Romanica Gothoburgensia – serie

The Romance languages are the Indo-European languages developed from Latin. The term "Romance Languages" also refers to the academic discipline, which studies the Romance languages and literature from the areas where the Romance languages are spoken. This discipline has a long tradition in Sweden. Swedish academic education and research in the Romance languages forms the subject of this anthology, whose contributions are written by 22 different researchers active in the field. The anthology examines the historical development of the study of the Romance languages in Sweden, as well as important trends in current education and research. The question of what characterizes the Romance languages as an academic discipline in Sweden today is thoroughly discussed in several of the contributions. The book brings a metadisciplinary perspective in the sense that it is the discipline itself, Romance languages – or some aspect of it – that constitutes the object of study. It is aimed at anyone with an interest in university and scholarly history and the development and position of academic language subjects in a Swedish university context. In addition, several of the contributions are of relevance for readers with an interest in language didactics and for pedagogical research on language teaching in higher education. The hope is that the reflections and investigations gathered in this anthology will serve as a starting point for the future development of the study of the Romance languages in Sweden.

The overall aim of this dissertation is to generate a theory explaining the variation in the way the Spaniards, particularly the Spanish women, designate female professionals. Three different studies are included, the first one a quantitative survey on how the use of the three main strategies for referring to female professionals (the feminine: la abogada; the common gender: la abogado; lexical modification: mujer abogado) is determined by the sex, the age and the educational level of the speakers. The material consists of 40 professions and includes job titles of various types, representing different socioeconomic levels in the Spanish society. The results show that 18 of the 40 professsions are used in the feminine, 22 in the common gender and, consequently, no profession is used in the third variant by the majority of the informants. The conclusions regarding the impact of the social factors confirm a majority use of feminine designations by the women, the oldest age group and the speakers with the highest level of education, respectively. However, the differences between the groups are marginal counted in absolute numbers. The analysis of the extent to which the informants are ready to accept the feminine of the professions demonstrates the highest values in the following groups: the women, the youngest age group and the informants with the lowest educational level. The results of the qualitative study show that several factors influence the election of variant in the 22 cases not used in the feminine according to the first study, which indicates the predomination of idiosyncrasy in this field. Due to the small differences between the groups concerning the feminine use, the aim of the third study is to find out what factors determine the female use. In 31 in-depth interviews, cards illustrating different professions, practised by both men and women, are presented and discussed. The analysis of this study is couched within the Grounded Theory framework, according to which the aim is to generate a new theory, not to confirm an existing one. Such a theory is entirely grounded in the empiric data that emerge throughout the analysis, when data are compared for similarities and formed into categories. The core category – existence in our study – is the one which accounts for most of the variation around the concern. Thus, the prerequisite of the use of a feminine title is its approval by the Royal Spanish Academy. However, its power is twofold. The academic norm is prescriptive only in non-existing cases, since nobody uses, unless in very specific contexts, a feminine title that is not accepted. In the opposite case, the use of the feminine is optional and determined by the factors awareness, presence, habit, aesthetics, attitude and idiosyncrasy. To ensure the highest degree of reliability and validity of our final conclusions, the last step consists of triangulating the three studies.

This thesis sets out to explore the clash between two rights. On the one hand the right of every person to protect his or her private life and reputation, on the other the right of an artist to create freely. Taking real people and putting them into literary works is not a recent phenomenon, but it is occurring more than ever in modern literature, just as there is a greater propensity to take novelists to court for what they write about real people. Obviously, people do not always appreciate becoming literary heroes, to see their most intimate secrets spread publicly and they themselves becoming the object of idle gossip. That is where the law intervenes, sometimes in favor of the victim, sometimes in favor of the artist, depending on the circumstances. The aim of this thesis is in the first place to proceed with a critical inventory of the current situation, including research into French law as well as court rulings regarding novelists sued by individuals who claim to have been turned into fictional characters. The research material consists therefore of legal decisions as well as of literary works. Fourteen chosen works of literature are discussed in the thesis. However, the main objective and core of the research is to propose new recommendations, inspired in particular by literary theories, which would allow for a better balance between opposing rights. This is all the more important since the French legal system has recently adopted a new law recognizing the specificity of artistic freedom, as compared to freedom of speech. Among the changes proposed is a law stating that a work presented as a novel should be treated as such by a court. Another proposed change is the implementation of the formal right of each person who feels his or her privacy has been encroached upon, to reply to the novelist, in a context provided by the publishing house. The most important improvement would be the possibility for the magistrate to call on an expert in literary and linguistic theories to assist in the case. The function of the expert would be to judge if the text in question contains elements that identify it as a work of fiction, and more importantly, to assess the degree of fictionality and credibility of the character alter ego of the individual claiming to have suffered from the publication. By taking into account literary techniques, and therefore the manner in which an eventual breach in privacy occurs, the courts could then make a fairer and more readily accepted decision, or at least one more in accordance with the rule of proportionality expected in every democracy.