The works of Tsai Ming-Liang and Kim Ki-Duk, two directors in contemporary Asian cinema, qualify as postmodern films transgressing the hegemonic dominance of classic text, aesthetic and structure manifested in the blockbuster Hollywood films that are overwhelming in Asia. The characters in Tsai’s and Kim’s films are social marginal and outcast excluded from main- stream society. They seem to be disengaged from their past and future, simply floating in different presents as a carrier of desire. One difference between is that the major figures in Tsai’s films are marginal young men and women presenting a sense of alienation and solitude among the residents of the city, and their intimate behavior is portrayed in enclosed spaces. Kim’s films, the major figures are abandoned by and isolated from society, either brutal men or solitary prostitutes. Tsai and Kim always make ample use of the residual in everydayness in order to produce the incessant different present-becoming. These becoming- presents are constituted by unpredictable contingency without the association of cause and effect between event and event. Therefore, for Tsai and Kim, time depicted in the cinematic temporality is enunciated by the permanently present discourse, which is absent from its past and is still unknown for its future, but only produces the infinite moment. In other words, this temporal prolongation is ahistorical, lacking depth and merely progresses in action linking action. Thus it also becomes a fragmentary and not a linear development for its lack of commencement and an end, being an endless present-becoming. There is no connection between narrative spatiality in Tsai and Kim’s films. This has become detached from its related and logical linkage prescribed in the classical narrative structure, but randomly, coincidentally and unforeseeably merged together, imbedded with the linguistic system of scission revealing no beginning and end but only providing the characters, Taipei and Seoul residents, like nomadic tribes wandering around without indicating the direction of their coming and going. In other words, these spaces in both post-colonial cities can be regarded as temporary and transitional spaces and create the ephemeral mirage of a playground. Tsai and Kim’s cinematizations of the urban spaces of Taipei and Seoul respectively have been constituted by the present discourse, which makes the spatial marking, to which personal memory as well as collective history attaches, vanish. These are the most salient traits in the postmodern text and structure, which can be viewed from both directors’ masterful works among Asian cinema. Moreover, their non-historical discourses, non-moralistic and non-ethical and dehumanized and dystopian text in describing social life as well as non-linear and non-classical narrative structure in constituting cinematic text also make Tsai and Kim’s films catch the international gaze. Nevertheless, there is still a lack of a full postmodern exploration of both directors’ works. This has motivated me to construct a passage from European postmodernity to Asian postmodern films.

This thesis investigates Emilia Pardo Bazán’s fiction predicated on the idea of a Galician regional Gothic deriving from elements of English literary tradition and nineteenth-century Spanish costumbrismo. While the recurrent use of Gothic elements in her literary output has been acknowledged and studied by a number of scholars, my investigation aims to shed some light on the reasons why this writer ultimately resorts to this genre. My first level of analysis concentrates on Gothic manifestations in nineteenth-century Spanish fiction, and how Pardo Bazán adopts this genre and adapts it to her Realist and Naturalist conventions. I maintain that the primary choice for the Gothic aesthetic responds to a necessity to portray the most basic features of Galician peculiarities – its distinctive landscape and its rural Volksgeist –. In this way, Edmund Burke’s contribution to the theorization of the Sublime reveals itself to be a satisfactory resource to Pardo Bazán, who was well familiarized with the concept. The use of Gothic elements equally functions as an instrument of social criticism to raise empathy for the backwardness that Galicia suffered during the last third of the nineteenth century. Thus, while addressing the issue of women’s subordination, the author develops distinctive narrative patterns frequently associated with the so-called Female Gothic. Meanwhile, the depictions of rural characters as savage, superstitious and ignorant indicate the author’s preoccupation with the psychological processes of the Gothic and the reactions among the reading public. In depicting the plight of rural Galicia, she is actually making her readers aware of the necessity to bring this region closer to modernity, that is, to Europe. My second level of analysis focuses on the psychological dimension of the Gothic. In the exploration of such motifs as hallucinations, nightmares, uncanny locations, or hysterical attacks, Pardo Bazán’s texts call for a psychoanalytic reinterpretation of these terms. If readers of Gothic fiction seek to decipher hidden meanings within texts, I will attempt to demonstrate that a psychoanalytic approach to Pardo Bazán’s use of Gothic fiction happens to be a necessary step to the better understanding of her work. Taking all this into account, this thesis will try to show that the use of Gothic devices Pardo Bazán employs are constant throughout her literary career and help her to describe the distinctive peculiarities of Galicia while functioning as a tool of social criticism.

The subject of this thesis is the translation of fiction relating to two movements that emerged in Taiwan towards the end of the last century. Tongzhi and ku-er arose during a period of liberalisation that permitted expression to the to the previously inexpressible, in this case, issues surrounding unconventional sexual identity. The growth of these movements was inspired by an increasing awareness among the sexually marginalised in Taiwan, of the developments that had occurred in the West regarding sexual identity. The newly tolerant political climate enabled a demand for previously unobtainable cultural material to be supplied, leading to a demand for translators of this material. This thesis concerns itself with the role of translation in the formation and evolution of tongzhi and ku-er movements through fiction. In the history of literature dealing with same sex desire, the rise of tongzhi and ku-er literature reflects a variety of social, political and literary trends, the international and politically rebellious elements that characterized tongzhi and ku-er identities. Translation, by turn is an important component that brings in foreign influence to tongzhi and ku-er literature, whereby the literature itself translates aspects from Western sources in a way that is characterized as ‘translocal’. Despite the close ties of tongzhi and ku-er literature with global and local political movements and translation, very little has been written on the subject of tongzhi and ku-er translation. The two translated texts selected for analysis, Angelwings: Contemporary Queer Fiction from Taiwan and Notes of a Desolate Man engage with the aforementioned global and local frameworks. Through analysing the translated text, interweaving strands in this thesis are connected.

This study aims to discursively examine the ways in which Thai and non-Thai participants manage face concerns in articulating and responding to interpersonally-sensitive activities, i.e. disagreements, rejections and refusals, in Thai service encounter contexts. Data included audio- and video-recordings and field-notes from naturally-occurring interactions between Thai agents and (non-)Thai customers in two hotels, a travel agency and a tourist information centre in Thailand. A fine-grained analysis of Thai service encounters revealed that the Thai and non-Thai customers preferred implicitness to explicitness in rejecting the suggested product, in order to avoid confrontation and maintain face. Their non-confrontation, through implicitness, indicated that the participants did not take into account the unequal status between agents and customers. This behaviour, which was signaled through nonverbally and prosodically dispreferred responses, e.g. silence and hesitators, was viewed by the interactants as politic behaviour. The Thai agents also showed implicitness by withholding (dis)agreements with the customers; this implicitness is linked with face concerns and commercial goal orientedness. However, the Thai agents occasionally formulated explicit disagreements without any mitigating strategies, when they wanted to ensure that the non-Thai customers understood their meanings clearly. Explicitness also occurred when they wanted to encourage the customers to buy the product at full price. Nonetheless, there was insufficient evidence to show that the agents’ explicitness was interpreted as non-politic behaviour by the non-Thai customers. This study contributes to the sparse discursive examination of verbal and nonverbal behaviour in authentic Thai institutional interactions and provides a rare insight to changes in social hierarchy and status in Thai culture.

One functional factor commonly affected by neurodegenerative diseases is communication. Many people with neurodegenerative disease experience a progressive motor speech disorder: dysarthria. It is known that communication is essential for full social participation but there is limited evidence on the role it plays in quality of life (QoL). The aim of this thesis is to explore the QoL of Saudi Arabian individuals with progressive dysarthria associated with neurodegenerative disease. The thesis includes the development of new intelligibility and functional communication measures for use with an Arabic speaking population. It also explores the relationship between QoL and communication for individuals with neurodegenerative disease. Qualitative and quantitative research methodologies were used. Research participants were recruited from a specialist hospital in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. 16 people participated in the first part and 34 in the second, all of whom had been diagnosed with neurodegenerative disease associated with different severities of progressive dysarthria. In addition, caregivers participated to explore the difference between their perceptions of participants’ QoL and functional communication and that of the participants themselves. It was established that QoL, as measured by the ASIP, showed the most frequent relationship with functional measures of communication. Additionally, qualitative analysis of interviews highlighted themes related to physical, psychological, social, and environmental factors. Communication was mainly discussed in relation to changes and restrictions in participation and interaction. Finally caregiver and patient perspectives were found to be similar when asked to rate the participants’ QoL and functional communication. Although this research is not without limitations as reflected by some of the methodologies used as well as variable population features within the disease groups, it is an important first step in looking at a Saudi Arabian population with progressive dysarthria and exploring methods for assessing intelligibility, functional communication and the relationship between communication and QoL.

A small number of articles and book chapters have analysed post-dictatorship Argentine science fiction film from a historico-political perspective, tracing embedded references to the 1976-1983 dictatorship and showing the ways in which films such as Hombre mirando al sudeste (Subiela, 1986), Moebius (Mosquera, 1996), La sonámbula (Spiner, 1998) or La Antena (Sapir, 2007) address the themes of political repression and violence through metaphor and connotation, under cover of a fantastic narrative. My approach complements these readings, extending the corpus and outlining the first book-length study of Argentine science fiction film. Contesting positions held by certain critics that science fiction is inadequate in terms of dealing with traumatic historical issues, and aiming to move beyond seeing the genre only as a ‘camouflage device’ which has enabled authors to hide their message within a fantasy framework under the threat of persecution, this thesis argues that science fiction film fills a gap where representations of trauma memory are concerned. On the one hand, its narrative strategies and tropes are highly suited to such representations. On the other, its status as popular culture places it on the outer margins of a political and cultural framework that has consistently denied the atrocities perpetrated in a totalitarian context and sought to impose a unilateral, hegemonic version of history. In the course of the study I draw on the fields of science fiction, psychology, and Latin American studies in a cross-disciplinary approach.

We introduce the Full Scan Condition on a language, which captures the idea that the membership question for a word w cannot be determined from a given prefix, suffix pair. We study the corresponding one-sided conditions, establish relationships between them, characterize these languages in the regular case through their minimal automata and syntactic monoids, and develop techniques for testing regularity of a language, Also, we investigate a topology on the free monoid that arises in the course of our research.

Current levels of language loss around the globe are unprecedented. With more than half of the world's languages thought to be endangered to the extent that there will be no speakers of these languages within the near future, the study of language threat and endangerment is more essential than ever (Krauss, 2000). The reason for such unprecedented language endangerment has come as a direct result of increased globalization, where people and the languages they speak have the ability to move throughout the world and communicate with literally anyone, anywhere, at any time. Furthermore, an ever-globalizing economy has created a space whereby a few languages have garnered extreme power and prestige, which inspires the envy of speakers of minority languages as they see the economic benefits of being able to speak a language of wider communication. The global dominance and influence of English and the implications for other languages throughout the world are well-documented (See Crystal, 2005; Phillipson, 1992; Dalby, 2003). However, the ever-growing 'prestige' and dominance of African languages of wider communication (e.g. Swahili, Hausa, Wolof), and the threat they pose to minority languages, has not been as adequately documented. Thus, while these powerful and dominant languages are spreading rapidly, hundreds of minority languages in Africa are disappearing at an alarming rate, taking with them important cultural heritage (e.g., history, folklore, literature, and music) and a unique ,. understanding of the local flora, fauna, and ecosystem. The trend is overwhelming, and almost certainly unstoppable, and it is becoming a worrying development for minority communities, linguists and advocates for the linguistic rights of minorities. Although researchers in African linguistics have made great progress in the description of minority languages at all levels, there has been little work done that addressed the sociolinguistics of minority language communities in urban Africa. This study sets out to investigate the implications of the dominance of Wolof for minority languages in urban Senegal. The study adopts a multidimensional approach in response to the kinds of data required, the participants involved and the social and cultural context. This entails adopting several different specific methodological approaches of data collection and analysis in order to capture the changing pattern of language use and language attitudes. The analysis of language use data shows that many of the minority languages are losing their grip in the home domain due to a breakdown of intergenerational transmission. This has resulted in the younger generation increasingly shifting to Wolof and no longer learning their language of heritage. Although none of the respondents in our study had Wolof as a mother tongue by origin, the majority of the younger respondents identified with Wolof as their mother tongue by competence (the language they know best) and function (the language they use most). The sociolinguistic analysis outlined in this study, though not exhaustive, reveals a very precarious situation for minority languages and their speakers in urban Senegal. The predominance of Wolof in urban Senegal is beginning to change the linguistic landscape of urban centres, and there is nothing, that guarantees minority communities in towns and cities, that there will be continuity of their languages beyond the present generation.

The thesis aims to give a critical survey of a cross-section of war novels published in the Federal Republic of Germany since 1945. Attention is accordingly focussed not only on works of literary merit (e.g. H. Boll), but also on popular (e.g. H.H. Kirst) and 'trivial' books (Landser series). The introduction points to some of the artistic problems involved in describing war in general and the 1959-45 war in particular. These problems and the social and political implications of war literature are highlighted in the first chapter, which is devoted to some characteristic literary products of the 1914-18 war and forms the background against which the main part of the thesis is set. In discussing both these earlier works and the novels written on the Second World War, consideration is given to the views various critics have expressed, and in particular to the criteria which some pro-Nazi scholars of literature applied to novels on the 1914-18 war. The main part of the thesis opens with a discussion of five personal narratives which together form a wide spectrum of attitudes towards the Second World War. It also contains a critique of works which continue the tradition of the post-1918 ethnocentric and nationalistic novel, if in a less extreme fashion, in so far as they portray the Second World War in terms of a tragic and heroic struggle to defend the Jatherland, or idealize the community of soldiers and champion the principle of Fuhrer und Gefolpschaft. Contemporary political developments, e.g German rearmament, are considered wherever appropriate. Other chapters are concerned with works which focus on resistance, disobedience and protest, and with works in which an effort is made to develop means of portrayal adequate to the subject. The thesis leads to the conclusion that the numerous works of an obscurantist character give cause for concern, and that only a minority of writers shows a critical under standing of the literary and social problems involved.

The thesis investigates how the theories of linguistic and literary composition of Dante's treatises and the poetics of ineffability of the Divine Comedy may be seen to provide the basis for (one of) the poetics of Joyce's Finnegans Wake. The polysemy of Joyce's last novel relies on Dante's literary-exegetical model of the four levels of meaning at the same time as it challenges it so as to show both its inadequacy for the modern literary work and, conversely, how its failings can be turned to the writer's advantage in the production of an original text. The multilingual idiom of the Wake draws from, at the same time as it reshapes, Dante's conception of the history of language and his theory of an illustrious poetic language, and the thesis shows how Joyce exploits these two aspects, turning them into a narrative framework for several episodes of the Wake and thematising their features in order to explore the function of character-roles in connection with the processes of artistic creation. Finally, Joyce's reliance on a pliable language for his evocation of the unfathomable dimension of the "nocturnal world" and of the unconscious is shown to be comparable to the poetics of ineffability that informs Dante's "vision" in the Divine Comedy. In this context, the thesis looks at such issues as silence, vowels / vocalisation, and the use of geometry to express the ineffable and / or the unspeakable. Joyce's use of Dante's works thus involves a constant reflection on the processes of writing and of literary composition as well as on the relationship between a modern writer and his sources, and the intertextual practice of the Wake is shown to be part of the "poetics in progress" that Joyce has been elaborating from his earliest to his last publication.