This is a book of short stories with a critical introduction. In theme, the stories seek to find the border between the Midwest and the Southwest of America by focusing on Ohio and Arizona. Some of the stories seek to exemplify “experimental” fiction, while the critical introduction seeks to define “experimental.” In addition, the introduction theorizes about the role of setting in linking collections and characterization.

This qualitative study explored the potential for decolonizing the secondary English Language Arts classroom. An interdisciplinary approach was used to explore contemporary theories of literary criticism relevant to the study of Aboriginal literature, including an approach through colonial and post-colonial discourse and the growing body of theory and criticism written by North American Aboriginals; to incorporate literary theory and pedagogical knowledge of content into the development of Aboriginal literature units FOR secondary school classrooms; and to incorporate these new interpretive and pedagogical understandings into the practices of two secondary English teachers using North American Aboriginal literature in their classrooms.<p>A document was prepared that explored the interpretive potentials of postcolonial and Aboriginal literary theories and given to the two participating teachers who were able to use this information to develop instructional units for their literature classes. Action research framed the approach used to implement, revise, and evaluate the units of study in the two grade twelve classrooms. <p>The participating teachers found that the critical lenses enabled them to approach Aboriginal literature with more confidence and insight. They also found that their classroom use of Aboriginal literature disclosed the misconceptions their students held concerning Aboriginal peoples. The teachers were frustrated by the systemic racism evident in their classrooms. They were also frustrated by the resistance shown by their teaching peers toward incorporating Aboriginal literature and anti-racist methodologies into their instruction.<p>The findings of this study suggest that more exposure to critical literary theories and minority literatures in the context of teachers pre-service and in-service education may help to decolonize Canadian classrooms.

This qualitative study explored the potential for decolonizing the secondary English Language Arts classroom. An interdisciplinary approach was used to explore contemporary theories of literary criticism relevant to the study of Aboriginal literature, including an approach through colonial and post-colonial discourse and the growing body of theory and criticism written by North American Aboriginals; to incorporate literary theory and pedagogical knowledge of content into the development of Aboriginal literature units FOR secondary school classrooms; and to incorporate these new interpretive and pedagogical understandings into the practices of two secondary English teachers using North American Aboriginal literature in their classrooms.<p>A document was prepared that explored the interpretive potentials of postcolonial and Aboriginal literary theories and given to the two participating teachers who were able to use this information to develop instructional units for their literature classes. Action research framed the approach used to implement, revise, and evaluate the units of study in the two grade twelve classrooms. <p>The participating teachers found that the critical lenses enabled them to approach Aboriginal literature with more confidence and insight. They also found that their classroom use of Aboriginal literature disclosed the misconceptions their students held concerning Aboriginal peoples. The teachers were frustrated by the systemic racism evident in their classrooms. They were also frustrated by the resistance shown by their teaching peers toward incorporating Aboriginal literature and anti-racist methodologies into their instruction.<p>The findings of this study suggest that more exposure to critical literary theories and minority literatures in the context of teachers pre-service and in-service education may help to decolonize Canadian classrooms.

This thesis argues that literary theory applied to political cartoons shows that cartoons are reasoned arguments. The rhetorical devices used in the cartoons mimic verbal devices used by essayists. These devices, in turn, make cartoons influential in that they have the power to persuade readers while making them laugh or smile. It also gives examples of literary theorists whose works can be applied to political cartooning, including Frederick Saussure, Mikhail Bakhtin, and Wolfgang Iser. Not only do those theorists' arguments apply to text, they also apply to pictorial representations. This thesis also discusses changes in the cartoon art form over the 250 years that American political cartoons have existed. Changes have occurred in both the way text and pictorial depictions have been presented by artists. This thesis makes some attempt to explain why the changes occurred and whether they have been for the better.

In 2K Games’ Bioshock (2007) the player, as the protagonist Jack, is thrown into a dystopian, futuristic alternate history of America. Rapture is an underwater city saturated in music: popular songs from the mid twentieth century; classical-style soundtrack pieces composed by Garry Schyman; characters humming, singing, whistling or playing instruments; musical vending machines; and even the sounds of whales and other creatures all participate in forming a textured soundscape. The songs from the 1930s - 50s used throughout Bioshock recall a real-world cultural environment—a popular music culture that is both comfortably recognizable yet strangely unfamiliar. They occur within the game world and are heard by the player and game characters, and thus the songs are diegetic or “screen music.” In Bioshock, such music is an explicit component of narrative production, game environment creation, and player immersion. Significantly, diegetic music participates in the construction of narrative through a constant interplay or negotiation with the video game’s other elements—visual, textual, ludic—and ultimately functions as a distinct discourse able to mediate for Jack/the player between contesting factors, via established conventional codes of musical, cultural, film, and now video game signification. Bioshock’s use of music initiates a pre-game discourse during installation and prior to every game session in the disc-loading scenes, and this musical discourse is continued throughout the narrative. The story’s opening and descent into Rapture further establishes and “naturalizes” the presence of diegetic music as part of the story being told, and as a vital component of the audio-visual environment enhances player immersion. At the same time, these opening instances and subsequent occurrences of diegetic music at significant points in the story demonstrate that music’s culturally encoded emotive potential produces ironic and poignant effects, while its lyrical intertextuality generates narratological and ludic commentary in various song/scene pairings.

This thesis investigates the transatlantic manifestation of the debate regarding the aesthetics of commitment in the modernist literary and theatrical tradition. Within the debate theatre occupies a privileged position since (because of its two-fold roles both as theory and performance) it allows a critique both of performative conventions and methods and also a dialectical consideration of the audience’s socio-political consciousness. The debate, often referred to as form versus content – schematically re-written as ‘autonomy’ versus ‘commitment’ – and its transatlantic evaluation are central to modernist aesthetics, as they bring into question the established modes of perceiving and discussing the issue. A parallel close reading will reveal the closely related development of the European and the American traditions and evaluate their critical strengths and shortcomings. The first part of the thesis discusses the positions of Georg Lukács and Bertolt Brecht, Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin in tandem with those of the New York Intellectuals, especially as expressed in the latters’ writings in the Partisan Review. The second part extends this transatlantic dialogue through a consideration of the theatrical works of the New York Living Newspaper unit of the Federal Theatre Project (FTP) in the USA and Bertolt Brecht’s vision of and relationship with ‘Americana’ as revealed through such plays as In the Jungle of Cities, Man Equals Man, St Joan of the Stockyards and the 1947 version of Galileo. The Federal Theatre and Brecht’s respective dramaturgies demonstrate differences in the articulation and application of the aesthetics of commitment and politics of engagement. A close reading of four plays by the Living Newspaper unit will not only reveal the influence of the Russian Blue Blouse groups and Meyerhold’s theatrical experimentations, but also how the unit’s playwrights and administration attempted to re-write this aesthetic. Hallie Flanagan (the director of FTP), recognising the limitations of Broadway and having sensed the audience’s need for a new kind of theatre, realised early on the importance of ‘translating’ the European aesthetics of commitment to conform with the American New Deal discourse. Brecht’s plays manifest not only the differences with respect to the European aesthetics of commitment, but also its highly complicated development. His American experiences revealed that the failings of the FTP’s attempt to establish a viable national theatre with a social agenda prohibited a more powerfully theatrical connection (theoretical and performative) between the two traditions. Both the European and the American modernist aesthetics are informed by Marxist cultural and literary theory, particularly by the writings centred on the political efficacy of a work of art with respect to its reception and its modes of production. The politico-aesthetic encounter of the Marxist tradition of engagement with a commitment to aesthetic formalism (often associated with the autonomy position) led to a confrontational and polemical rather than dialectical argumentation. However, this thesis maintains that the arguments were not simply articulated by theorists at opposing ends of the political spectrum. At the same time, Brecht and the Federal Theatre Project’s interest in the advancements of the European avant-garde and fascination with the notion of ‘Americana’ demonstrate the necessity to examine the issue of commitment in a more dialectical manner. While their notion of the aesthetics of commitment differed, this thesis argues for the necessity, not only of revisiting some of the fundamental premises regarding the role and function of this aesthetics in modernist political theatre, but also of reading the two traditions in conjunction.

I argue that current descriptions of the ways that language and computer code effect change (are “performative”) oversimplify the effects that utterances made in and through virtual spaces have on the real world. Building on J.L. Austin’s speech-act theory and Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction of Austin’s notion of performative language, I develop the theory of cyber-performativity. Though Katherine Hayles argues that “code” is more strongly performative than the utterances Austin focused on, Hayles’ analysis is founded on her problematic distinction between the logical computational worldview and the slippery natural-languages worldview. Cyber-performative theory builds on Hayles’ argument by showing that computational processes are as uncertain as natural languages: like human languages, “code” might always signify more and other than is intended. I argue that the social, economic, and political status of language changes as utterances made in virtual worlds such as Second Life simultaneously effect change in both real and virtual spaces.

El problema a tratar o la reflexión sobre una redefinición o reestructuración de la ciencia literaria (crítica académica literaria, estudios literarios, CL) y estudios culturales (EC) es un fenómeno global obvio cuando, por ejemplo, en la propuesta para este volumen de reflexiones conjuntas, se pregunta "¿cómo reaccionar frente a la disminución de estudiantes subgraduados y graduados de literatura y al incremento de los abocados a los estudios culturales?" Esta pregunta revela un fenómeno que se está dando masivamente en todos aquellos países en cuyas universidades se han introducido los estudios culturales, así en Alemania, así en el Instituto de Romanística y en el Centro de Investigación Iberoamericana de la Universidad de Leipzig.

Made available in DSpace on 2014-06-11T19:26:52Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 0 Previous issue date: 2009-07-29Bitstream added on 2014-06-13T20:15:57Z : No. of bitstreams: 1 lima_lfm_me_assis.pdf: 697871 bytes, checksum: 0bbe9220f62fcc4c0238339196d33e3c (MD5) / Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES) / Harold Bloom (1930) é, para muitos, o crítico norte-americano de maior destaque nos estudos literários da atualidade. Sua teoria da influência, além de possuir sua própria retórica, resgatou à literatura seus aspectos mais subjetivos. O presente trabalho tem por objetivo empreender uma leitura de dissertações e teses acadêmicas brasileiras que tenham lançado mão da teoria da angústia da influência e seu mapa de desleitura, ou que discutam temas como o cânone literário, tão usualmente associado à figura do professor de Yale, enfático debatedor desse assunto. Para esse propósito foi feito o levantamento do corpus por meio de uma pesquisa nos principais sites e bancos de dados científicos brasileiros, como a Plataforma Lattes e o Banco de Tese da CAPES, e estabelecido os critérios de análise com base nas teses e dissertações que compõem esse corpus. A leitura desses trabalhos acadêmicos buscou identificar em que medida o crítico norte-americano está sendo lido no meio acadêmico brasileiro e compreender qual a amplitude dessas leituras. Por conseguinte, esta dissertação tem o intuito de entender qual a relevância das idéias de Bloom para o intelectual brasileiro da área de Letras. / Nowadays, Harold Bloom (1930) is, to many, the North-american critic of major projection in literary studies. His theory of influence, besides to have its own rhethorics, brought back to literature its more subjective aspects. The present work has as its objectives to engage in a reading of Brazilian academic dissertations and thesis which have made usage of the theory of anxiety of influence and his map of misreading, or which discuss themes as the literary canon, so usually associated to the professor of Yale´s figure, an emphatic debater of this subject. With this purpose in mind it was made the survey of the corpus through a research in the main Brazilian scientific websites and databases, like Plataforma Lattes and CAPES thesis database, and it was established the criteria of analysis based upon the thesis and dissertations which compound this corpus. The reading of these academic works sought to identify in what extent the North-American critic is been read in Brazilian academic environment and comprehend how wide have been these readings. Therefore, this dissertation has as its aim to understand how relevant to the Brazilian scholar of Language and Literature the ideas of Bloom area.

Made available in DSpace on 2014-06-11T19:26:52Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 0 Previous issue date: 2010-12-16Bitstream added on 2014-06-13T20:55:34Z : No. of bitstreams: 1 nascimento_mab_me_assis.pdf: 598423 bytes, checksum: 22a2b745bad373dd9de8aab375f2db57 (MD5) / Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES) / O presente trabalho apresenta um estudo analítico/comparativo do conto “A volta do marido pródigo”, extraído da obra Sagarana, de Guimarães Rosa com a Parábola do Filho Pródigo, encontrada no Novo Testamento, narrada em Lucas 15.11-32, comparando-o, formal tematicamente, fato que revela seu caráter intertextual. Propõe-se neste estudo uma reflexão acerca da relevância da análise da Bíblia tanto para o seu próprio conhecimento literário quanto para a constatação da mesma como referência consagrada para muitas obras que se tornaram marcos na literatura ocidental, como é o caso do conto selecionado neste trabalho, que configura uma expressão artística de um gênero discursivo pouco estudado na atualidade, que pode se constituir em uma ferramenta muito útil no processo de ensino/aprendizado. Para isso, tem-se como base teórica uma bibliografia referente à intertextualidade, ao estudo literário da Bíblia, ao gênero do discurso da parábola e à crítica e análise literária / This essay presents a comparative analytical study of the short story A volta do marido pródigo from the book Sagarana, written by Guimarães Rosa, with the Prodigal Son parable, found in the New Testament, in Luke 15:11-32, comparing it formally and thematically with, which reveals its intertextual aspect. This study proposes a reflection on the relevance of the Bible analysis for both its own literary knowledge and it as a great reference for many works that have become memorable marks in Western literature, such as the short story selected in this work, which sets an artistic expression of a little studied genre that may constitute a useful tool in teaching and learning. In order to this, we have a literary theoretical base about intertextuality, literary study of the Bible, parable as a discursive genre and literary criticism and analysis