The thesis explores connections between diaspora, exile and the re-entry of displaced youth into a post-war society. The study is based on a sample of sixty creative writing students at the American University of Beirut (AUB). Questionnaires were administered, interactive interviews conducted and autobiographical narratives analyzed to isolate and examine the themes that foreground their texts. Some of the significant findings reveal that the sample of returnees under study are hybrids, cosmopolitan travellers who are everywhere but nowhere at home. Their position of "suspended inbetweenness" situates them in the margins of whatever society they happen to be in. Yet paradoxically, it is the experiences of multiplicity that hold immense possibilities. For when channelled into creative expression, and reinforced by the formation of spaces where silent and muted voices can speak, they enable this marginalized group to serve as vectors for forging new cultural identities and fostering change. In parts of my thesis I inevitably utilize the more conventional form of academic writing that locates the work in its appropriate theoretical context. Overall however, it assumes the shape of an experimental, narrative ethnography. The mode of ethnographic writing captures, in my view, the evocative elements inherent in "life as lived" by the sample of returnees as well as myself. To achieve this, a reflexive approach, which places my work in an interpretive perspective seemed most appropriate. Among other things, it fuses the humanities with the social sciences, the personal with the professional, and my lived experience with my research. Accordingly, my research narrative is interspersed with personal vignettes that run parallel to the texts and conversations of the students. I have also applied a number of methodologies to meet the multi-layered and shifting demands of the study. Given the sampling frame and exploratory nature of the study, a set of assertive or unequivocal conclusions would be of questionable validity. Instead, I think it more consistent with the spirit and nature of the study, to extract a few relevant inferences about the role of creative writing students in a post-war setting. First, creative writing classes have allowed students to take up identity positionings not available to them in other areas of social life. This was made possible by becoming part of the process of establishing a community of writers with shared goals. Second, I have come to view emotional narrative engagement as much more than a powerful tool for communicating defiance and nonconformity. It creates the conditions whereby students’ private discourse is transformed into something akin to a public realm, a “third space”, where negotiation occurs in ways that, I believe, will eventually unsettle fixed positions of identity and behavior. It is my premise that in these spaces, perceptions of the “other” can be altered to serve as venues for genuine openness and civility in a post-war society desperately in need of multiplicity and creative alternatives.

In commenting on the work of Kelly, Bannister and Fransella (1980: 53) note that research may be defined as the process whereby people try to make sense of things. In order to achieve this, the importance of working with rather than on subjects is stressed as is the need for researchers to explicitly state, as far as they are able, the constructs within which they believe themselves to be working. Cohen et al note that critical theory and critical educational research have a substantive agenda: for example, examining and interrogating: the relationships between school and society - how schools perpetuate or reduce inequality; the social construction of knowledge and curricula, who defines worthwhile knowledge, what ideological interests this serves, how power is produced and reproduced through education. (2007: 27) Underlying both of these assertions is the implication that in order effectively to look outwards, the researcher must be prepared to look inwards; in order to move forwards, one must critically assess the past. Such a project requires critical thinking, that is, thinking that embodies the attributes of `quality' thinking based on a sound knowledge of context and resulting in reasoned judgements regarding what to believe and how to act. (Bailin 1998: 145)

Rates of unconscious plagiarism were investigated using Brown and Murphy's 3-stage paradigm. Initially, participants completed the creative Alternate Uses Test (generation phase) and then at test, recalled their original ideas (recall-own phase) and generated new ideas (generate-new phase). In both of the testing phases, participants plagiarised by reporting someone else's ideas as either their own idea or a new idea. Plagiarism rates increased over a one week retention interval (Experiment 2) and both active and passive participants were equally likely to plagiarise someone else's idea as a new idea (Experiment 1). When an elaboration phase was incorporated into the paradigm, following idea generation, different types of elaboration had clear and consistent effects on participant performance. Elaboration by rating ideas positively and negatively improved correct recall (Experiment 3) and rating the imaginability of ideas (Imagery-elaboration IE) and improving the ideas in three ways (generative-elaboration GE) also increased correct recall to a comparable degree (Experiment 4). In the generate-new phase, these different types of elaboration either reduced plagiarism (Experiment 4) or did not affect the level of plagiarism relative to control (Experiment 3, 5, 6, 7 & 8). However, in the recall-own phase, the GE alone consistently led to the highest levels of unconscious plagiarism (relative to IE or control, Experiment 4, 5, 6, 8). This pattern prevailed when participants were encouraged not to plagiarise by means of a financial incentive (Experiment 5) or when their memory was assessed more stringently by a source monitoring task (Experiment 9). IE did not result in such recalled intrusions, even when it was matched in terms of content to the GE (Experiment 6) or when IE was repeated (3 days after generation) and thus strengthened (Experiment 7). Also, strengthening IE did not affect plagiarism levels in a source monitoring task (Experiment 11). Strengthening GE, on the other hand served to dramatically inflate the observable intrusions in both a recall-own task (Experiment 8) and in a source monitoring task (Experiment 10). Therefore, contrary to a strength account, the probability of plagiarising another's ideas as one's own is linked to the generative nature of the elaboration performed on that idea, rather than its familiarity. The theoretical and practical implications of these findings will be discussed.

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This study looks at how differences of language and genre affect the pattern of the usage of metadiscourse (MD: the rhetorical resources used to organise a discourse, or the writer's point of view towards either its content or the reader) in the academic writings produced by expert and student writers in the same discipline. The corpora consist of thirty journal articles (PRO) and fifty-five student assignments, twenty-five from native English speakers (NES) and another thirty from non-native English speakers (NNES). All texts in both the PRO and student corpora are in English, produced by a single-author, in topics of study in language, culture, and communications in the same school of Newcastle University. The research uses a typology derived from those in the literature but focussing on written texts and modified by a pilot study. From the comparison of texts produced by the NES and NNES postgraduate students, the language variable (native English vs non-native English) plays a greater role in the use of MD. The NNES writers use statistically more textual metadiscourse (TMD) while the NES writers employ more interpersonal metadiscourse (IMD) in general and there are statistical differences in the use of sequencers, code glosses which were more used by the NNES, hedges and self references which were more employed by the NES in particular. The finding indicates that the NNES writers are more concerned about expressions to show the logical order and relations between different parts of the text through TMD; the NES writers try more to involve the readers in the argument than do their NNES counterparts with IMD. The findings also show that learning a writing style which is acceptable in western academic life (e. g. 'writer-responsible') influences the use of MID in the NNES academic writing. Evidence of this comes from the interview data and the results of text analyses which show the statistically greater use of textual metadiscourse (e. g. sequencers, code glosses) and the significantly infrequent use of self-references in the NNES texts. From the results in the genre/expertnessv ariable Oournal articles vs student assignments), no overall significant differences were found in the use of the main V categories (TMD and IMD), but differential purposes (effects) and frequency were found in the use of MD subcategoriesT. he student writers do not use MD devicesi n the same way as the PRO writers, as reflected in the use of MD devices with a limited range of items and purposes in the student texts compared to a broad range of MD features and functions in the PRO texts. In fact, the PRO writers made more use of concessives, concluders, sources, hedges and self references with a broad range of purposes;t he student writers made significantly more use of sequencerst,o picalisers and more use of emphatics with limited purposes. Thus the finding proposes that the way they use MD is influenced by the two factors in the student and PRO texts; the consideration about the readership and the goal of the argument; which lead the different pattern of MID usage in the student and expert writings. This suggests that the genre variable (student assignments vs journal articles) is also a crucial one to influence the use of MID within the same discipline. As regards the language aspect from the comparison between the NES and NNES, the differences are mainly in the amount of features in the use of MD. When it comes to the student and j ournal article texts, genre variable, the differences are not only in the frequency of MD subcategories but also in the way they use the MD features.

The Painter of Bridges is a hybrid siege-exile novel about a landscape painter, Zora Buka, who loses her life’s work in a fire during the siege of Sarajevo. Part One, presented in the creative paper, is set in Sarajevo and depicts Zora’s experience of the first ten months of the siege. Part Two is set in England: Zora recollects her escape from Sarajevo, and waits for her asylum claim to be accepted. The novel is therefore concerned with portraying the exceptional states of life under siege and of being a refugee. The critical paper shares these concerns and follows the movement of the novel from siege to exile. Beginning with a discussion of the siege in post-war literature, the critical section then looks at the double figure of the siege in Camus’s The Plague, before turning to themes of siege and exile in Susan Sontag’s 1993 Sarajevo production of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. It finally examines Slavenka Drakulić’s representation of the refugee in her Bosnian war novel, As If I Am Not There. The critical paper thus offers close readings of two war novels and a wartime theatrical production. These texts are seen as ‘works of exception’ which illuminate the liminal spaces that Giorgio Agamben terms ‘zones of indistinction’. The readings of The Plague and Waiting for Godot draw on Agamben's theory of modern life to analyse their depictions of the refugee and the state of exception. Postcolonial questions about the representation of others, meanwhile, are addressed in the second reading of The Plague, where, going against much postcolonial criticism, it is argued a hidden allegory of anticolonial uprising is at work, and again in As If I Am Not There, where the uprooted, violated protagonist is found to have an ethically and artistically flawed doubled consciousness.

This Creative and Critical Writing PhD thesis explores the dialogue between fiction and geek culture. It seeks to understand the definitions and uses of the terms ‘geek’, ‘nerd’ and ‘otaku’ over time. I look for points of commonality and how they have been used in texts since the seventeenth century. After this initial exploration, I move to a close reading of three novels that are representative of geek culture. These texts comment on geek culture though they do not belong to genres traditionally associated with it, such as fantasy or science fiction. Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao makes extensive use of footnotes, intertextuality and hypertextuality. Douglas Coupland’s Microserfs explores the influence of technology, tries to define geeks and nerds, plays with form and language, and touches on the subject of posthumanity. Meanwhile, Nakano Hitori’s Train Man, which began life as a collective online message board thread, challenges common tenants of fiction, especially that of authorship and form. The novels, in the order in which they are discussed, move from the traditional to the innovative. They pose questions about the way in which geek culture interacts with fiction, how this influence plays out in terms of theme, characterisation, format, and the reading experience. Finally, these novels also interrogate ways geek culture might help us understand the future of fiction writing. Both thesis and novel were designed with the idea of ‘play’ in mind, with particular reference to games, flexibility and contestation. The creative element of this thesis, Legendary Days, is a geeky novel about saving memories. The protagonist, after loosing his father, writes down his own memories in a narrative that plays with geek culture and related themes. It follows the same character in three different times and contexts, while also allowing for several intertextual intromissions throughout the text.

My PhD thesis combines a novel, Idiopathy, and a critical essay, ‘A Failed Entertainment:’ The Process of Paying Attention In and To Infinite Jest. Idiopathy examines the inner lives of three friends and their experiences of both separation and a reunion. By emphasising internality over externality it seeks to examine the notion that how we feel about our lives may be more important, indeed, more ‘real,’ than what takes place around us. Idiopathy is overtly concerned with the extent to which interaction with others is problematic, and pays particular attention to the emotional complexities of friendships, relationships and family dynamics. Through these pained and frequently unsatisfactory interactions the novel seeks to satirise broader social phenomena, such as media panics, health epidemics, ideological protest movements and the rise of what might be termed a ‘pathologised’ culture, in which all the characters are continually concerned that something is ‘wrong’ with them. Illness is a metaphor throughout, and is explored not only through the characters’ sense of personal malaise, but also through the device of a fictional cattle epidemic that forms a media backdrop to unfolding events. Throughout the novel I am particularly concerned with empathy: its limits, its problems, its importance. This manifests not only as a difficulty experienced by the characters, but also, I hope, for the reader herself, since empathy with the central characters is something I have deliberately problematized. ‘A Failed Entertainment . . .’ looks at the work of a writer I regard as being not only a key influence but a vital figure in the contemporary literary landscape: David Foster Wallace. Specifically, it focuses on his novel Infinite Jest and explores the way in which the novel is designed to encourage a certain kind of attention, which Wallace overtly stated was something he felt was important in contemporary life. In my essay I examine the idea that Infinite Jest not only concerns itself with attention at a thematic level, emphasising the importance of a certain kind of active, engaged relationship with art and entertainment through a satirical negative image: a video ‘Entertainment’ so successful it kills anyone who watches it, but also, through certain stylistic and structural devices, heightens and demands the self-same attention that Wallace is concerned with. Note: Due to word limit constraints I have included the final section of Idiopathy as an appendix. Examiners may read this section at their own discretion. Publication History: Idiopathy was published by Fourth Estate (London) in April 2013 and by Faber and Faber inc. (New York) in August 2013. It has been translated into nine languages.

Authorship attribution is the problem of identifying the true author of a disputed text. Throughout history, there have been many examples of this problem concerned with revealing genuine authors of works of literature that were published anonymously, and in some cases where more than one author claimed authorship of the disputed text. There has been considerable research effort into trying to solve this problem. Initially these efforts were based on statistical patterns, and more recently they have centred on a range of techniques from artificial intelligence. An important early breakthrough was achieved by Mosteller and Wallace in 1964 [15], who pioneered the use of ‘function words’ – typically pronouns, conjunctions and prepositions – as the features on which to base the discovery of patterns of usage relevant to specific authors. The authorship attribution problem has been tackled in many languages, but predominantly in the English language. In this thesis the problem is addressed for the first time in the Arabic Language. We therefore investigate whether the concept of functions words in English can also be used in the same way for authorship attribution in Arabic. We also describe and evaluate a hybrid of evolutionary algorithms and linear discriminant analysis as an approach to learn a model that classifies the author of a text, based on features derived from Arabic function words. The main target of the hybrid algorithm is to find a subset of features that can robustly and accurately classify disputed texts in unseen data. The hybrid algorithm also aims to do this with relatively small subsets of features. A specialised dataset was produced for this work, based on a collection of 14 Arabic books of different natures, representing a collection of six authors. This dataset was processed into training and test partitions in a way that provides a diverse collection of challenges for any authorship attribution approach. The combination of the successful list of Arabic function words and the hybrid algorithm for classification led to satisfying levels of accuracy in determining the author of portions of the texts in test data. The work described here is the first (to our knowledge) that investigates authorship attribution in the Arabic knowledge using computational methods. Among its contributions are: the first set of Arabic function words, the first specialised dataset aimed at testing Arabic authorship attribution methods, a new hybrid algorithm for classifying authors based on patterns derived from these function words, and, finally, a number of ideas and variants regarding how to use function words in association with character level features, leading in some cases to more accurate results.

The cultural identity of multilingual Lebanese students is examined in academic writing (mainly argumentative) in Arabic and in English essays using case studies. This area is important because it helps reach an understanding on whether different languages allow us to take up different identity positions. Ivanid's theory of voice (1998) is used to look at how four students present themselves in their writing. Three research tools were used to collect the data. The first is the actual student scripts on 'Merciful Killing' and the second is semi-structured and in-depth interviews which were used to allow students to explain their attitudes and feelings when they write in both languages. Observations were used in two ways: as a participant observer in the preliminary stages of the investigation for exploring the area as an observer while researching sitting at the back of the class or going around and taking field notes. It was found that the two dimensions of the writer's voice: the 'discoursal self and the 'autobiographical self (ideational self) were in flux in the students' writings. In some cases, this lead to different representations of the self as they wrote in different languages. Findings and analysis suggest that the religious identity issue is consistent across languages reflecting the importance of religion in these students' lives. However, students take different identity positions when writing depending on the topic and the text type. This leads to important implications for teaching English as a foreign language, but requires further research.