The scope of this thesis is to show how the use of maps in political and scientific arguments functions as a mediator between ideological discourse and the physical landscape. This is done by studying three maps displaying the same geographical region but from different times and with different motifs. The maps were studied by operationalizing the French Sociologist Bruno Latour’s concept of immu-table mobiles into a methodological toolset.The thesis shows that the cartographic tradition of the Swedish state throughout the 20th century func-tioned as an immutable mobile that ideological actors could use to form political or scientific argu-ments. An almost trivial point to make. However, the problem is the great distance between state and the place, which in this case is about 1400 kilometers. Thus, the map allows a remote power relation-ship. As the state-owned immutable mobiles were extracted, they were interpreted by the politicians and scientists ideological perspectives. The ideological interpretations were then used in government propositions and reports and thus resulted in actual political decisions that affected the physical land-scape.The creation of Abisko National Park is one example of how this process can look. The park was instigated with a specific set of political goals to be achieved. The political and scientific actors used the immutable mobile that is the map and formed a proposition with it. The act of instigating and upholding the Abisko Valley as a national park is thus a manifestation of both state presence, its supremacy over territory as well as its contemporary ideological context. Moreover, it would be im-possible to instigate a park without the use of maps to define its borders. The planning and ratification of Transnational Road 98 can be seen as another example of the same thing, but with a different contemporary ideology as background.The thesis results in an explanation about what the maps role is in a stately place making process. Additionally the thesis shows what happens over time as different ideological embodiments in the landscape conflict with each other because of their different visions of how the landscape should be used and by whom. / Uppsatsens syfte är att försöka hur kartor fungerar som en länk mellan politisk diskurs och det fysiska landskapet. Detta görs genom att studera tre kartor som avbildar samma område men vid olika tidpunkter och med olika motiv. Kartorna studeras genom en operationalisering av den franske sociologen Bruno Latour’s teori om ’immutable mobiles’.Uppsatsen visar att den statliga kartografiska verksamheten under 1900-talet i Sverige producerade immutable mobiles som sedan kunde avläsas av aktörer och som i sin tur kunde använda dem för att understödja deras politiska och vetenskapliga argument. En tillsynes trivial poäng. Problemet är dock avståndet i mellan den centraliserade makten och platsen som i detta fallet är ca 1400 kilometer. Kartorna möjliggör alltså en maktrelation trots det stora avståndet. Allt eftersom de statligt ägda kartorna var hämtade, tolkades de av aktörernas ideologiska perspektiv. Dessa tolkningar låg sedan till grund för politiska beslut som sedan resulterade i faktiska ingrepp i landskapet.Formerandet av Abisko nationalpark används i uppsatsen som ett exempel på hur denna process fungerar. Parken skapades med ett specifikt set av ideologiska motiv. De politiska aktörerna använde statliga kartor för att utforma sin proposition. Formerandet av parken är således en manifestation av både statlig närvaro, statlig kontroll över landskapet och ett ideologiskt artefakt. Det vore därtill omöjligt att skapa parken utan en karta för att definiera dess gränser. Planerandet och konstruerandet av mellanriksväg 98 mellan Kiruna och Narvik har analyserats på ett liknande sätt, dock med en annan ideologisk bakgrund.Uppsatsen resulterar i en möjlig förklaring till vad kartorna har för roll i en statlig platsskapande och landskapsförändrande process. Vidare så försöker uppsatsen förklara hur olika ideologiska tolkningar av landskapet kan hamna i konflikt med varandra över tid på grund av inkompatibla ideologiska motiv.

This dissertation examines the impact of modernity, in the form of modernization, rapid industrialization and the introduction of Western ideas about nationalism and female emancipation, on gender and gender relations in contemporary Malaysian film and literature. Drawing upon theories ranging from Lacanian psychoanalysis, feminism, postcolonialism, nationalism, existentialism to theories about fascism, I examine and critique the representations of gender from the predominantly middle-class writers and the works of the new wave Malay filmmakers. I make the case that these films and literary works reflect the outcome of the National Economic Policy (1971-1990) and, in my analyses, show that these modernizing imperatives, though received positively, are sometimes greeted with a cautionary ambivalence, depending on one's class, gender, ethnicity, and political and religious beliefs. Such ambivalence towards feminism, for example, appears in K.S. Maniam's portrayal of independent female characters, whom I call "fascist 'feminists'," or in the representations of hypermasculinity or male violence in current Malay cinema. Films and literature by some Malays reflect a desire to recover Malay custom, adat, while forging a unique, modern, postcolonial identity that distinguishes itself from the West, other former British colonies and other Muslim nations. However, this subversive postcolonial move must be treated with caution to ensure that it does not replicate prevalent negative stereotypes of women as sexualised beings. A key distinction in this dissertation is that the representations of the modern Malay woman vary according to the gender of the cultural producer: male writers and filmmakers portray the negative impact of modernity on women, whereas their female counterparts portray women at ease with modernity.

This dissertation investigates the phenomenon of the reworking of children's narrative, generally termed "fairy tales," within the framework of Spanish post-Civil War fiction. It is focused on selected novels by four contemporary women writers whose works are representative of the phenomenon under study. They are: Carmen Laforet (Nada 1944), Ana Maria Matute (Primera memoria 1959), Esther Tusquets ( El mismo mar de todos los veranos 1979) and Carmen Martin Gaite (Caperucita en Manhattan 1990 and La reina de las nieves 1994). / The first three chapters examine generic issues as a preliminary step towards the explanation of the significance of fairy tales to novelists today. To this end, the first chapter tackles the ambiguities surrounding current definitions of the fairy-tale genre to establish dearly the nature of the narrative substructure of the novels of the study. It proposes an alternative approach which lends a chronological dimension to present definitions that are based on stylistic and structural analysis alone. This is followed by a second chapter which explains the recurrence of fairy tales and fairy-tale motifs in the novels by underlining the structural and conceptual similarities between the two genres. The third chapter is devoted to a comparative analysis of the genres under study as a means of isolating minimal recurrent units of the children's narratives and explaining their transformation in the novels. / The last three chapters, based primarily on the findings of the comparative analysis of the fairy tales and their novelistic versions, focus on two important fairy-tale motifs that appear to hold the key to the importance of fairy tales in the novels: The marginalization of the fairy-tale hero and the ambiguous image of the mother-figure as at once evil and benevolent. The fourth chapter therefore concentrates on the various conventions of marginality in the novels and the fifth is dedicated to a study of the structure of the contemporary novel against the backdrop of its transformation of the basic fairy-tale paradigm that traces the development of the hero from a marginalized position to his/her integration into society. The sixth chapter concludes the question of transformations by analyzing the image of the woman in the contemporary novel on the basis of the reworking of the evil stepmother/fairy godmother motif.

In twentieth-century poets such as W. B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot, Robert Lowell and Allen Ginsberg, the literary apocalyptic--identifiable by its homology with the major elements of the biblical Apocalypse--undergoes progressively complex transmutations. While in the early Yeats the apocalyptic is evocative of earnest Romantic moods, in his later work it is complicated by irony, yoked to the cycles of Yeatsean history, and counteracted by exaggerated postures of defiance. In Eliot, a reductive juxtaposition of the apocalyptic and the contemporary foreshortens the traditional paradigms to a diminutive modern-day scale. In Lowell, the apocalyptic is manifested variously as a bitter inversion of American Puritan eschatology, the telescoping of the personal and the cosmic, and a catastrophe in slow-motion. The climactic point of distortion, however, is reached in Ginsberg's poetry in which apocalyptic horrors form a bizarre combination with humour and bathos. While their treatment of the eschatological is widely divergent, an element common to all four poets is their ambivalence towards the paradigms of an apocalyptic new world.

In this dissertation I explain the transition from modernism to postmodernism through the study of the French existentialist novel. I follow theories that demonstrate that the latter owes its success to historiographic metafiction. By setting off the aporias that deeply penetrate modern novels, I demonstrate the obsolescence of the prototype of the realist novel and I explain the impasses towards which the project of a committed literature lead, inscribed in the line of realism and aimed at an almost direct relation with society and history through the mediation of art between 1945 and 1955 in France. / On one hand I consider literature as an object which can be described by the methodologies of history. On the other hand I suggest an analysis of the historicity of the text that is constituted by the dynamic system generated by the interaction, the interdependence, and the correlation of the poetic and aesthetic parameters and the factors of the historical context. My aim is to set off the poetic and aesthetic mecanism of stability and of transformation of literary creation according to the dynamic relation between the vector of the project associated to realism and the one of the prototype associated to the novel. I think that late modernism produces paradoxical configurations of the novel because it is the period in which the project of realism becomes lapsed and the prototype of the realist novel becomes dilapidated. / Among the works that are exemplary of the tension between fiction and history and between project and prototype in the framework of the representation of reality and of the inscription of history in novels, I identified Albert Camus' La Peste, Simone de Beauvoir's Les Mandarins and Jean-Paul Sartre's Les Chemins de la liberte . I conclude that the enterprise of committed literature was an aporias because it was generated from the impoverishment of the project of realism and the obsolescence of the prototype of the novel. Later literature was extricated, firstly, by the radically and extremely metafictional writing of the Nouveau Roman and, secondly, it was changed by postmodern historiographic metafiction. The crisis of history and of the writing of history was solved by works in which there is the acknowledgement and the use of sophisticated mediations to evoke and inscribe history in different ways.

This thesis explores the question, “What literary strategies can be employed to allow as many people as possible to identify themselves positively with South Africa as a nation and a country?”. I focus in particular on the possibilities for identification open to white South African women, engaging with Antjie Krog's English texts, A Change of Tongue, Down to My Last Skin and Body Bereft. I seek to identify the textual strategies, such as a fluid structure, shifts between genre and a multiplicity of points of view, which Krog employs to examine this topic, and to highlight the ways in which the literary text is able to facilitate a fuller engagement with issues of difference and belonging in society than other discursive forms. I also consider several theoretical concepts, namely supplementarity, displacement and diaspora, that I believe offer useful ways of understanding the transformation of individual subjectivity within a transitional society. I then explore the ways in which women identify with, and thereby create their own space within, the nation. I investigate the ways in which Krog represents women in A Change of Tongue, and discuss how Krog uses „the body‟ as a theoretical site and a performative medium through which to explore the possibilities, and the limitations, for identification with the nation facing white South African women. I also propose that by writing „the body‟, Krog foregrounds her own act of writing thereby highlighting the construction and representation of her „self‟ through the text. I proceed to consider Krog's use of poetry as a textual strategy that enables her to explore the nuances of these themes in ways which prose does not allow. I propose that lyric poetry, as a mode of expression which emphasises the allusive, the imaginative or the affective, has a capacity to render in language those experiences, emotions and sensations that are often considered intangible or elusive. Through a selection of poems from Down to My Last Skin and Body Bereft, I examine the way in which Krog constantly re-writes the themes of belonging and identity, as well as interrogate Krog's use of poetry as a strategy that permits both the writer and the reader access to new ways of understanding experiences, in particular the way apparently ephemeral experiences can be rooted in the body. I also briefly consider the significance of the act of translation in relation to the reading of Krog's poems. I conclude by suggesting that in A Change of Tongue, Down to My Last Skin and Body Bereft Krog engages with the project of “[writing] the white female experience back into the body of South African literature” (Jacobson “No Woman” 18), and in so doing offers possible ways in which white South African women can claim a sense of belonging within society as well as ways in which they can challenge, resist, re-construct and create their identities both as women, and as South Africans. / Thesis (M.A.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 2006.

This study examines Canadian works of fiction that contain historical trial narratives and that enact an adversarial trial of their own for an implied reader who acts as 'appellate judge.'' Included are four Canadian novels published after 1970 that fictionalize the circumstances leading to notorious criminal trials: Margaret Atwood's Alias Grace (1996), Lynn Crosbie's Paul's Case: The Kingston Letters (1997), and Rudy Wiebe's The Temptations of Big Bear (1973) and The Scorched-Wood People (1977). They represent commentaries on the justice or injustice done to convicted murderer Grace Marks (whose trial took place in 1843), to rebel Cree chief Big Bear and Metis leader Louis Riel (1885), and to serial rapists and killers Karla Homolka and Paul Bernardo (1993, 1995). / Each work reproduces excerpts from the original trial yet also represents a response to the historical trial's unfolding. This adversarial response takes the form of a trial-like narrative (or counternarrative) that engages with the original trial. Consequently each of these works is what I call a 'trial novel' that raises fundamental questions about justice and citizenship. / Chapter One analyzes Atwood's Alias Grace and lays bare the fictional constructs included in a trial narrative. Chapter Two looks at Crosbie's Paul's Case and pits the judicial system's claim to sober neutrality against a more populist version of justice based on affect and revenge. Finally, Chapter Three, which is devoted to Wiebe's novels, studies the conflict of normative universes implicit in trials for treason and posits that rebel nomoi are as coherent as the dominant ones that quash them. / Three communities are implicit in these novels and enter into a debate with one another: at the core of each work is a historical community of persons (the accused, attorneys, the judge, jurors, and members of the Canadian public) mobilized around an actual crime. This original community and its judgment provide the inspiration for the fictional community of the novel, which grapples with its own version of the crime and trial. Finally, an imaginative community of readers deliberates upon the questions raised both by the original trial and by the 'trial novel'.

Black Snow, an orchestral work composed by Michael Smetanin in 1987, was named after the book Black Snow by Mikhael Bulgakov. Newspaper articles, reviews and the literature researched, all comment on Smetanin’s style and on the influences that shaped that style. The aggressive and confrontational style of much of Smetanin’s music can be attributed partly to his love of rock music and jazz and partly to his mentor in the Netherlands, Louis Andriessen. The same sources quote other composers who also influenced Smetanin’s style. Three works in particular are named, that is, Trans by Stockhausen, Keqrops by Xenakis and De Tijd by Andriessen. It was decided, in the light of previous investigations into Smetanin’s music, to take one of these composers, namely Stockhausen and his work Trans, and discover how much Smetanin was influenced by this composer and this particular work. Trans was chosen because the similarities with Black Snow are less obvious. All aspects of Black Snow were examined - namely the harmony, rhythms, the important textures, serial/mathematical techniques, orchestration, the dramatic program, how the instruments are played - and then compared with Trans for similarities and differences. The results of the analytical investigation show that, while the internal organisation of the two works is very different, there are significant similarities between the two works in most of these areas. Serial/mathematical techniques could only be demonstrated in one area, and this is only conjecture.

This thesis takes as its starting point the consensus among scholars and interpreters of Joseph Roth’s work that his writing can be divided into two periods: an early “socialist” phase and a later “monarchist” phase. In opposition to this view, a reading of Roth’s novels is put forward in which his desire to make sense of post-Habsburg Central Europe provides the underlying logic, thus reconciling his early novels with Radetzkymarsch and Die Kapuzinergruft. The first chapter addresses the common contention that the transformation in Roth’s work is the result of a deep identity crisis. An alternative reading of the relevance of Roth’s identity to his work is offered: namely, that Roth’s conviction that identity is multivalent explains his rejection of both nationalism and other “solutions” to the problems of post-war Europe, a sentiment that finds expression in his early novels. The interpretation of these novels, which represent Roth’s early attempts to give literary form to contemporary reality, is the focus of the second chapter of the thesis. In the third chapter Radetzkymarsch is analyzed as a historical novel in the terms first proposed by Georg Lukács, as a novel which facilitates the understanding of the present through the portrayal of the past. Paradoxically, it is the historical form that most effectively captures and illuminates the complex reality of Roth’s contemporary times. The fourth and final chapter demonstrates that Die Kapuzinergruft is not simply an inferior sequel to Radetzkymarsch, a nostalgic evocation of an idealized lost Habsburg world and condemnation of the 1930s present, but rather continues the dialogue between past and present begun in Radetzkymarsch. In this novel, written before and in the immediate aftermath of the Anschluß of Austria to Nazi Germany, it is not Roth but his narrator who takes flight from reality, behaviour that Roth condemns as leading to the repetition of mistakes from the past and the failure to prevent the ultimate political catastrophe.

The reading of four contemporary novels, namely: Credo by Melvyn Bragg, The Catastrophist by Ronan Bennett, Everything You Need by A.L. Kennedy and American Gods by Neil Gaiman explores the prominent position of mythification and remythification in contemporary literature. The discussion of Bragg's novel examines the significance of Celtic mythology and folklore and to what extent it influenced Christian mythology on the British Isles and vice versa. The presentation of the transition from a cyclical, pagan to a linear, Christian belief system is analysed. My analysis of Bennett's novel supports the observation that political myth as myth transformed contains elements and qualities embodied by sacred myths and investigates the relevance of Johan Degenaar's observation that "[p]ostmodernism emphasises the fact that myth is an ambiguous phenomenon" and practices an attitude of "eternal vigilance" (1995: 47), as is evident in the main protagonist's dispassionate stance. My reading of Kennedy's novel explores the bond that myth creates between the artist and the audience and argues that the writer as myth creator fulfils a restorative function through the mythical and symbolic qualities embedded in literature. Gaiman's novel American Gods focuses on the function of meta/multi-mythology in contemporary literature (especially the fantasy genre) and on what these qualities reveal about a society and its concerns and values. The thesis contemplates how in each case the original myths were substituted, modulated or transfigured to be presented as metamyth or myth transformed. The analysis shows that myth can be used in various ways in literature: as the data or information that is recreated and transformed in the creative process to establish a common matrix of stories, symbols, images and motifs which represents a bond between the author and the reader in terms of the meaning-making process; to facilitate a spiritual enrichment in a demythologized world and for its restorative abilities. The study is confirmed by detailed mythical reference. / English Studies / (D. Litt. et Phil. (English))