No description available.

No description available.

In this thesis, learner beliefs and their implications for second language learning were examined. Individual learner differences have traditionally been measured statistically by using age, motivation and other variables that have been studied within a quantitative research framework. Recently, second language acquisition (SLA) research has been experiencing a shift from the etic, or outsider perspective to the emic, or insider perspective that is characteristic of qualitative research. Benson (2005) states, "learners are individuals and that their individuality may have significant consequences for their learning" (p. 5). Larson-Freeman (2001) ended her assessment of research by calling for "more holistic research that links integrated individual difference research from emic and etic perspectives to the processes, mechanisms and conditions of learning within different contexts over time (p. 24). Learner beliefs thus demand further exploration. <br /><br /> In order to show the implications that learner beliefs have for language learning, I met with three beginner German students and asked about their language learning processes and their language learning beliefs and experiences over a period of three months. This was done by conducting several interviews with these students, which provided me with a wealth of data to explore. This collected material and its potential influence on language learning was analyzed and is discussed in this thesis. This work begins with an overview of existing research in the field and a description of the research questions and methodology. This is followed by a description of the learners' comments and concludes with my findings and a discussion that points toward future research in the field.

This thesis is a translation of chapter 1 of Zafer Senocak's recent novel In deinen Worten: Mutmaßungen über den Glauben meines Vaters. It is part of a collaborative translation project with the goal of combining the practical and theoretical aspects of the art, in order to reflect on the challenges that arise whilst translating. Zafer Senocak is a Turkish-German author, who currently lives in Berlin, and was a writer in residence at the University of Arizona during the Spring semester of 2015. The following work contains the translation of the previously mentioned chapter, as well as a critical reflection upon the process.

While debates over the memory and representation of the National Socialist past have dominated public discourse in Germany over the last forty years, the literary scene has been the site of experimentation with the genre of the autobiography, as authors developed new strategies for exploring their own relationship to the past through narrative. Since the late 1970s, this experimentation has yielded a series of autobiographical novels which focus not only on the authors' own lives, but on the lives and experiences of their family members, particularly those who lived during the NS era. In this dissertation, I examine the relationship between two waves of this autobiographical writing, the Väterliteratur novels of the late 1970s and 1980s in the BRD, and the current trend of multi-generational family narratives which began in the late 1990s. In a prelude and three chapters, this dissertation traces the trajectory from Väterliteratur to the Generationenromane through readings of Bernward Vesper's Die Reise (1977), Christoph Meckel's Suchbild. Über meinen Vater (1980), Ruth Rehmann's Der Mann auf der Kanzel (1979), Uwe Timm's Am Beispiel meines Bruders (2003), Stephan Wackwitz's Ein unsichtbares Land (2003), Monika Maron's Pawels Briefe (1999), and Barbara Honigmann's Ein Kapitel aus meinem Leben (2004). I read these texts as examples of genealogical writing, in which protagonists seek to position themselves in relation to their family histories through the construction of family narrative. The formal similarities between the two trends - (inter)textual dialogue, hybridity of prose style, vignette or essayistic structure - cast their underlying differences into greater relief. While the author-narrators of Väterliteratur seek to reach a definitive conclusion regarding the question of the father's complicity in Nazism, the authors of Generationenromane allow for greater nuance in categories such as victim and perpetrator. In both cases, however, the subjectivity of the individual protagonist shapes his or her engagement of the family past, as they seek to negotiate between personal family relationships and public discourses of collective memory in contemporary Germany.

This dissertation investigates the imagination of the Jewish table in German and German-Jewish letters. Examining ethnographic, iconographic and literary depictions of the Jewish table from the sixteenth to the early twentieth century, I argue for its significance as a key site in the German imagination of the Jews, a locus of fantasies regarding the nature of Jewish religious practice, social community and corporeal difference. The work of the dissertation proceeds in two stages. First, I identify a wealth of fantasies concerning the alimentary behavior of the Jews that have existed in German letters since at least the early sixteenth century. Then, I argue that these various myths of Jewish eating and drinking persisted well into the modern period, experiencing a covert afterlife in literary texts from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century. Two broader conceptual aims of the dissertation are to argue for the significance of the table motif in the social, religious and aesthetic contexts and to draw attention to the typically neglected topic of food themes in literature. The dissertation begins with a study of the Jewish table as it was imagined in polemical ethnographies of the Jews written in the German language from the early sixteenth to the mid eighteenth century. Based on my reading of these sources, I identity four main features to the imagination of the Jewish table in the early modern period. Jews supposedly refuse to eat with Christians out of hatred and fear of fraternization with them. They exhibit immoderate behavior at table and lack a proper code of alimentary ethics. They eat copious amounts of garlic and exude a foul stench, the foetor judaicus, as a result. Most damningly, they consume the blood of innocent Christian children in their Passover Seder meals. Against this background I turn my attention to the modern period and show how literary (con)texts become the medium in which authors--Jews and non-Jews alike--receive and reinterpret these myths of the Jewish table. In Chapter 2, I analyze two distinctive table cultures of the turn of the nineteenth century, the Jewish salon and the Christian-German Table Society, and argue that participants used the idea of table fellowship as a microcosm for imagining Jewish-German social relations at large. In Chapter 3, I juxtapose Heinrich Heine's defiant materialist stance and cryptic celebration of Jewish cuisine in Der Rabbi von Bacherach with Wilhelm Raabe's evocation of Jewish appetite in Der Hungerpastor. Chapter 4 focuses on the resurgence of the blood libel at the turn of the twentieth century. I analyze a trio of German and German-Jewish fictions from the fin de siècle that feature the fantasy space of the Jewish table and in some cases invoke the myth of ritual murder, including Arnold Zweig's Ritualmord in Ungarn, Theodor Herzl's Altneuland and Thomas Mann's Wälsungenblut.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Chicago, 1912. / Bibliography: 1 p. at end. Also available on the Internet.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Chicago, 1912. / "Register of examples": p. 61-78. Also available on the Internet.

No description available.

In this thesis, learner beliefs and their implications for second language learning were examined. Individual learner differences have traditionally been measured statistically by using age, motivation and other variables that have been studied within a quantitative research framework. Recently, second language acquisition (SLA) research has been experiencing a shift from the etic, or outsider perspective to the emic, or insider perspective that is characteristic of qualitative research. Benson (2005) states, "learners are individuals and that their individuality may have significant consequences for their learning" (p. 5). Larson-Freeman (2001) ended her assessment of research by calling for "more holistic research that links integrated individual difference research from emic and etic perspectives to the processes, mechanisms and conditions of learning within different contexts over time (p. 24). Learner beliefs thus demand further exploration. <br /><br /> In order to show the implications that learner beliefs have for language learning, I met with three beginner German students and asked about their language learning processes and their language learning beliefs and experiences over a period of three months. This was done by conducting several interviews with these students, which provided me with a wealth of data to explore. This collected material and its potential influence on language learning was analyzed and is discussed in this thesis. This work begins with an overview of existing research in the field and a description of the research questions and methodology. This is followed by a description of the learners' comments and concludes with my findings and a discussion that points toward future research in the field.