This thesis analyzes William Golding&rsquo / s Rites of Passage using a detailed examination of the Bakhtinian concepts of heteroglossia, polyphony and the carnivalesque to investigate the points of mutual illumination and confirmation between Bakhtin&rsquo / s ideas and Golding&rsquo / s novel. Therefore the method of analysis is divided between a close study of Rites of Passage and an equally close examination of Bakhtin&rsquo / s ideas. The Bakhtinian concepts studied in this thesis are central to his idea of language and theory of the novel and their analysis in Rites of Passage reveals that while these concepts shed light on the stylistic, structural and thematic complexities of the novel, the novel also verifies the working of these concepts in practice. Moreover, the results of the analysis indicate two main points in which Golding&rsquo / s novel and Bakhtin&rsquo / s ideas confirm and illuminate each other. The first point is related to Bakhtin&rsquo / s celebration of the novel genre for its capacity to include diverse elements, a celebration that find its counterpart in Golding&rsquo / s novel due to the novel&rsquo / s heteroglot nature, polyphonic structure and inclusion of the carnivalesque. The second point is related to Bakhtin&rsquo / s notion of dialogism which emerges as a relational property common to his mentioned concepts. As this thesis shows, Golding&rsquo / s Rites of Passage is a dialogic novel in this regard, with its foregrounding of dialogic relations between heteroglot languages, characters&rsquo / voices and social classes. This thesis ends with a discussion indicating postmodern aspects of Bakhtin&rsquo / s ideas and Golding&rsquo / s novel, which include intertextuality, the problematization of truth, and the blurring of boundaries between opposites.

Within the genre of young adult literature, a growing trend is the use of epistolary messages through electronic methods between characters. These messages are set apart from the formal text of the narrative of the novel creating a break in the text features and layout of the page. Epistolary texts require a more sophisticated reading method and level of interpretation because the epistolary style blends multiple voices and points of view into the plot, creating complicated narration. The reader must navigate the narrator’s path in order to extract meaning from the text. In this hermeneutic study, I examined the text structures of three young adult novels that contained epistolary excerpts. I used ethnographic content analysis (Altheide 1987) to isolate, analyze, and then contextualize the different epistolary moments within the narrative of the novel. The study was guided by two research questions: 1. What types of text structures and features did authors of selected young adult literature with epistolary interruptions published since 2008 use across the body of the published work? 2. How did the authors of selected young adult literature situate the different text structures of interruption into the flow of the narrative? What happened after the interruption? I used a coding system that I developed from a case study of the novel Falling for Hamlet by Michelle Ray (2011). Through my analysis I found that the authors used specific verbs to announce an interruption. The interruptions, though few in number, require readers to consider context of the message for event, setting, speaker, purpose and tone as it relates within the message itself and the arc of the plot. In addition, following the interruptions, the reader must decide how to incorporate the epistolary interruption into the narrative as adding to the conflict, adding detail, ending a scene, or simply returning to the narrative. . Therefore, the interruptions in epistolary young adult novels incorporated the text or literacy practices of young adults. Such incorporation reflects the changes in literacy practices in the early 21st century that may render novels of this style a challenge to readers in creating meaning. The study further incorporates Bakhtin’s theory of heteroglossia (1980) that a novel does not contain a single language but a plurality of languages within a single langue and Dresang’s Theory of Radical Change (1999) of connectivity, interactivity, and access. Texts of this nature offer teachers of reading opportunities to guide students through text features to synthesize information in fiction and non-fiction texts.

Recently, network theory has been used to analyze the formal syntactic and semantic properties of written texts to explain the development of language (Solé et al. 2005). While foundational, this approach neglects the social and cultural pressures affecting language in interaction, a central focus of sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology (Hymes 1974, Goffman 1981, Gumperz 1982, Goodwin 2006). The influential work of M.M. Bakhtin (1981) frames speech as an emergent social process inflected by shifting patterns of negotiated meanings. As Hill (1986) observed "the enormous impact of Bakhtin's work, already felt with earthquake strength in literary studies...[is] now beginning to appear with equal force in the anthropology of language" (1986: 89).The aim of this research is to test the conjecture that by expanding the frame of language network analysis to include the social context of speech, the emergent properties of heteroglossia predicted by Bakhtin will be clarified. This analysis builds on prior research on language in interaction, drawing from sociolinguistic analysis (Sacks et al. 1974, Atkinson & Heritage 1984), word frequency (Nelson et al. 1998, Mendoza-Denton 2003), and network analysis (Bearman & Stovel 2000, de Nooy et al. 2005, Solé et al. 2005, Mehler 2010).According to Bakhtin, heteroglossia emerges as speakers "appropriate the words of others and populate them with one's own intention" (1981:428). This multi-sited doctoral research investigates the speech of butchers through participant observation, work place interactions and interviews, with a focus on references to blood. Some of the semantic features that become affixed to blood are due to historical and popular culture understandings of this signifier, while other salient features derive from subject positionality and community of practice (Lave & Wenger 1991). This work provides a snapshot of all of these processes at work in the speech of an occupational community of American butchers. The results of this analysis show that including the social context has significant effects on the conceptualization of both semantic and social networks, in comparison with networks derived exclusively from written texts.

The transposition of Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard (originally published in Russian in 1904) to contemporary South Africa in Suzman's The Free State (2000) is based on the corresponding social changes within the two contexts. These social changes cause a binary opposition of past and present in the two texts. Within this context memory functions as a space in which the characters recall the past to the present and engenders a dialogue between past and present. Memory is illustrated in the two plays by associations with place as an important aspect of identity formation. Memory and place are fused in the plays by means of Bakhtin's concept of the chronotope which is best observed in the plays in memories of specific places such as the respective orchards, houses and rooms such as the nursery and the ballroom in. The Cherry Orchard and the garden in The Free State. Furthermore, the influence of the past is also evident in the present when ideas of social status, class, race (in the case of The Free State) and behaviour are contrasted and when various characters express their perceptions of personal relationships and ideas about marriage. The influence of the past is also evident when the characters voice their different perceptions and expectations of the past and future. In The Cherry Orchard these cultural differences are evident in the concept of heteroglossia. However, in The Free State, these dialogues are directed by a specific politically liberal view which diminishes the heteroglossia in the text. The juxtaposing of past and present is also illustrated in The Cherry Orchard by various subversive strategies such as comedy of the absurd in order to portray the behaviour of the characters as incongruous. Another subversive strategy is the contrasting of characters and ideas in order to expose pretensions and affectations in speech and actions to parody both the old establishment and the ambitions of former peasants. These conventions are best illustrated by the concept of the carnivalesque that also features as one of Bakhtin's terms to capture incongruous ideas and situations in literature. In The Free State, comedy is unfortunately much diminished and in contrast to Chekhov's ambiguity, only directed against politically conservative characters. The prevalence of these three Bakhtinian concepts in the texts shows how identity formation is to a large extent influenced and defined by occupied space. When social change affects the distribution of land, a character's concept of identity is destabilised. Although Suzman uses this similarity in the two contexts in order to transpose Chekhov's text to contemporary South Africa, she organises the various stances in the text to advocate a specific politically liberal view. Thus, Suzman's transposition leads to an interesting comparison between the Russian and South African contexts as well as between the two texts. However, her text is limited by her political interpretation of Chekhov's text. / Thesis (M.A. (English))--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2009.

The transposition of Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard (originally published in Russian in 1904) to contemporary South Africa in Suzman's The Free State (2000) is based on the corresponding social changes within the two contexts. These social changes cause a binary opposition of past and present in the two texts. Within this context memory functions as a space in which the characters recall the past to the present and engenders a dialogue between past and present. Memory is illustrated in the two plays by associations with place as an important aspect of identity formation. Memory and place are fused in the plays by means of Bakhtin's concept of the chronotope which is best observed in the plays in memories of specific places such as the respective orchards, houses and rooms such as the nursery and the ballroom in. The Cherry Orchard and the garden in The Free State. Furthermore, the influence of the past is also evident in the present when ideas of social status, class, race (in the case of The Free State) and behaviour are contrasted and when various characters express their perceptions of personal relationships and ideas about marriage. The influence of the past is also evident when the characters voice their different perceptions and expectations of the past and future. In The Cherry Orchard these cultural differences are evident in the concept of heteroglossia. However, in The Free State, these dialogues are directed by a specific politically liberal view which diminishes the heteroglossia in the text. The juxtaposing of past and present is also illustrated in The Cherry Orchard by various subversive strategies such as comedy of the absurd in order to portray the behaviour of the characters as incongruous. Another subversive strategy is the contrasting of characters and ideas in order to expose pretensions and affectations in speech and actions to parody both the old establishment and the ambitions of former peasants. These conventions are best illustrated by the concept of the carnivalesque that also features as one of Bakhtin's terms to capture incongruous ideas and situations in literature. In The Free State, comedy is unfortunately much diminished and in contrast to Chekhov's ambiguity, only directed against politically conservative characters. The prevalence of these three Bakhtinian concepts in the texts shows how identity formation is to a large extent influenced and defined by occupied space. When social change affects the distribution of land, a character's concept of identity is destabilised. Although Suzman uses this similarity in the two contexts in order to transpose Chekhov's text to contemporary South Africa, she organises the various stances in the text to advocate a specific politically liberal view. Thus, Suzman's transposition leads to an interesting comparison between the Russian and South African contexts as well as between the two texts. However, her text is limited by her political interpretation of Chekhov's text. / Thesis (M.A. (English))--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2009.

This dissertation explores the incorporation of Facebook into everyday live activities and practices of a group of young Turkish-American women affiliated with a faith-based movement, known as the Hizmet (volunteer's service) movement. In particular, I examine the emergent communicative practices and performances of these young women and how they create a sense of identity and community and mediate these via this online medium in their diverse geographical localities. I start my analysis by investigating several instances of discourse and within these I focus on metacommunicative, metapragmatic, and metadiscursive acts in aiming to understand their semiotic performances on and off Facebook. I found that these young Turkish-American women, after being dispersed to different geographical localities, began to see Facebook as a vital means to maintain their group ties. Furthermore, their use of Facebook from 2008 to 2011 became more and more for Hizmet purposes. Stepping into the ideological realm, I understand that the notion of "friendship" is highly influenced by a semiotic ideology of tefani (gloss). That is, true/religious brotherhood is one of the important principles of gaining ikhlas (sincerity) and hence a way to establish good relations with God, and these young women see Facebook as a means to further their relationship with their sisters and thus establish a good relationship with God. I observed that they rely heavily on their unique ways of speaking to mark their in-groupness. I argue that, in the absence of several resources exploited by mainstream youths in the US, these young women employ and exploit their ingroup language features as a means to construct their "coolness" and "otherness". In addition, through playing with several languages and language varieties and playing with several generated intertexts, these young women make their interactions somewhat invisible to outsiders through drawing from their shared stock of knowledge and communicative repertoires developed in prior in. Influenced by several competing ideologies, these young women negotiated the use and incorporation of Facebook into their everyday life and especially its pros and cons in terms of their religiosity. Through differentiating their Facebook use from its popular uses, they transform it to a Vefabook (Loyaltybook) and hence employ it as a medium of/for vefa (loyalty) through which they practice uhuvvet (religious brotherhood) and tefani. Their unique ways of speaking and circulation of stretches of discourse contribute to transforming Facebook into a vefa space where they mainly interact with their sisters in their group.

This study investigates Chinese online users’ adoptions of various languages and other meaning making signs in their online literacy practices in two popular Chinese CMC sites, Weibo (micro-blogging) and bilibili.com (video-sharing). Adopting the theoretical framework of heteroglossia (Bakhtin, 1981), I explore how various meaning making resources are creatively and playfully utilized by Chinese users in their online communication. After two-month data collection, I sampled the non-standard literacy practices (e.g., foreign language transliteration) identified from micro-blogging postings and comments in Weibo, as well as spontaneous (known as “bullet curtain” comments) and traditional text-box comments from featured videos in bilibili.com. The findings resulted in 30,005 non-standard literacy practice types which contain meaning making features from languages (e.g., stylized Chinese Mandarin) and other meaning making signs (e.g., emojis) from both sites. The analysis suggests that Chinese online communication are noticeably hybrid with plurillingual and non-linguistic semiotic resources. These practices reflect the Bakhtinian notion of heteroglossic communication in which people stylize their language use with various meaning making resources. In addition, many practices are also “carnivalesque” (Bakhtin, 1984) which is characterized with creativity and playfulness. The study further deconstructs the notion of multilingualism and extends the discussion of how online communication opens up space for non-conventional and creative literacy practices, which potentially challenge the authoritative policies and voices.

In this paper I introduce and explain the construct of ‘Craft Fiction’ as a setting for my own artistic work. Within a fictional framework, I am mediating between the field of craft and the contemporary environment of relocated materialities and digital worlds I find myself in. Using the vehicle of language and analyzing those dialogue that are ongoing in craft processes, I am assessing the intimate relationships between maker and its tools/machines, in order to discuss hierarchies and purpose of crafting.

This dissertation brings two recent strands of research together and attempts to contribute to two areas of study: (1) apocalyptic Paul studies and (2) the discipline of intertextuality. When apocalyptic Paul is concerned, many works utilize comparative literature approaches. The present study, however, is different in two respects. First, this study sees intertextuality and apocalyptic as a cultural semiotic that is a meaning potential in culture. Whereas many intertextual studies focus on how later texts employ earlier texts for literary and theological purposes, the present study views culture as a matrix of intertextuality. In addition, this study deems apocalyptic as a cultural discourse that society and culture share to understand transcendent phenomena and events. The second distinctiveness of this study is its analytic method. Instead of word-to-word comparison, we investigate whether Paul’s letters present similar patterns of semantic relations between apocalyptic thematic items. After identifying recurrent thematic formations throughout multiple texts, this study explores Paul’s heteroglossia (different voices) in the thematic formations. As such, the meaning of Paul’s apocalyptic can be construed, when we scrutinize, first, how the apocalyptic languages or themes are used in culture, and second, how Paul differently employs them from others. To paraphrase, the meaning of Paul’s apocalyptic language can be vivid when the same apocalyptic thematic formations in Paul’s letters present different linguistic features from other writings. Through this procedure, the present study argues that though Paul shares similar thematic formations with other texts in the Greco-Roman world, the apostle’s apocalyptic thought is significantly distinctive from others. In Paul’s apocalyptic discourse, Jesus is the primary participant that interacts with other thematic items. Also, the apostle’s peculiar linguistic features in the shared apocalyptic formations converge around one figure that is Christ. In other words, Christ takes the central role in his apocalyptic discourse. Christ, therefore, is the apocalyptic lens for Paul to shape his understandings of transcendent phenomena (i.e., otherworldly journey, resurrection, sin and evil, and the two-age apocalyptic eschatology) through Christ.

Thesis advisor: Charles P. Proctor / This dissertation develops, theorizes, and investigates the notion of metalinguistic engagement (ME). Within the context of reading research for upper elementary bi/multilingual students, which is relatively sparse and particularly lacking in qualitative detail, there are some emerging and promising findings related to the impacts of ME on students’ overall literacy development (Proctor et al,. 2012; Silverman et al., 2014). These outcomes specifically suggest that the development of component language (semantic, morphology, syntax) knowledge, skills, and strategies through ME provides substantial support to bi/multilingual students (Proctor et al., 2015; Silverman et al., 2015). CLAVES, a quasi-experimental language-based reading intervention and curriculum project (Proctor et al., 2020), highlighted the instructional malleability of ME, demonstrating positive effects for both language proficiency and reading comprehension among the participating fourth and fifth grade Spanish/English and Portuguese/English bi/multilingual students. However, the nature of the students’ ME and the extent to which their naturally dynamic linguistic repertoires emerged and were capitalized on during learning is currently unknown. In order to address gaps in research, this dissertation theorizes and investigates ME and contributes a qualitative analysis to the larger quasi-experimental intervention from Proctor et al (2020). This dissertation presents three case studies of teachers and their fourth-grade, Spanish/English bi/multilingual student working groups. A theoretical framework of cultural historical activity theory (CHAT) (Greeno & Engström, 2014; Roth & Lee, 2007) informed by heteroglossia (Bakhtin, 1981) was employed to attend to the tensions between the centripetal forces of classrooms’ goal-oriented activity and the centrifugal aspects of multiple voices and repertoires during ME (Wertsch, 2009). Findings highlight the various actions and resources through which students and teachers participate in ME. The ‘multivoicedness’ of students’ practices were shown to mediate ME goals, while also moving alongside and against the pressures from both the curriculum structure and teachers’ facilitation. Furthermore, dialectics between the curriculum and teachers within ME activities emphasize overarching tensions related to the goals of ME and the students’ opportunities and outcomes within ME. Findings accentuate the flexibility and constraints on bi/multilingual students’ practice and participation during ME and have implications for curriculum, instruction, and teacher preparation. / Thesis (EdD) — Boston College, 2020. / Submitted to: Boston College. Lynch School of Education. / Discipline: Teacher Education, Special Education, Curriculum and Instruction.