A Research Report submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in English Education at the University of the Witwatersrand Johannesburg, November 1998 / With the emergence of South Africa as a new democracy and the concomitant new constitution there has been interesting and subtle change in the context in which I teach. The composition of my classrooms has changed and thus I have used journal writing by the students to try to deal meaningfully and transformatively with these changes. My classroom had within a relatively short space of time, become a multi-cultural one in which silences, different from those I had previously noticed, emerged. [No abstract provided. Information taken from introduction]. / MT2017

My dissertation research studies the use of video games as texts for analysis in a College English course. The purpose of the study was to see what happens when College English students are asked to engage with a video game as a class text, use their engagement with a video game to make sense of other texts, and how reader-response theory applies to making meaning of video games as texts. A secondary purpose was to study, if this transaction does take place, whether video games can support the kind of analysis required of a College English curriculum and what this curriculum might look like. I conducted this study as an autoethnography of a course designed for this purpose as the course instructor. Observing my students’ participation and analyzing their written work served as the primary data, as well as self-reflection on my own meaning-making processes. My final observations suggest that students engaged with the video game as a class text, though not more than they might have any other text; however, the nature of playing the text (and the multiple interpretations that afforded individual students) encouraged a critical reading in which students readily participated. For this reason, game choice was of paramount importance, that it might align with learning objectives but was accessible to a wide variety of prior experience with video games. Finally, a committee of department faculty deemed the majority of student work as of the quality expected for the course, suggesting video games can serve as texts for analysis that the field expects of its students. The implications of this study should inform English Education’s adaption to teaching the multiple literacies of the 21st century, as this research itself is multimodal and requires multiple literacies to read. This choice of research method and format was also meant to serve as examples of the transactions I and students experienced in the study.

Bibliography: leaves i-xvii / v, 290, xvii leaves ; 30 cm. / Title page, contents and abstract only. The complete thesis in print form is available from the University Library. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Adelaide, Dept. of Anthropology, 1986

published_or_final_version / Education / Master / Master of Education

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Jacques Derrida argued that a supplement "adds only to replace." Since the blind Milton dictated his epic to amanuenses, the text of Paradise Lost may be conceived as a supplement to an aural performance. This dissertation itself supplements another project, a digital "audiotext" or classroom edition of Paradise Lost on which I am collaborating with Professor John Rumrich and others. In the audiotext, we reassert the duality of the work as both a print text and an oral epic by integrating an audio recording with an electronic text of the poem. This pairing is informed by our own experiences teaching Paradise Lost as well as by cognitive research demonstrating that comprehension increases when students read and hear a text sequentially or simultaneously. As both a wellspring of the audiotext project and a meditation on its aims, this dissertation investigates the actual effects on readers of print and digital supplements putatively designed to enhance their appreciation or study of the work. The first two chapters examine the rationale and influence of the authorial and editorial matter added to early editions. The final two chapters explore the ways in which digital technology is changing how scholars and readers interact with Paradise Lost and other works of literature. I begin by examining why the first edition of Paradise Lost arrived in 1667 bearing no front matter other than a title page. In Chapter Two, I argue that critics have undervalued the interpretive significance of the prose summaries or Arguments that Milton appended to Paradise Lost and Samson Agonistes. Chapter Three relates the current emphasis on electronic textual encoding in editorial theory to the ideological dominance of Richard Bentley's conjectural approach in the early seventeenth century and of Fredson Bowers's copy-text approach in the 1960s and 70s. Chapter Four introduces the audiotext project and contrast its goals with those of other projects in the Digital Humanities. The audiotext's interface offers multiple viewing modes, enabling the user to display the reading text alone or in parallel with annotations and other supplements. Unlike prior editions and archives, therefore, it accommodates both immersive and analytical reading modes. / text

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No abstract available. / Thesis (Ph.D.)-University of Natal, Durban, 1995.

This study concerns the writing of Geoffrey Hugh Durrant. Durrant’s writing is to a large extent academic in nature, but he also comments on the broader South African society during the course of the 1940s and 1950s. The study has two interrelated objectives, the first archival in nature and the second more theoretical. The archival objective entails bringing to attention Durrant’s writing produced during the period he spent in South Africa. At present this archive remains largely unexplored. The second objective is to relate this body of writing to current thinking regarding the mission of university English Studies in South Africa. The study of languages and literatures in South Africa today finds itself in a complex situation of ongoing changes within the university as an institution, the broader system of education, and a society which in many respects can still be described as becoming a “New South Africa”. This is also true for university English Studies. It will be argued that in this process of transition Durrant’s writing, informed by the challenge to university English Studies to define itself as an independent academic discipline with an essential educational and social function, offers a valuable perspective. In defining the task of English Studies at the university Durrant aligns himself with the critical tradition which at a conceptual level originated in the writing of Matthew Arnold by the middle of the nineteenth century, but came to full fruition only after 1917 in the Cambridge English School. Durrant has to be credited for a measure of original thought and for making a personal contribution to this critical framework in for instance his definition of the concept “practical criticism”. He also has to be credited for including politics into the cultural analysis implicit in this critical framework, something which was never done by the Cambridge critics. This, for Durrant, means that his duty as citizen is not to be separated from his duty as university teacher. Durrant believes that indifference and failure to judge unacceptable political developments will ultimately endanger the values of society and make a self-respecting existence impossible. For university teachers an attitude of indifference will eventually leave the universities with no authority, unable to fulfil their essential task. Durrant sees the university as guardian of a specific type of intellectual activity and therefore as indispensable to society. The essential duty of the university is to cultivate an ability of critical discernment, and it is in this realm that the task of the university and that of English Studies coincide. For Durrant the social mission of English Studies depends on the fostering of a critical ability through engagement with the particular form of language use unique to the literary text. The standards of thought and understanding set by the literary text function as touchstones for life in all its various aspects, and mastery of this type of text affords the level of critical discernment necessary as foundation for a civil self capable of critical judgement. / Thesis (M.A.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, 2009.

The purpose of this case study was to examine the effectiveness of a technique known as re-creation on student writing abilities in ENG 104 section 95 during the spring semester of 1992. Re-creation, already used almost exclusively in England and Australia, invites a writer to divulge his or her personal interpretation of a literary text by rewriting given aspects of it. In section 95, the instructor devoted the entire range of assignments to re-creative writing tasks, using four dramatic scripts and the motion pictures that had been adapted from them as literary texts. The instructor carefully developed re-creative writing assignments and a reasonable criteria with which to grade them. He closely monitored how the students adapted to re-creative writing, and discovered that four students exemplified the main different styles of writing that emerged from re-creation. The case study does indicate that all of the twenty-one students coulddo the work that re-creation involves; some experienced only minor successes with it, but other students, including some top achievers who would probably have done well in any writing class, found broad new avenues for creative expression of their personal responses to literature. / Department of English