<p>The essay intends to problematize the notion of heroism in Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game by contemplating the hero himself as well as his enemies. Particular focus will be placed on the good and evil dichotomy, arguing that it is essential to the heroic tale since the hero is supposed to fight evil and foster good. Seeing that Ender is also a murderer, the matter debated will be that he both is and is not a hero.</p>

Thesis (Ph. D. in Religion)--Vanderbilt University, May 2006. / Title from title screen. Includes bibliographical references.

The aim of this essey is to examine how teachers´ work with individual development plans (IDP) can contribute to an intercultural leadership and inclusion. The interwied teacherss ay that IDP forces them to reflect critically on their thinking on aspects as learning methods, gender and ethnicity. It makes them listen to -and think - in new and more including ways to adapt to each pupils individual possibilities to achieve the curriculum standards within the common area. That requires lots of resources like extra teachers and new material. An active reflection can make ethnocentrism develop into intercultural competence. That is a listening, critical and diversified thinking prepared to deconstruct and create new ways of thinking in relation to different pupils and situations. It can deconstruct the cultural boundaries and dualistic categorising. An intercultural leadership needs a common culture -as a common truth- where all cultures can meet. That could be the curriculum of values wich aims for erasing prejudices and to create inclusion.

The essay intends to problematize the notion of heroism in Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game by contemplating the hero himself as well as his enemies. Particular focus will be placed on the good and evil dichotomy, arguing that it is essential to the heroic tale since the hero is supposed to fight evil and foster good. Seeing that Ender is also a murderer, the matter debated will be that he both is and is not a hero.

The WM sector in Nairobi is a failure. Collection rates are deplorable, regulations go unenforced and the municipal landfill is desecrating the environment and killing neighbouring slum dwellers. This paper focuses on the exclusion and marginalization of the slums adjacent to Nairobi’s landfill, Korogocho and Dandora, and uses a post-structuralist theoretical framework to conceptualize a just response to these exclusions and theorize an inclusive approach to waste policy in Nairobi. Building on the work of Jacques Derrida, I present a ‘deconstructive ethic’ for development that is dedicated to mitigating and overcoming the production of alterity, and reintegrating excluded communities and knowledges into the sites of knowledge and policy creation. This ethic is used to formulate a five-part response to the conditions of exclusion experienced in Korogocho and Dandora, and to engage these populations in finding participatory solutions to the city’s waste problem.

Willa Cather's 1913 novel, O Pioneers! concludes with an unexpected moment of extreme violence as two young lovers, Emil Bergson and Marie Shabata, are murdered by Marie's husband in a mulberry orchard. Cather's novel is almost wholly devoted to the psychological interior of the protagonist, Alexandra Bergson, thereby rendering this violent interruption more dynamic as it essentially undercuts the generally lulling interiority of the narration. My interest here is to examine this strange moment of violence and Alexandra's subsequent forgiveness of Frank for the murder of her brother and his own wife through the theoretical paradigms of René Girard, Jacques Derrida, and Slavoj Žižek.

This paper deals with the novel Jazz, written by African-American writer Toni Morrison. The paper argues that the novel deconstructs itself. Also, it illustrates how the jazz music in the novel works as a deconstructing force on the characters and the narrative form. The essay begins with a chapter about deconstructive theory.  Next, there is a brief summary of jazz music – its history and features. Then, there is an analysis which focuses on how jazz music affects the characters. Last, the narrative form is investigated, for instance in terms of the narrator’s tendency to shift between various points of view. / Uppsatsen påbörjades vid Halmstad Högskola med Cecilia Björkén Nyberg som handledare, men slutfördes vid Växjö Universitet. Magisterexamen är sedan uttagen vid Högskolan i Halmstad.

Written about the time of the Golden Venture incident, Chang-rae Lee’s Native Speaker makes a particular reference to that incident, whereby implying that particular immigrants, on the grounds of their racial identities, are mistreated and considered as aliens by some Americas. While some whites discriminate against immigrants, there is widespread ethnic tension between Korean Americans and African Americans. Significantly, racial conflict between Koreans and blacks and the racist attitude of some whites toward immigrants are mirrored in the relationship between the Korean-American protagonist Henry and his American wife Lelia. That is, due to their different racial identities they do not understand each other and they always argue. However, toward the end of the novel, Henry and Lelia come to understand each other. While ethnic conflict between Koreans and blacks and certain whites’ discriminatory attitudes toward immigrants is serious one, the novel suggests the unimportance of racial identity. In other words, the novel concludes that there is no discriminatory treatment of immigrants and, in fact, every one is a native Speaker in America. In the novel there is no message of how racial conflict could be resolved. However, this essay suggests that by investigating how the tension between Henry and Lelia is resolved, one could suggest a solution for the ethnicity problem in America and in real life.

In this thesis William Shakespeare’s comedy The Taming of The Shrew is analyzed from a feminist perspective. It is argued that the female characters Katherina and Bianca are mainly constructed through language expressed by male characters as binary oppositions. By an act of deconstruction within the play, these images, or constructed representations, are adjusted and somewhat reversed in the end. In addition, it is shown how the Induction, an introductory part of the play, adds aspects of construction and deconstruction, which supports an ironic reading and a questioning of the constructed gender roles.

Based on Derrida's deconstruction and other methodologies, this six-chapter thesis aims at effecting a valid re-reading of self manifested in Wordsworth's The Prelude. What the stop here introductory chapter unfolds is the motivation to pursue this research, a summary of the related scholarship to date, an overview of the poem, and a description of the theoretical approaches. The second chapter is an attempt to identify the internal instability, fluidity, and ambivalence of self that inform The Prelude. Wordsworth's language is what the third chapter concerns. It seeks to work out a way into the following questions: Does Wordsworth know that self is a trick of language and ever-changing? If he does, how profound is his knowledge? Since it is self that Wordsworth does hope to privilege, what we tend to identify as the reconciliation of nature, imagination and that self can hardly be realized and is little more than an illusion. This is the subject to which the fourth chapter is devoted. Because of his inability to get rid of the sense of confinement and insecurity even in the face of what he may call the renovating virtues, a scene that repeats more frequently in The Prelude is Wordsworth's continuous struggle against them. To do Wordsworth justice, however, to argue that he is not the only one whose subject is unstable, a history of self and its inevitable relation to other is provided in the fifth chapter. I suggest here also that if the position of self is precarious, that of autobiography, a genre that purports to articulate subjectivity, cannot be more secure. In conclusion, we have a review of the maintained dialogue between Wordsworth and Derrida. For the sake of de/construction, the thesis ends with an attempt and a hope to put everything back to what it is.