Thesis (M.A.)--Tennessee Technological University, 2009. / Title from title page screen (viewed on Feb. 25, 2010). Bibliography: leaves 87-90.

English language enjoys a high status in Hong Kong. Many parents enroll their children to language classes at a very young age aiming to get them into well-regarded schools for a better prospect. One way that can help learners improve English proficiency is through reading. However, when local students are streamed into different secondary schools, the motivation to read is lowered. This thesis aims at highlighting the different learning contexts of our students that contribute to reading. A new genre, graphic novel, is used to investigate the effectiveness to motivate secondary school students to read. Factors are also identified which may facilitate the revival of the interest of students of different backgrounds and abilities in reading. The study consists of 8 Form 3 (grade 9) students and 2 secondary English teachers. 5 students are studying in a secondary school with English as medium of instruction (EMI) and the other 3 students are studying in a secondary school with Chinese as medium of instruction (CMI). The 2 teachers are working in these two secondary schools respectively. This research was conducted using an action research approach. Questionnaires, interviews and students’ journals were used to achieve the aim of the study. The results reveal that graphic novel can positively motivate secondary school students to read. Teachers can also make use of the features of the genre to make the lessons more interesting. However, more research needs to be done about the introduction of the genre in classrooms and the value of the genre in improving the language proficiency. / published_or_final_version / Education / Master / Master of Education

This thesis involves a class-based literary criticism of working-class women s writing. I particularly focus on a selection of novels by three working-class women writers - Livi Michael, Caeia March and Joan Riley. Their work emerged in the 1980s, the era of Thatcherism, which is a definitive period in British history that spawned a renaissance of working-class literature. In my readings of the novels I look at three specific aspects of identity: gender, sexuality and race with the intersection of social class, to examine how issues of economic positioning impinge further on the experience of respectively being a woman, a lesbian and a black woman in contemporary British society. I also appropriate various feminist theories to argue for the continued relevance of social class in structuring women s lives in late capitalism. Working-class writing in general, and working-class women s writing in particular, has historically been under-represented in academic study, so that by highlighting the work of these three lesser known writers, and by indicating that they are worthy of study, this thesis is also complicit in an act of feminist historiography.

D. Tech. Language Practice / The graphic novel has become the means through which a generation of contemporary writers has chosen to communicate the myths of our time to the world, yet unlike their counterparts in classic mythology, they have not yet enjoyed the same depths of investigation. As a medium with the ability to conjure up powerful, emotive reactions, the graphic novel is now in need of a means of substantiating the responses and reactions to the medium. This study has set out to prove that through the utilisation of a three-pronged analytic model that incorporates analytical approaches from the schools of Myth- and Archetypal Criticism, visual analysis, and particularly Linguistic Criticism an authoritative literary critique can be produced on a graphic novel that would reveal and comment on the three primary constituents of the medium, namely: language; story; and graphic illustration. In addition, this study has aimed to provide contextualisation for the nature and development of the graphic novel against the backdrop of postmodernism for the purposes of explaining the sociological, cultural and temporal influences that prompted and promoted the development of the comic book into what we now know as the graphic novel. A secondary aim of this study has been to provide further legitimacy to the concept of contemporary mythology through the exploration of this controversial concept and, by virtue thereof, set the scene for the incorporation of Myth-criticism into a multi-pronged analytic model.

This dissertation discusses Italy’s bestselling author Andrea Camilleri’s series of Montalbano crime novels. It poses the question of what makes Camilleri’s series so successful in the contemporary literary marketplace and if his success is a representation of Italian culture (and by extension, the postmodern or post-postmodern Italian literary scene). This dissertation deals with Camilleri and his success from a narrative literary point of view. It examines Camilleri’s work from several different perspectives, placing it within the vaster context of Italian literature while also taking a meticulous look at Camilleri as the author who has managed to free a literary genre from its previous confines and opened new boundaries for Italian literature. The dissertation demonstrates how Andrea Camilleri provides a "security blanket" for his readers: by including many elements of a common cultural memory, he keeps his readers safely anchored. These elements include a long list of recurring characters that function almost like the chorus in a Greek play. Certain thematic elements, such as Montalbano’s perpetual search for Justice, and his struggle to combine the written law with the law of men are a topoi of Western literature, as are the antonyms eros/thanatos as well as food and death, which Camilleri heavily employs. The Sicilian author manages to root his work deeply within a literary tradition through direct citations, and explicit and implicit references to the canon, but also breaks new ground and manages to move Italian literature a step forward. In front of this apparently nostalgic background, the Sicilian author plays with and invents many new components in his works, satisfying thus the Italian need for the "known" with the pleasure of a discovery of the "unknown" or the "new", which is a major reason for his success. Camilleri participates in a (post)modern shift of horizons, but does not radically challenge his reader’s "expectations". His series of Montalbano mysteries presents literature of a high level that almost by chance becomes part of an "immediate" literary canon, but does not set out with the ambition to become part of "the canon". / Romance Languages and Literatures

This thesis explores the psychological development of liminal characters in four late-twentieth-century British novels. Studies of Julian Barnes’s Flaubert's Parrot, A. S. Byatt’s Possession, Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus, and John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman, by using D. W. Winnicott’s transitional-objects theory and Jessica Benjamin’s intersubjective theory, show how characters who are little more than infants socially and psychologically attempt to transcend the transitional, liminal status defined by Victor Turner. With the aid of significant objects or equal other subjects, these characters, whose subjective self-constructions at the beginning of the novels have become stalled in an immature position of emotional development or been inhibited by dominating individuals, progress psychologically towards controlling their own subjectivity.

This dissertation joins a vibrant conversation in the social sciences about the challenging nature of care labor as well as feminist discussions about the role of the daughter in Victorian culture. It explores the literary presence of the middle class managing daughter in the Victorian home. Collectively, the novels in this study articulate social anxieties about the unclear and unstable role of daughters in the family, the physically and emotionally challenging work they, and all women, do, and the struggle for daughters to find a place in a family hierarchy, which is often structured not by effort or affection, but by proscribed traditional roles, which do not easily adapt to managing daughters, even if they are the ones holding the family together. The managing daughter is a problem not accounted for in any conventional domestic structure or ideology so there is no role, no clear set of responsibilities and no boundaries that could, and arguably should, define her obligations, offer her opportunities for empowerment, or set necessary limits on the broad cultural mandate she has to comfort and care others. The extremes she is often pushed to reveals the stresses and hidden conflicts for authority and autonomy inherent in domestic labor without the iconic angel in the house rhetoric that so often masks the difficulties of domestic life for women. She gains no authority or stability no matter how loving or even how necessary she is to a family because there simply is no position in the parental family structure for her. The managing daughter thus reveals a deep crack in the structure of the traditional Victorian family by showing that it often cannot accommodate, protect, or validate a loving non-traditional family member because it values traditional hierarchies over emotion or effort. Yet, in doing so, it also suggests that if it is position not passion that matters, then as long as a woman assumes the right position in the family then deep emotional connections to others are not necessary for her to care competently for others.

A brief look at the history of film adaptation studies and its terminology. Character differences between a piece of literature and it's film version are compared in three separate case studies. The film adaptations of a graphic novel, a classic novel, and a play are analyzed on the basis of the changes made to specific characters within their respective stories and the effects of those changes on the overall outcome of the film.

Young adult novels are undeniably popular and yet they are simultaneously dismissed as inconsequential or light – conventionally deemed low literature, these novels are generally not considered worthy to be discussed in the same spaces as the less popular, more traditional high literature. If a genre of young adult novels were given a place within literary history, it would not only legitimize these novels as more than guilty pleasures or the provinces of adolescent readers who will come to grow out of them, but it would also open up the possibility for other forms of literature to be similarly recognized as worth reading or thinking about. The Bildungsroman, also known as the “novel of formation” or the more colloquial “coming-of-age” novel, is a genre grounded in the traditions of multiple literary histories and is commonly understood to be high literature. Marianne Hirsch models the European Bildungsroman, which is useful for both American novels due to the predominance of European and particularly English canon. This paper is interested in determining how contemporary young adult dystopian novels, examined through the Scott Westerfeld's Uglies and Veronica Roth's Divergent, both work within and depart from the conventions of the traditional Bildungsroman.

Lawrence's work has almost invevitably been read as an aesthetic production whereby one must eventually agree or disagree with his vision of "reality". Those who assume a formalist standard of taste often find that Lawrence "loses control" of his material; those who offer ideological apologies for his work argue that disruptions in the aesthetic plane are representative of an exploratory genius, often seen as the outstanding characteristic of literary modernism. Both approaches, explicitly or otherwise , rely on the ultimate sanction of the achieved image, transmuted by the author always in control of his material. Yet anyone who reads Lawrence with an eye to to what the "tale" says in addition to what the "teller" claims discovers that Lawrence is not in full control of his material, thought it cannot simply be argued, on aesthetic or linguistic criteria, that he is out of control. Rather, there exists a "third" state whereby Lawrence both writes and is written, gives us a message with one hand, yet retracts, as it were, with the other. Because this double-move is preeminently suited to the language of fiction, and because it appears in Lawrence's fiction with the greatest versatility and incisiveness, this dissertation analyzes six of his novels for their rhetorical significance, understood as both an organization of tropes and figures and as a system of persuasive doctrine. A new definition for allegory is proposed, the introductions of thematic and structural "blanks" is examined, and a spread of narrative delays are identified and discussed, all concerned with the central problem of writing novels that direct themselves to the resurrection of a pre-linguistic universe, yet ironically depend more and more upon writing to bring this about. Ideas drawn from Continental philosophy and recent critical theory are incorporated for support and instruction. Attention is also focused on Lawrence's revision processes, often with specific emphasis on unpublished manuscript material.