My thesis centers on Lolita and The Crying of Lot 49 and the ways in which both novels defamiliarize our world and ways of thinking. Both novels use formal literary techniques as a way of making ordinary cultural artifacts, situations, and environments seem unfamiliar from our every day perceptions. This process of defamiliarizing the regular and everyday has the greater implications of estranging universal themes such as love, environment, and belonging. Both novels also question our precarious hold on corporeal reality by interpreting plot through two outside narrators whose trustworthiness is constantly placed into question. Unsurprisingly, Lolita and The Crying of Lot 49 unsettle the categories of truthfulness and reinvention in interpreting America's immediate cultural and environmental landscape. Both texts blur the distinction between recorded and imaginatively reconstructed worlds: just so, America has isolated our two narrators in the text from their immediate landscape. Interpretations of America are questioned in the thesis through the process of Shklovsky's theory of Defamiliarization interfaced with Freud's Uncanny in the novel. Language disobedience and discord also play a part and will be discussed through Bakhtin's theories on polyphonic language.

This document explores the use of motion within design to defamiliarize a message. The objective is to expand a viewer’s level of understanding through prolonged perception. I experiment with this idea using present-day tools which afford my own movement during the capturing process to create various visual interpretations of motion. I look to László Moholy-Nagy, Aleksandr Rodchenko and Eadweard Muybridge who explored the use of the camera, the new technology of their day, to understand its potential to create a new visual language. They believed the lens of the camera was the eye of the future—and the public’s exposure to the camera’s possibilities an enlightening transcendence. I also believe in exploring newly developed tools; in visually researching their intended and unintended use to discover new perspectives in not only the way we see and represent the world, but the way we understand and represent ourselves in relation to the study of our field.

Although presenting the concept of love in a form not accepted by societal conventions does indeed estrange the conception of love in Nabakov's Lolita, it does nothing to explain how readers accept Humbert's passion, without immediately and consistently disregarding it as lewd and inappropriate. I will argue that Nabakov estranges the romantic conceptions not by defamiliarizing the occasion of love (i.e. by making the romance a manifestation of pedophilia), but rather by defamiliarizing and complicating the acts of both reading and interpreting. First, I will make associations between the Romantics and Nabokov, regarding their shared desire to renew the habitual acts of both perceiving and interpreting human life, which they accomplish through methods of isolating the emotions effected by acts--not the acts themselves. After which, I will examine the theories of phenomenology and externalist philosophy to cement the concepts of anticipation and hermeneutics, starting in general and then narrowing to the act of reading. In following, I will demonstrate how Nabokov agitates this anticipation for readers, making the very act of reading Lolita a new experience, in which Romantic themes do not appear cliché and outdated. On the whole, I will maintain that it is this disruption in interpretation that absolves Humbert's ills, allowing Lolita to maintain its status as one of the greatest love stories of the twentieth century.

My thesis project is attempting to investigate the notion of estrangement as a qualitative effect and discover various strategies and technics of estrangement in the field of architecture.These investigations will aim to design a cultural center as an institute for discovering more about the displaced situation of mankind in the twenty-first century, producing a defamiliarized aesthetic that is both alien and strangely contextual to our new cultural identity which embraces the concepts of disorientation and otherness. This center will be designed as a public exhibition and community building, integrating a high variety of programs and functions for attracting people of all ages and backgrounds, addressing the instability and fragility of our environment.Architecture is always incomplete and reliant on multiple layers of interaction and engagement, I aim to produce spaces that are challenging, lacking clear boundaries or hierarchies which demand new forms of interaction between architecture and subject, and offer a new understanding of space and material.

Studien har haft ett ledarskapsperspektiv och undersökt upplevelser av ettkulturförändringsarbete vid en svensk medelstor kommun. Studien har undersökthur ledare uppfattar och antar idén kring värdskap. Uppfattningen av idén, rollensamt organisationen och medarbetarnas roll har varit centrala i studien. Syftet harvarit att problematisera och fördjupa kunskapen kring spänningar, såsommöjligheter och risker, som kan uppstå i antagandet av en ny idé. Uppsatsensfrågeställningar har varit; (1) Hur uppfattar och antar ledare idén kring värdskap?(2) Hur upplever ledare möjligheter och risker i värdskapet? Studien har haft ettkvalitativt angreppssätt där frågeställningarna är studerade genom en fallstudie.Resultaten har redovisats genom tematisk och kritisk analys. I den tematiskaanalysen redovisades resultaten utifrån temana; idé, roll samt organisation ochmedarbetare. I den kritiska analysen har fem dominanta och fyra dolda berättelserillustrerats. Studiens slutsatser har varit att antagandet av idén kring värdskap ärkomplext. Flera av de spänningar som framkommit i studien flyter samman ochnågra av dem talar emot varandra. Studien har också visat att idén kring värdskapkan komma att antas olika. Hur idén antas är beroende på individen ochkontexten. Möjligheterna i värdskapet är att chefer får draghjälp och stöd i sinchefsroll samt att kommunens anställda får en gemensam plattform i och med envärdskapsutbildning. Riskerna i värdskapet är att chefer inte tar till sig idén ochvärdskapet får i och med det mindre eller inget fokus. En annan risk är attmedarbetare inte tar till sig budskapet.

This project is intended to serve as an exploratory investigation of inquiry-based teaching in an Advanced Placement (AP) literature and composition course. The rigid curricular constraints of AP courses and the assessment-based guidelines for teaching such courses can challenge the value placed in teaching students to think critically. This project seeks to draw attention to the difficult terrain that teachers navigate when trying to foster environments that facilitate inquiry-based learning while at the same time holding students to the standards set by the curriculum. As an exploratory study, the project aims to identify important issues and questions concerning inquiry-based learning as they have been disclosed by a specific classroom context, that of a twelfth-grade AP literature and composition course I have taught. In addition to drawing from information and insights, along with personal experiences, derived from a specific classroom context, I examine research and scholarship on the concept of inquiry-based learning. In particular, I consider the scholarly work on invention, discourse communities, and critical pedagogy to offer the most relevant insights to the issues I identify and the questions I raise. The first part of this study consists of examining such areas of scholarship in “dialogue” with one another. That is, I consider the implications the various scholarly works have for one another, ii i particularly in the context of the AP course I teach. Because this study is exploratory in nature, the second part of my project consists of detailed summaries of the major scholarly works I have examined. Thus, this project serves as a preliminary inquiry for future study, and it serves to help teachers make informed decisions about developing and implementing inquiry-based teaching strategies that can take root in the rocky terrain of assessment-based curricula.

The project examines, and experiments with, how one can use historical fragments as a starting point for the design of a 7000 square meter large civic center, or house of arts and culture, in Beirut, as this is a place where the urban development has had a very different point of departure the last decades. The historical fragments in this case has been a collection of postcards of various public buildings that existed in the city between 1890 and 1970. Many times postcards are the main record of history of historical places, but this is not the main reason why I chose it as a study object. I chose it because of their purpose; to communicate a story of the place it portrays to outsiders, to people whose only knowledge about that place comes from the image on its front and the restricted number of words that can be squeezed into the small area on the back. Given my position as a foreigner working in a context that, although having visited multiple times, is unfamiliar to me, I found this an interesting starting point for the project.

Herta Müller represents physical suffering and repression in her works, often reflecting on the regime of Nicolae Ceaușescu, and her constant interest in language and reflexivity towards writing have led her to develop sophisticated metaphors that she uses to illuminate language and its functioning under such subjugation. With reference to her fiction and non-fiction, I demonstrate how she uses concrete ideas to understand linguistic phenomena. She evokes injury, destruction, force, life, space, touch, silence, and other bodily experiences to make sense of language in the condition of suffering from social oppression. Drawing on conceptual metaphor theory within the framework of cognitive literary studies, I argue that Müller both relies on and estranges the ways in which people speak and think about language. Language is imagined differently depending on the circumstances and in close relationship with various sensory experiences. The complexity of the relationship between language and thought problematises the process of metaphor building and makes it difficult to identify its key aspects across different contexts and sensory modalities. Müller’s tropes are easy to experience, but difficult to analyse. The idea of language does not exist as a stable concept and is regularly reimagined in her texts; but its meaning is not arbitrary and depends on bodily experience. While Müller evokes such experience to understand language in the condition of suffering, she can also use linguistic concepts to elucidate more abstract ideas. Language can be regarded as an abstract or concrete phenomenon depending on the relevant bodily, linguistic, and cultural contexts. This project contributes to the study of Müller’s poetics as well as to the literary critical interpretation of embodied cognition, and develops the use of conceptual metaphor theory for literary analysis. It also seeks to develop understanding of the role of bodily experience in the metaphorical conceptualisation of language.

This essay’s aim is to investigate how Rowling uses her novel Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets to criticize racism in her magical world and ours. A secondary aim concerns how Rowling’s critical stance creates ways to resist racism for readers in the EFL classroom. Therefore, a comparison from a Critical Race Theory (CRT) perspective is made with focus on certain sequence comparisons between the novel and the film. Teachers need to highlight problems like racism in classrooms and fantasy novels and movies are exceptional tools to raise awareness and teach critical thinking to students.

Syftet med denna uppsats är att undersöka hur det kusliga kan skapas och användas i litteraturen. De litterära verk som analyseras är Maria Gripes Tordyveln flyger i skymningen och Agnes Cecilia – en sällsam historia. Analysen utgår från tankar om det kusliga som huvudsakligen återfinns i Sigmund Freuds essä ”Das Unheimliche” (”Det kusliga”) från 1919. Även Viktor Sklovskijs främmandegöringsbegrepp används för att analysera Gripes texter. Studien visar att romanerna främmandegör bland annat naturen och tiden för läsaren, medan det kusliga i dem – som inledningsvis kan uppfattas som hotfullt och farligt – visar sig peka i positiv riktning, mot förening och försoning. Slutsatsen är att det kusliga i Tordyveln och Agnes Cecilia används på okonventionella sätt, vilket leder till en främmandegöring av det kusliga i sig självt. / The purpose of this essay is to examine how the uncanny can be created and used in literature. This is done by analyzing Maria Gripe’s novels Tordyveln flyger i skymningen and Agnes Cecilia – en sällsam historia. The analysis is based on thoughts pertaining to the uncanny that mainly can be found in Sigmund Freud’s essay “Das Unheimliche” (“The Uncanny”) from 1919. Viktor Sklovskij’s theory on defamiliarization is also used to analyze Gripe’s texts. Among other things the study shows that the novels defamiliarize nature and time for the reader. At the same time the uncanny – which initially can be perceived as threatening or dangerous – turns out to be pointing in a positive direction, toward unification and reconciliation. The conclusion is that the uncanny in Tordyveln and Agnes Cecilia is used in unconventional ways, which leads to a defamiliarization of the uncanny in itself.