teniendo en cuenta en la identidad semántico-pragmática de este tipo de formantes adverbiales, se hacen algunas reflexiones sobre las condiciones comunicativas que explican sus ocurrencias. In this piece of work it is my intention to reflect about adverbs of manner commonly known as "enunciation or illocutionary adverbs". We pretend to make a distinction that will allow us to separate them from this group and show their relationship to other types of "adverbial phrases" based on their pragmatic and semantic characteristics and their formal behaviour. Likewise, taking into account the pragmatic and semantic identity of these adverbial forms, some reflexions are made about the communicative conditions that explain their ocurrence