This thesis is an analysis of the media attention concerning the artist Anna Odell and her artwork Okänd, kvinna 2009 – 349701. The main materials I have used come from newspapers and articles where critics discuss Odell´s artwork in the period 2009 to 2015. The theoretical and methodological framework is based on Arthur C. Danto, George Dickie and Howard Beckers understanding of the art world and how artwork and artist receive their status. Another theoretical tool I have used is a discourse theory of Mara Lee. Lee helped me to understand the language and the relations between power and institutions. My aim with this thesis has been to understand how Okänd, kvinna 2009 – 349701 achieved its value and its transformation from a bad to a good evaluation. Why did Odell, in the beginning, get blamed for using tax money, tricking people in to believing that she was mentally ill resulting to the attention of the police, but in the end became an appreciated artist for this very same action? Odell was criticized for her behavior and was accused of stepping over a line for using art in a questionable way. A discussion started about the question of what art is. And what the purpose of art in society is. A few years later, in 2015, Odell was called one of the most interesting artists in Sweden by art critics when they wrote about Okänd, kvinna 2009 – 349701. What changed in the eyes of the critics? What is artistic quality and how can we understand the transformation that Odell´s artwork underwent? My analysis shows that esthetic quality depends on the situation and in ethics and morality. At the beginning the critics compared Okänd, kvinna 2009 – 349701 and the profession of psychiatry and in that comparison the psychiatry profession is more important than art. People attributed more confidence to a doctor than to a student of art regarding the truth about what happened at the psychiatric institution of St: Göran´s on the 21th of January 2009.

This dissertation examines the importance of the concept of measurement to poets and literary critics in eighteenth-century England. It documents attempts to measure aspects of literary form, especially prosodic phenomena such as meter and rhythm, and it explores how these empirical and pseudo-empirical experiments influenced the writing and reading of poetry. During the Enlightenment, it argues, poets and critics were particularly drawn to prosody's apparent objectivity: through the parsing of lines and counting of syllables, prosody seemed to allow one to isolate and quite literally measure the beauty and significance of verse. Inquiries into the social and historical functions of literature routinely relied on this discourse, exploring questions of style, politics, and philosophy with the help of prosodic measurement. By drawing on works and artifacts ranging from dictionaries and grammars to mnemonic schemes and notional verse-making machines, and through close readings of poet-critics such as John Dryden, Alexander Pope, Thomas Gray, and Samuel Johnson, "Poetic Numbers" contends that the eighteenth century's fascination with prosody represents a foundational moment in the history of literary criticism: a moment whose acute self-consciousness about literary critical methods, as well as about whether and how these methods can aspire to count and account for aspects of literary experience, anticipates many of the methodological questions that mark our own time.

Esta pesquisa abre uma trajetória de leitura a partir de André Gide, centrando-se majoritariamente em dois de seus livros: Les Faux-monnayeurs, o único romance do autor, e Ainsi soit-il ou les jeux sont faits, livro de memórias e uma de suas últimas publicações em vida. A questão que guia a trajetória de leitura é primeiramente a escuta, de modo a entrelaçar o ensaio de Jean Luc-Nancy, À lécoute, o livro de Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Lécho du sujet e o texto de Jean Starobinski, La relation critique. Esse tecido teórico ajuda a investigar mais a fundo as seguintes perguntas: o que significa escutar um texto? Que implicações a escuta carrega para a crítica? Que tipo de fronteiras e divisões esse gesto é capaz de desfazer ou de reorganizar? Guiar-se pela escuta é possível segundo os pressupostos de escrita de uma tese acadêmica? Tais perguntas desencadeiam uma série de experimentos de leitura e escrita que diluem a nítida separação entre sujeito e objeto em meu texto, fazendo com que eu, como leitora, também me implique na narrativa a ser construída pela tese e dê a ver as experiências que funcionam como suas condições de enunciação (como, por exemplo, a discotecagem). Essa trajetória me conduzirá por fim às potenciais implicações políticas desse gesto por assim dizer experimental no interior da tese de doutorado. / This research opens a reading path based on André Gide, focused majorly on two of his books: Les Faux-monnayeurs, his only novel, and Ainsi soit-il ou les jeux sont faits, a memoir and one of his last publications in life. The main issue which guides this reading path is, first of all, listening itself, in a way to entwine Jean Luc-Nancys À lécoute, Philippe Lacoue- Labarthes Lécho du sujet, and Jean Starobinskis La relation critique. This theoretical tissue supports a deeper investigation around these questions: what does it mean to listen to a text? What implications listening conveys to critics? What kind of borders and divisions is this gesture capable of undoing or reorganizing? Is it possible to guide oneself through listening according to writing assumptions inside an academic thesis? These questions triggers a series of both reading and writing experiments that dilutes clear separations between subject and object in my text, enabling myself, as a reader, to enter this thesis narrative and manifest experiences that work as its utterance conditions (for example, DJing). This path ultimately guides me into potential political implications of the so to speak experimental gesture within this thesis.

<p>The dissertation Reading Texts or ”Reality” investigate teachers use of interpretive communities in teaching literature in secondary school. It discusses how different learning outcomes generates from three interpretory frames for reading. Teachers can be looked upon as critics when they show unexperienced readers why and how they read an interprete literary texts. In their teaching,they don´t relate only to their students but also to thier own conception of subject matter and to a broader discourse in society that deals with questions of why and how we read literature. Following voices of the discourse are included in the study: eight teachers, curriculum texts, a journal for the profession and a journal för scholors.</p><p>Teachers combine several aims in their teaching of literature. They use literature to discuss life, gender and problems related to young people, text as faction. But, they also try to teach their students about narrathology and how to understand and interpretate fictional texts, text as fiction and a world of signs. The curriculum, however, means that literature is read only to gain knowledge about the world,oneself and other people. A contradiction is that one of the criterias for assement includes knowledge of texts and methodology from the academic subject. One of the other voices in the discourse, a journal for scholors, talk about the literary texts but very seldom about teaching the texts. Another voice, a journal for teachers in Swedish, follows the curriculum closely and discusses reading literature as a way to get knowledge of the world.</p><p>Research in subject matter didactics can investigate teaching, relate different aims to different outcomes and show possibilities for teaching literature and reading comprehension. If we choose only one interpretive community, we get one kind of reading comprehension.If we combine two in a complex teaching strategy, we extend learning and reading comprehension of our students.</p>

<p>The aim of this essay is to debate the narrow contextualization of the works of Swedish artist Maria Friberg, in which she is interpreted as a female, feminist artist engaged in masculinity studies. Art reviews and exhibition catalogues regarding a great part of Friberg’s work have formed the core body of information in this study, selecting the more recent works entitled Still lives (2003- ) as the main focus. These show a change in Friberg’s artistic expression.</p><p>Subjects concerning group belonging, identity and existential questions have always been present in Maria Friberg’s art, but they are more clearly expressed in her latest works. Art critics have acknowledged the change of motifs in Still lives as a negative development and have expressed disappointment in the absence of Friberg’s renown portrayals of men in business suits. This attire and the gendered motif man have ascribed Friberg to an agenda surrounding masculinity and feminism, leaving little room for other interpretations.</p><p>The subordinate aim of the study is to suggest alternative readings of Friberg’s art in general and of the Still lives-series in particular. The great majority of art critics are accentuating Friberg’s interest in men, overlooking reasons for her supposed fascination of them. This creates a need for further examination of the depths of Friberg’s photographs. Hence, the last chapter presents a theory of the artists’ use of men as carriers of non-gender related meanings in which the human being is a small part of the impressive machinery composed of nature, culture and the industrialised world which absolutely devours humans.</p>

The dissertation Reading Texts or ”Reality” investigate teachers use of interpretive communities in teaching literature in secondary school. It discusses how different learning outcomes generates from three interpretory frames for reading. Teachers can be looked upon as critics when they show unexperienced readers why and how they read an interprete literary texts. In their teaching,they don´t relate only to their students but also to thier own conception of subject matter and to a broader discourse in society that deals with questions of why and how we read literature. Following voices of the discourse are included in the study: eight teachers, curriculum texts, a journal for the profession and a journal för scholors. Teachers combine several aims in their teaching of literature. They use literature to discuss life, gender and problems related to young people, text as faction. But, they also try to teach their students about narrathology and how to understand and interpretate fictional texts, text as fiction and a world of signs. The curriculum, however, means that literature is read only to gain knowledge about the world,oneself and other people. A contradiction is that one of the criterias for assement includes knowledge of texts and methodology from the academic subject. One of the other voices in the discourse, a journal for scholors, talk about the literary texts but very seldom about teaching the texts. Another voice, a journal for teachers in Swedish, follows the curriculum closely and discusses reading literature as a way to get knowledge of the world. Research in subject matter didactics can investigate teaching, relate different aims to different outcomes and show possibilities for teaching literature and reading comprehension. If we choose only one interpretive community, we get one kind of reading comprehension.If we combine two in a complex teaching strategy, we extend learning and reading comprehension of our students.

The aim of this essay is to debate the narrow contextualization of the works of Swedish artist Maria Friberg, in which she is interpreted as a female, feminist artist engaged in masculinity studies. Art reviews and exhibition catalogues regarding a great part of Friberg’s work have formed the core body of information in this study, selecting the more recent works entitled Still lives (2003- ) as the main focus. These show a change in Friberg’s artistic expression. Subjects concerning group belonging, identity and existential questions have always been present in Maria Friberg’s art, but they are more clearly expressed in her latest works. Art critics have acknowledged the change of motifs in Still lives as a negative development and have expressed disappointment in the absence of Friberg’s renown portrayals of men in business suits. This attire and the gendered motif man have ascribed Friberg to an agenda surrounding masculinity and feminism, leaving little room for other interpretations. The subordinate aim of the study is to suggest alternative readings of Friberg’s art in general and of the Still lives-series in particular. The great majority of art critics are accentuating Friberg’s interest in men, overlooking reasons for her supposed fascination of them. This creates a need for further examination of the depths of Friberg’s photographs. Hence, the last chapter presents a theory of the artists’ use of men as carriers of non-gender related meanings in which the human being is a small part of the impressive machinery composed of nature, culture and the industrialised world which absolutely devours humans.

Kara Walker, winner of the MacArthur “Genius” award and the Smithsonian Lucelia award, is one of the most critically acclaimed contemporary African American artists. Her work, especially her cut-paper silhouettes depicting grotesque antebellum scenes, has inspired as much outrage from an older generation of Black artists as acclaim from the mainstream media. This thesis gives an overview of the artist’s life, analysis of some of her works, and an examination of the controversy her work has caused. In the conclusion, I introduce the next generation of Black American artists, self-proclaimed “Art Stars,” including Atlanta artist Fahamu Pecou.

<p>1.1 billion people are today living without sustainable access to improved water. The debate over the water sector has been dominated by the discussion over whether public or private actors are the most competent to manage it. In this paper the arguments pro and contra the two positions are presented to try to overview the debate and to try to find new ways to approach the question of the people living without clean water. By examining possible alternatives towards the discussion of public and private actors, it might result in some new approaches on how to move closer towards a solution. One alternative is local, small- scale projects which focus on the situation of the targetgroup in most need. I have in this paper tried to find signs of that the debate is changing in a way that would bring positive outcomes for the people living without access to improved water. The debate is changing, both the private as well as the public sector is changing their ways of working and the alternative approach is increasing its influence. Hopefully the debate can move away from the discussion of ideology and acknowledge the strengths of each other to result in possible solutions of the water problems. With the increasing interest and concern for the question of water there is thus an opportunity for a change in the debate that would benefit the ones living without sustainable access to improved water.</p>

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