It is the purpose of this paper to explore how Morris' novel relates to life in Twin Oaks, primarily as depicted in two books: Living the Dream (1983) by Ingrid Komar, a long-term visitor to the commune and Kinkade's Is It Utopia Yet? (1996). This comparison will demonstrate that the experiences of contemporary intentional communities such as Twin Oaks provide a meaningful context for reading News from Nowhere because of the similarities in goals and philosophy. It will further demonstrate that though Twin Oaks was originally inspired by a utopian novel much more in the tradition of Bellamy's work than Morris', the community's subsequent evolution has brought it much closer in philosophy to News from Nowhere than Looking Backward.

Both historiographical and literary practices have undergone revision in recent years in attempting to address the inheritance of nineteenth-century realism. Since the object of realist stylistics, employed in both the writing of fiction and history, is to render authorship authoritative or even invisible, the ideological import of these narratives is often such that the constructedness of the historical record and its absences are veiled. In developments beginning in the 1980s with the advent of ‘New Historicism’ and with the emergence of postmodern literary techniques, the interface of literature and history became of seminal importance, since both were now credited as being products of narrative and discourse, and hence, to varying degrees, of the literary imagination. This movement intersects interestingly with developments in postcolonial studies, since it is the voices of the marginalized and disempowered colonized peoples that are routinely co-opted and excised from nineteenth-century realist histories. These concerns are now being fully explored in the literature of the contemporary post-transitional South African moment, since authors in this country seemingly now feel freed up to look back to histories that precede the immediate traumas of apartheid. The concern, in relation to apartheid developments but also on a broader universal scale, is this: if history is viewed as perpetual emergences of modernities, then one of the great absences in the record is the historical determinants of any given epistemology. The attempt to recreate such an epistemological genealogy is thus simultaneously postcolonial, historiographical, and literary. Russel Brownlee’s Garden of the Plagues (2005), Ingrid Winterbach’s To Hell with Cronjé (2010), and Etienne van Heerden’s The Long Silence of Mario Salviati (2002) attempt to bridge this gap in the recorded sensibilities of any historical moment by representing a ‘lived experience’ of the past, and in the process imaginatively recreating the cultural, historical and psychological locations of the proponents of an emerging modernity. This study concerns itself with the ways in which these authors address the influence of realist historiography through the use of literary innovations that allow for the departure from realist stylistics. Most commonly, all three authors draw on forms of magic realism, but multiple refigurings and recombinations of notions of temporality, narrative, and characterization likewise work to defamiliarize the once stable discourse of history.

This diploma thesis deals with the possibilities of using graphic novel in German language teaching (teaching German as a foreign language). The main premise of this thesis is that graphic novel, as a multimodal medium and a phenomenon of current literature, has a wide potential for the German (and other foreign languages) classroom. The goal of the thesis is to design a didactic material respecting the specific qualities of graphic novel and drawing upon its potential. The first chapter serves as an introduction, exploring graphic novel as a medium, as a phenomenon of current literature and as a pedagogical tool. The term is defined and put into context. In the second chapter, the method of a review study is employed to explore how graphic novel is used in the foreign language classroom. The systematic review has shown that it is possible to use graphic novel as a tool for achieving the objectives of foreign language teaching and learning - the language aims (through vocabulary acquistition, reading skills development and creative writing) as well as the cognitive and formative aims (through the development of literacies, cultural and historical awareness, intercultural competence and citizienship). Moreover, graphic novel proved to be positive influence on motivation. The third chapter uses the...

100 years after the official acceptance of women into higher architectural education in Sweden’s technical institutions, I have tracked and summarized the progress of not just female students and female employees within the architecture industry, but also the extent of the creative space offered for women throughout the years to express their individual styles. This has been with the intention of detecting a female design language that can be read in the Swedish city, starting from Sweden’s earliest female pioneer in the late 1890s. The study relates the female design language to openness and fluidity, and the feminine sense of caring for the social experience taking place within urban spaces. This is naturally not the case for every woman and is just a common pattern detected throughout different architectural eras. Results show a rapid progression of women within statistical numbers of both educational institutions and architecture firms. This number is, however, one dimensional and does not accurately represent positions of power - which appear to be male dominated - and its impact on the Swedish urban city. The modern woman, as it turns out, does not face the struggles of the pioneers. She is, on the other hand, placed within the box of large architecture corporations, and in that way loses her personal touch and sense of style in her professional work.

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