Thesis (M.A.)--Catholic Theological Union at Chicago, 2005. / Vita. "May 2005." Includes bibliographical references (leaves 63-64).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Western Conservative Baptist Seminary, 1986. / Abstract. Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 127-142).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Chicago, Divinity School, March 2001. / Includes bibliographical references. Also available on the Internet.

While there is evidence of early creativity in children’s colorful drawings, original stories, and elaborate games of pretense, conducting research on the topic of children’s creativity can be challenging. In particular, the most commonly used measures of creativity have been shown to be problematic, particularly with young children. Therefore, an important goal of this dissertation was to develop appropriate laboratory tasks for assessing children’s creativity. At Time 1, 75 4- and 5-year-old children (38 boys, 37 girls) were asked to complete two new measures of creativity – a storytelling task and a drawing task. In addition, the children were interviewed about whether they engaged in elaborated role play (i.e., pretending in which children imagine and act out the part of a character on a regular basis). The results indicated that the laboratory measures of creativity were both related to engaging in elaborated role play as well as related to each other (independent of age and language ability), suggesting that the measures were effective in assessing young children’s creativity, and that they were specifically associated with elaborated role play. Another goal of this dissertation was to examine the continuity of individual differences in creativity from preschool age to middle school age with a longitudinal follow-up assessment of the children from Time 1 approximately eight years later when they were 11 to 14 years old. 41 children (21 boys, 20 girls) participated at Time 2 and completed a large battery of creativity measures, including tasks similar to the laboratory measures at Time 1 as well as additional measures that varied in whether they included social content. Contrary to hypotheses, laboratory measures of creativity at Time 1 did not predict any of the measures of creativity at Time 2. However, the creativity ratings of the role play characters from Time 1 were related to all of the indicators of creativity eight years later. In addition, having an imaginary companion at Time 2 was concurrently related to several measures of creativity. These results suggest that elaborated role play might be particularly relevant for children’s developing creativity. This dissertation includes previously published co-authored material.

This research focused on the issue of children's understanding of the pretend-reality distinction. In particular, it investigated several features of the availability hypothesis (Harris, Brown, Marriott, Whittall & Harmer, 1991; Johnson & Harris, 1994) and the pretence continuation account (Golomb & Galasso, 1995) which have been previously offered as competing explanations for children's behaviours during pretence. Specifically, the experiments reported here explored the role of differing forms of affect in both of these accounts and assessed the constraining influence of empirical evidence of reality on the effects of increased cognitive availability. To this end, a series of seven related experiments were conducted in which four to seven year old children (N = 591) were asked to pretend about the contents of empty boxes. The children's behaviours on a series of box selection tasks were then observed under conditions of differing affect and varying levels of empirical evidence (experiments 1 to 5). The children's spontaneous behaviours were also video recorded (experiments 6 and 7). Taken together, the results suggest that there are interactions between individual differences, age, affect and levels of empirical evidence which predict children's propensity towards making pretend-reality confusions. In relation to previous explanations of children's behaviour, the pretence continuation account (Golomb & Galasso, 1995) is unable to explain the complexity of the current findings and the results are instead more consistent with an account involving individual differences such as that proposed by Johnson and Harris (1994). However, there are two crucial contributions which the experiments reported here can make to these explanations. First, there are developmental changes which take place between four and seven years of age in relation to pretend-reality understanding and these changes interact with the individual differences identified by Johnson and Harris (1994). Second, the present data provide evidence of the central role played by affect in children's pretence. Overall, this thesis offers an account of children's understanding of the distinction between pretence and reality which incorporates both developmental and individual differences.

This study addresses two questions. What light does the work of George MacDonald shed on the concept of 'spiritual development' and what is the pedagogical function of his fantasy? The thesis is largely concerned to clarify these conceptual issues but the reason for raising them is practical. The promotion of spiritual development in schools is a statutory requirement. The conclusions of this thesis contain implications for curricular strategies for meeting that requirement and attention will be drawn to them. Two major claims are made. The first concerns the issue of whether a coherent spirituality necessarily depends on - and thus must be promoted within - a religious framework. The implication of MacDonald's recourse to fantasy, a discourse dispensing with traditional religious categories, to explore the theme of spiritual development is that a spiritual pedagogy does not need to be rooted in traditional religious concepts and truth-claims. The two discourses, the 'theistic' and the 'non-theistic', are compatible and complementary. Secondly, the concept of 'transfiguring fantasy' is introduced and commended. MacDonald's transfiguring fantasy functions pedagogically, as potentially does all such unclosed flmtasy, by calling in question the distinction between the narrative one reads and one's own life-story. The two realms, those of the text in one's hands and the life one is leading, elide and the task of resolving the enigmas of the fantasy becomes one with the unfinished business of making sense of one's own story. This thesis also considers the familiar Romantic themes of nature, childhood and the imagination, which MacDonald treats with original insight. Nature is akin to fantasy in its capacity to engage and direct the attentive spirit. Childhood is the pattern of what we must become. The imagination's role is to summon us to press beyond the borders of what may be scientifically proven or rationally articulated.

Cette recherche a voulu analyser l'écart entre la dimension littéraire de la page autobiographique et la réalité de l'expérience existentielle de l'auteur. On sait, en effet, qu'à partir d'un emploi fonctionnel et pertinent des éléments paratextuels, l'écrivain de la Vita construit une image héroïque et idéale de lui-même, en mettant en évidence plus ou moins de façon volontaire les aspects de sa personnalité hors du commun qui lui ont permis de s'autodéclarer Héros littéraire.Cette analyse ne reparcourira pas donc les nœuds fondamentaux autour desquels s'articule l'histoire de l'autobiographie comme genre littéraire du XVIIIe siècle, mais elle cherchera à rendre la véritable image de l'auteur, à partir des événements racontés dans la Vita. Dans ce but, on a entrelacé des approches de lecture différentes, bien que complémentaires, de l'autobiographie d'Alfieri qui justifient le sectionnement de cette thèse en trois parties: ) La “Vita » comme mémoire sélective; 2) Des silences autobiographiques et des nouvelles d'Alfieri; 3) La mémoire des choses / This research work wants to analyse the difference between the literary side of the author’s biography and his real existential experience.The first part of the research, “La Vita come memoria selettiva”, deals with the author’s workshop and wants to analyse the elaborative phases of the autobiographical text, supplied with manuscript 13 and 24.The first paragraph of the thesis, whose title is “Presenza e significato del paratesto nella Vita”, analyses the textual apparatus of the autobiography. The second paragraph, “Figure e Figuranti nella Vita”, analyses the characters,mentioned and unmentioned, in the autobiographic work. At the end, the third paragraph, “Francesco Elia, il servo che dirige il suo padrone. Aspetti della commedia settecentesca nella Vita”, concentrates on the study of the servant’s character.The second part, written in an innovative tone, wants to study the personality of Alfieri in depth.The last chapter, “La memoria delle cose”,concentrates on a series of objects of different importance in the author’s autobiography that is full of consonances and discordances between reality and imagination.

The intention with this project is to explore and open up the imagination, through investigating how text can be transformed into architecture. The outcome of the investigation during this project is a series of 9 architectural objects. The objects are independent from the text and could be thought of as ‘short-stories’. / Intentionen med detta examensarbete var att undersöka och öppna upp fantasin, genom att utforska hur text kan transformeras till arkitektur. Resultatet av detta utforskande projekt är en serie av 9 objekt. Objekten är oberoende av texten och kan ses som ’short-stories’ i sig själva.

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