Inaug.-Diss.--Rostock.

Thesis (Ed.D.)--Boston University.

This study was concerned with the use of dialogue journals in senior high school as a central feature of literature studies. The teacher-researcher gathered information from a Grade 10 English course in which the students used dialogue journals as a part of their course in literature studies. All students were asked to volunteer their journals for the study, and nine students' journals were purposefully selected for study. The study was designed to answer the following questions: (1) What is the nature of secondary students' responses to literary texts as revealed through their dialogue journals? (2) Do dialogue journals reveal development in secondary students' responses to literary texts, and, if so, along what dimensions can that development be revealed? The teacher-researcher developed a handbook to provide students with a structure for their responses. The purpose of the handbook was to give students guidelines or directions to examine literary text, without prescribing to the students what they ought to be looking for in the literature. Each guideline suggested in the handbook had been researched to determine if it had a theoretical basis for inclusion. All students in the Grade 10 English course, including the nine selected, completed the study of a variety of literary genres, including short stories, essays, poetry, drama, novels, and Shakespeare. Students were required to write about the literature in their journals three to four times a week, with the handbook used as a resource for possible responses. These guidelines also provided the readers with lessons on strategies readers which they may use to explore and examine literary text. The study was conducted over a fourteen week period. During this period the teacher-researcher divided the study of students' journals into “Early entries” and “Later entries”. These responses to the literary texts, both early and later, were separated into thematic units and analyzed in terms of the guidelines outlined in the resource handbook. Each of the response units were placed on a chart and labeled. Coding procedures began with the idea that students would attempt to follow the handbook, with provision made for students whose responses were diverse. Coding procedures were designed to find patterns in students' responses. The findings for Question I were: (1) Students' responses generally followed the categories outlined in the handbook, as they were encouraged to use the handbook as a guide for their responses. (2) Personal reaction was by far the most common and the most diverse of all the responses. Uncertainty and resistance to making meaning of literary text were more common in earlier responses, but lessened as students gained more strategies for making meaning. (3) Students rarely used categories of response such as using quotes or asking questions of the text. Only one student attempted a graphic representation [drawing] of a literary text. The findings for Question 2 were: (1) The average length, in words, of students' responses increased over the period of the study. (2) Students did not appear to judge the merits of a literary selection until they had had an opportunity to interpret their meaning of the literary work. (3) Students appeared to become more accustomed to using literary terminology as an integral part of their responses. The conclusion drawn from the study is that, while the dialogue journal may be of use in Senior High School English studies, there should be principles established to determine the value of journals. Further research will be needed to code variation of students' responses to the literature. An examination of teachers' comments in students' response journals will be necessary. / Graduate

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Bibliography: pages 171-178. / Fourteenth-century man saw around him constantly the immediate prospect of death. Not only the high mortality rate and the universally public death-bed scene which had always been present, but pestilence and war emphasized the proximity of the dread messenger. Around him he saw sculpture and painting, in churches chiefly but not confined to them, depicting the horrors of death and judgement and he was accustomed to hearing sermons and verse which dwelt on the subject in lurid detail. Death to fourteenth-century man was not so much fear of the unknown since the whole process was, up to a point, readily observable and thereafter authoritatively mapped out by the church. Although the departed soul may be destined for the joys of the Beatific Vision, nevertheless those left behind experience loss, uncertainty of the loved one's fate, the often traumatic physical sight of the death-bed and the unwelcome reminder that this is the fate that overtakes everyone. However joyous may be the wished-for reunion with God, one cannot help viewing reality. The cherished body becomes loathsome. In the face of this terror, some form of consolation is required, leading to resignation to the inevitable. The way fourteenth-century man looked at death is well illustrated in the enormous body of literature on the subject. From this plenty has been selected Chaucer's Book of the Duchess, a gentle work which keeps Death at a distance; Pearl, an anonymous work depicting the handling of grief at the loss of a child; The Parlement of the Thre Ages which deals harshly with its audience in order to teach its lesson and contains most of the themes which recur in the final chapter, where a small selection of didactic and homiletic poems is considered. All the writers are English but attitudes in Western Christendom show, at a cursory glance, the similarities one might expect from cultural and religious homogeneity. The selection was made to demonstrate both this unity of outlook and the various treatments of the theme of death. The conclusion is a summary of the evidence from Chapters I to IV for the fourteenth-century attitude to death and a brief comparison with a modern work on the subject.

This examination of students' writing, based on essays written by selected groups of students who participated in the English Language Tutorial Scheme in l969 and 1970, is aimed at establishing what the stylistic, lexical, grammatical and syntactical difficulties of students are. In this way, the approach of tutors may be confirmed or adapted, so that the general weaknesses of students can be concentrated on and the satisfactory aspects of their written composition can be ignored. In this way valuable time need not be wasted on unnecessary teaching.

The sky’s grumbling. Layers of gray grinding above me the way teeth grind, angry and wanting, all nap long. Two boom-clap bangs and my eyes snap open to clouds thick as clay, metal-sheet lightening and thunder thumping close and heavy as fists. I grab the stone floor and I’m watching and listening, listening and watching and I’m hearing yelling and it’s my own heart yelling, and I realize this ain’t dreaming. This ain’t dreaming. I ease myself near the rock ledge, hanging there like a loose tooth when the ground rips apart, it clear splits thirty feet in front of me right through the Joneses' veggie patch. My gut leaps to my throat. Would be an awesome sight if it weren’t so terrifying. Air and water and fire and earth dancing into one, blasting the ground inches from the Joneses’ farmhouse splitting their flagpole, my eardrums just about splitting in the roar. I clasp on tight. Next thing, my legs are falling from my body, or my body’s falling from the rock and we’re sinking together, sliding down. Then silence. Earth shattering silence. A venomous pause. Nothing moves, not even my lungs. I grab at the ledge hanging, waiting, watching. Come on Bill. Get out of the house. Get the Missus and get the fuck out. The elements are hovering, brewing a soup so thick and dark a rich thick and dark soup. Triple decker boom and I’m rolling to the spine of the rock as it tilts and digs its feet in, crushing or protecting, as the sky breaks open with rain belting down. I crank my head towards the farmhouse and it’s sinking. Come on Bill and Betty. As the sky belts the earth belts my skull belts on the back of that blasted crushing protecting rock, the ground sinking further under the weight from above and rock falling, consciousness too, and then I’m dreaming of everything.

Bibliography: pages 156-164. / In this thesis, the nature and function of Marvellous Secondary worlds are examined by means of a comparative study of three Marvellous Secondary worlds: C. S. Lewis's Narnia, J. R. R. Tolkien's Middle-earth, and Ursula K. Le Guin's Earthsea. We consider the way in which Marvellous Secondary worlds may be used in order to explore certain aspects of reality highly effectively through themes and images characteristic of Marvellous fantasy. In the Introduction, the wide range of Secondary worlds in modern fantasy and the specific functions that Secondary worlds may fulfil is commented on. These analyses are then linked to a discussion of some of the central characteristics of Marvellous Secondary worlds.

Alexandra Fuller's memoirs detail the lives of white settlers in Southern Africa (specifically Zimbabwe) from white-rule to post-independence. Her memoirs illustrate how the settler colonial dream of the promised land in Africa would ultimately fail to be fully realised and maintainable. Yet, through the portrayal of unexamined colonial discourse, Fuller continues to perpetuate a constructed notion of Africa. The publication of her first memoir, Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight, coincided with international media coverage of President Robert Mugabe's contested land redistribution programme and told a similar story of the loss of their family farm. Written from her home in Wyoming in the United States, Fuller's work forms part of a white expatriate culture that writes home to Africa from a different continent. Previous works have failed to address the theme of settler colonialism in literature specifically pertaining to the field of Southern African literature. This dissertation makes use of a postcolonial framework to examine Alexandra Fuller's work; Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood, Scribbling the Cat: Travels with an African Soldier and Cocktail Hour under the Tree of Forgetfulness. Fuller's memoirs are used to explore the function of innocence, nostalgia and memory in postcolonial white writing, the construction of whiteness and masculinity in Africa and the tragedy of discourse that is still pervasive in the portrayal of colonial notions of Africa as a playground for disaffected Westerners. Fuller's writing forms part of a Zimbabwean post-independence body of work that absolves whiteness of complicity and a history of colonial violence. Fuller's memoirs ultimately do not settle on a definitive point about Zimbabwe and its history of colonial dispossession or herself and settler colonial family.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Columbia University, 1930. / Vita. Published also without thesis note. Includes bibliographical references and index.