This study has conducted an analysis of how the monomyth has appeared in the fantasy story Diamond sword wooden sword part 1 and 2 by Nick Perumov. The study has confirmed that the story structure of the monomyth can be detected within several different characters progression. The study does not claim that all of the different stages within the monomyth can be identified within one single characters, but rather that there are several different characters that reinvents the world and the community. Speculations about why the authors story structure follows a ”divided” version of the hero’s journey are presented. The study also conducts an analysis of Perumovs construction of the society, male characters and female characters, which showed no distinct division in the construction of the two genders within the story. The construction of the society is discussed in light of the authors national upbringing, in this case the former Soviet Union, and briefly how the conflict in the world of Melin could be inspired by the Bolshevik revolution in Russia.

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In 1971, Isaac Asimov observed in humanity, a science-important society. For this he credited the man who had been his editor in the 1940s during the period known as the golden age of American science fiction, John W. Campbell, Jr. Campbell was editor of Astounding Science-Fiction, the magazine that launched both Asimov's career and the golden age, from 1938 until his death in 1971. Campbell and his authors set the foundation for the modern sci-fi, cementing genre distinction by the application of plausible technological speculation. Campbell assumed the science-important society that Asimov found thirty years later, attributing sci-fi ascendance during the golden age a particular compatibility with that cultural context. On another level, sci-fi's compatibility with "science-important" tendencies during the first half of the twentieth-century betrayed a deeper agreement with the social structures that fueled those tendencies and reflected an explication of modernity on capitalist terms. Tethered to an imperative of plausibly extrapolated technology within an American context, sci-fi authors retained the social underpinnings of that context. In this thesis, I perform a textual analysis of stories published in Astounding during the 1940s, following the sci-fi as it grew into a mainstream cultural product. In this, I prioritize not the intentions of authors to advance explicit themes or speculations. Rather, I allow the authors' direction of reader sympathy to suggest the way that favored characterizations advanced ideological bias. Sci-fi authors supported a route to success via individualistic, competitive, and private enterprise. They supported an American capitalistic conveyance of modernity. / Master of Arts

Among the species of Diomedea albatrosses, diverse foraging strategies during breeding have been described, indicating species differences in foraging ecology and behaviour. Foraging strategies of Southern Royal Albatrosses, Diomedea epomophora (SRA) breeding on Campbell Island were studied in January – early February 1999 during the latter half of incubation. Movements and activity of ten birds were monitored using satellite transmitters and wet-dry activity recorders. Three birds from a pilot tracking study in February 1997 were also included in some analyses. Foraging strategies, zones used, factors influencing the duration of foraging trips, and the influence of wind conditions were investigated. Foraging activity took place at sites with bathymetric characteristics associated with high productivity: outer shelf and shelf-break zones, with a concentration of activity on a shelf contour south of the Snares Islands. This is in contrast to Wandering (D. exulans) and Gibson’s (D. gibsoni) albatrosses, typically deep oceanic foragers, but is similar to Northern Royal Albatross (D. sanfordi). The maximum distance of foraging trips from the colony was 1250 kilometres (mean 584 +351(SD)). This was closer than for incubating Wandering and Gibson’s Albatrosses but more distant than for Northern Royal Albatross from the Otago Peninsula. The mean duration of 77 foraging trips from 52 nests was 10.11 days for females and 8.76 for males (ns). Foraging trips became shorter as incubation progressed. Foraging trips were shorter, but not significantly so, when the median wind speed throughout the foraging trip was higher. No significant relationship was found between bird mass and duration of foraging trips. The mean cumulative distance flown by the ten birds tracked in 1999 was 4262 km + 1318 (SD). Eight of the ten SRA employed a ‘commute, forage, commute’ foraging strategy, and the other two alternated short bouts of commuting and foraging. Commuting phases were characterised by rapid directional flight with a straight-line distance (range) of 180 km to 800 km between positions 24 hours apart. Foraging phases were characterised by a range of less than 180 km per 24 hour interval and frequent tight turns. Displacement rate between successive uplinks was significantly higher during commuting phases (28.6 kph + 1.93 SE) than foraging phases (15.1 kph + 1.4 SE). Wind strength and direction influenced the timing of the return commute to the colony. SRA covered greater distances at more favourable wind angles relative to flight track (broad reach and close reach) than in head, tail or direct side winds. Birds of low mass (< 8kg) made fewer landings in winds above 40 kph than in lighter winds, whereas heavier birds had a similar level of landing activity across all wind speed bands. One bird was delayed for several days by light winds, and another flew off course during strong winds. Two birds exploited the same window of wind conditions to return to the colony, each flying a similar course in both timing and route. These results define the foraging strategies of SRA during incubation, and demonstrate the influence of wind conditions and other factors on the overall duration of foraging trips and on the timing of commuting and foraging phases.

"Endymion" è il traît d'union tra i juvenilia di Keats ("Poems", 1817) e i suoi lavori più conosciuti ("Lamia, Isabella ... and other Poems"). Per sua natura, è un'opera di transizione e quindi concede allo studioso un punto di vista privilegiato sullo sviluppo della poetica e della lingua di Keats. Inoltre, l'"Endymion" è l'opera keatsiana più aspramente contestata dalla critica romantica. Gli studiosi moderni hanno analizzato il problema alla luce di considerazioni socio-politiche, il mio lavoro mira invece ad un'analisi più strettamente linguistica. Ricostruisco il contesto linguistico del diciottesimo e diciannovesimo secolo al fine di spiegare il disagio dei recensori nei confronti di "Endymion". Sostengo che il prescrittivismo del Settecento nasce da una profonda ansia relativa alla lingua, causata dalle teorie di Locke. L'atteggiamento prescrittivista influenza la critica romantica e i critici di Keats in particolare, più di quanto potessero fare considerazioni di natura politica. Analizzo le peculiarità linguistiche e strutturali di "Endymion" al fine di provare che Keats elabora una 'poetica dell'incontrollabilità', una serie di strategie stilistiche e testuali, che violano le convenzioni linguistiche e narrative e che vengono quindi percepite come destabilizzanti e stranianti. / "Endymion" is the traît d’union between Keats’s juvenilia ("Poems", 1817)and his better known, and, conventionally, ’mature’ works ("Lamia, Is- abella ... and other Poems", 1820). By its nature, it is a transitional work, and thus gives the scholar special insight into the development of Keats’s poetics and idiom. Moreover, "Endymion" is the Keatsian work which most irritated and provoked contemporary critics; the two pieces of venomous invective it received in the periodical press of the time have become the stuff of scholarly legend. Recent scholarly work has analysed the language of "Endymion" in socio-political terms; my work focuses on more strictly linguistic concerns. I reconstruct the linguistic context of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in order to explain the reviewers’ unease with regard to "Endymion". I maintain that eighteenth-century prescriptivism arose from a deep-seated anxiety regarding language, Lockian in origin, and that the ensuing desire to stabilize and therefore control language informed Romantic criticism in general, and the criticism of Keats’s work in particular, more fundamentally than politics could or did. I analyse the imaginative and linguistic markers of "Endymion" in order to prove that Keats had elaborated a “poetics of uncontrollability”, a series of textual and stylistic strategies, which violated linguistic and narrative standards and were therefore perceived as unsettling.

Autobiographical writing acquired increasing importance during the apartheid period, with greater numbers of autobiographical texts being published by a more representative range of South Africans across race, class and gender categories. This thesis analyzes the implications of shifts in autobiographical production, in English, during the years 1948-1994 through the examination of selected texts. The readings are informed by poststructuralism, modified by information about indigenous black South African cultural practices, as well as by input supplied by some of the autobiographical texts themselves. This theoretical approach may be referred to as a "pratique de metissage" (Glissant). The texts selected for close reading are from a field of over 120 autobiographical texts. They were chosen for their ability to illustrate important trends in South African autobiographical writing, specifically with regard to the three constituent parts of autobiography: autos, bios, and graphe. The chapter dealing with the depiction of self interrogates the hierarchized discourses of male-biased humanism in Roy Campbell's Light on a Dark Horse (1951). In Ellen Kuzwayo's Call Me Woman (1985) I analyze the melding of the conceptual frameworks of indigenous black cultures and Western individualism by which the autobiographical subject is defined. Breyten Breytenbach's The True Confessions of an Albino Terrorist (1984) is read as an exploration of the postmodernist decentred self. In the chapter focusing on the portrayal of life experiences, I examine the ways in which the narrator of Albert Luthuli's Let My People Go (1962) seeks to secure the reader's approval of his version of recent South African history; while the analysis of the sub-genre referred to here as worker autobiography is principally concerned with the politics of life-writing. In Chapter 5, I look at how Godfrey Moloi's My Life: Volume One (1987) uses the discourses of popular American movies of the 40s and 50s in order to validate a self victimized by racism, and also at the ways in which Lyndall Gordon's Shared Lives (1992) probes the limits and possibilities of biography through autobiographical speculation. In general, apartheid autobiography moves away from individualism to contribute, through various means, to social and political change. / Thesis (Ph.D.)-University of Natal, Durban, 1994.

The thesis consists of the novel, Stargate Atlantis: Exogenesis (Whitelaw and Christensen, 2006a) and an accompanying exegesis. The novel is a stand-alone tie-in novel based on the television series Stargate Atlantis (Wright and Glassner), a spin-off series of Stargate SG-1 (Wright and Cooper) derived from the movie Stargate (Devlin and Emmerich, 1994). Set towards the end of the second season, Stargate Atlantis: Exogenesis begins with the discovery of life pods containing the original builders of Atlantis, the Ancients. The mind of one of these Ancients, Ea, escapes the pod and possesses Dr. Carson Beckett. After learning what has transpired in the 10,000 years since her confinement, the traumatised Ea releases an exogenesis machine to destroy Atlantis. Ea dies, leaving Beckett with sufficient of her memories to reveal that a second machine, on the planet Polrusso, could counter the effects of the first device. When the Atlantis team travel to Polrusso, what they discover has staggering implications not only for the future of Atlantis but for all life in the Pegasus Galaxy. The exegesis argues that both science and science fiction narrate the dissolution of ontological structures, resulting in cognitive estrangement. Fallacy writers engage in the same process and use the same themes and tools as science fiction writers to resolve cognitive estrangement: they technologise mythology. Consequently, the distinction between fact and fiction, history and myth, is blurred. The exegesis discusses cognitive estrangement, mythology, the process of technologising mythology and its function as a novum that facilitates the resolution of cognitive estrangement in both fallacy and science fiction narratives. These concepts are then considered in three Stargate tie-in novels, with particular reference to the creative work, Stargate Atlantis: Exogenesis.

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