The essay begins by addressing the imbalance between students' lack of interest in the literary-historical content of the Swedish subject and the voices advocating for strategies to engage interest in the subject. Given the textbook's position in education and its potential to also engage students, the expectations of the recipient as constructed in its design will be examined. Therefore, Wolfgang Iser's and Umberto Eco's theories on the implied reader have been used to identify the intended recipient, more particularly the student, of the textbook. With that said, the purpose of the present study is to contribute to the understanding of how the intended student of textbooks is constructed through strategies designed to engage interest in the literary-historical content of the Swedish subject. The study adopts a qualitative approach and consists of a thematic analysis of the textbooks Svenska 2 – helt enkelt and Svenska impulser 2. The results indicate six distinctive strategies that collectively provide an understanding of how the intended recipient is expected to be engaged. Overall, the textbooks convey different expectations. Although they employ the same strategies, they do so to varying extents and based on different values concerning the use of meaning-making resources. Svenska impulser 2 prioritizes a shorter text span but varied semiotic resources, whereas Svenska 2 – helt enkelt expresses the need for and illustrates a minimalist design with a longer text span. Consequently, the books construct different expectations regarding the intended student's interest in the literary-historical content of the Swedish subject. The intended student is either in need of varied content or focus. In turn this means that the student is expected to become interested in either a summarizing language with varied semiotic resources or a simpler design with a denser linguistic content. / Uppsatsen tar avstamp i obalansen mellan elevers bristande intresse för svenskämnets litteraturhistoriska ämnesinnehåll och de röster som talar om vikten av strategier att intressera för ämnet. På grund av lärobokens fortsatt starka ställning i undervisningen och dess potential att också intressera eleven ska förväntningar på mottagaren som konstrueras i dess design undersökas. Därför har Wolfgang Isers och Umberto Ecos teorier om att texter har en avsiktlig mottagare använts för att formulera vem lärobokens tänkta mottagare, närmare bestämt elev, är. Med det sagt är syftet med föreliggande studie att åstadkomma ett kunskapsbidrag om hur läroböckers tänkta elev konstrueras genom strategier som intresserar för svenskämnets litteraturhistoriska ämnesinnehåll. Studien har en kvalitativ ansats och består av en tematisk analys av läroböckerna Svenska 2 – helt enkelt och Svenska impulser 2. Resultatet indikerar sex utmärkande strategier som tillsammans ger en bild av hur den tänkta mottagaren förväntas intresseras. Sammantaget förmedlar läroböckerna olika förväntningar. Även om de använder samma strategier är det i olika utsträckning och utifrån olika värderingar gällande användandet av meningsskapande resurser. Svenska impulser 2 visar en prioritering av ett kortare textomfång men varierade tecken, medan Svenska 2 – helt enkelt både uttrycker behovet av och gestaltar en minimalistisk design med ett längre textomfång. Således konstruerar böckerna även olika förväntningar på den tänkta elevens intresse för svenskämnets litteraturhistoriska innehåll. Den tänkta eleven är antingen i behov av ett varierat innehåll, eller i behov av fokus. Det innebär i sin tur att eleven förväntas bli intresserad av ett sammanfattande språk med varierade tecken eller av en enklare design med ett tyngre språkinnehåll.

The U.S. Southwest is a semi-arid region affected by numerous environmental problems. Chicana/o communities have been directly affected by such problems, especially ever since the region was annexed from Mexico by the United States in the mid-nineteenth century. From this moment onwards they lost their environmental sovereignty, mostly through their dispossession of the natural resources.   This environmental humanities dissertation focuses on the ethics, politics, and practices around water (management), for water is a key natural resource and a central element of Chicana/o cultural identity. It explores the ways in which Chicana/o culture is interconnected with environmental practices and sites in subaltern literary works about the Chicana/o experience. It investigates how the hegemonic Anglo-American environmental, political, and economic practices have challenged and undermined Chicana/o culture, identity, and wellbeing, and how this has been addressed in fiction; and it questions whether establishing such a connection adds any useful insights to the larger discussion on the global socio-environmental crisis. This dissertation also analyzes the writer activist character of the subaltern narratives of the corpus, with attention to the relevance of rhetoric in subverting and constructing environmental discourses and ethics.   By examining regional and border narratives, as well as fiction and non-fiction narratives about the socio-environmental struggles of other ethnic minorities in the Southwest and in other parts of the world, this dissertation puts literature about the Chicana/o experience in a regional, national, and transnational context. It moreover explores the pivotal role of literature in reclaiming environmental sovereignty, in asserting cultural identities, and in countering the environmental crisis by imagining alternative managerial practices and socio-environmental relations, as much as in challenging cultural hegemonies. / <p>QC 20170508</p>

I en nära samverkan med yrkesverksamma svensklärare utreder och prövar föreliggande studie hur undervisningen i litteraturhistoria kan utvecklas i praktiken. Med utgångspunkt i elevers och svensklärares uttryckta erfarenheter av arbete med litteraturhistoriska texter konstrueras en didaktisk design. Den didaktiska designen omsätter tidigare forskning rörande förkroppsligat lärande i en lektionsserie på sex lektioner där fokus ligger på bearbetning av en litteraturhistorisk text med hjälp av fyra fysiska komponenter: gester, röstläge-intonation, en visuell komponent samt en auditiv komponent. Iscensättningen av den didaktiska designen studeras med en triangulering som består av observationer, fokusgruppsamtal med elever och lärarintervjuer samt skriftliga exit tickets. Genom en tematisk analys visar resultatet att eleverna trots ett utmanande språk erövrar den litteraturhistoriska texten, engagerar sig i olika erbjudna livsvärldar, minns textinnehåll och inkarnerar nyvunnen kunskap med hjälp av kroppsliga representationer. Förklaringen spåras till kroppen och sinnets enhet samt det meningsskapande multimodala perspektivet, där föreliggande studie också visar den sociokulturella kontextens betydelse. Litteraturdidaktiska ställningstaganden diskuteras vidare och konstaterar att fysiska komponenter kan användas för att gynna en omfattande läsupplevelse, där både kropp och sinne förses med den litteraturhistoriska textens narrativ på olika sätt. Slutligen föreslås fysiska komponenter som en väg in i texten, vilket i sin tur potentiellt kan leda till ökad måluppfyllelse. / In collaboration with professional teachers who teach the Swedish language, this study explores how to develop teaching in history of literature within the field of design-based research. A didactic design is created and tried in an authentic learning situation. This didactic design refers to earlier studies of embodied learning. In a series of six lessons which focus on working with texts from the Enlightenment, four physical components are incorporated in the design: gestures, voices, a visual component and an auditive component. The staging of the didactic design is investigated through a triangulation consisting of observations, group conversations with pupils, interviews with the teacher and written exit- tickets by pupils. Through a thematic analysis the result shows that students, despite the challenging language, conquer the texts from the Enlightenment, engages themselves in different presented lifeworlds, remember contents and incorporates newfound knowledge while using bodily representations. The explanation is traced to the unity of body and mind and to the multimodal perspective that creates meaning. The presented study also shows the meaning of a sociocultural context while working with literature. Didactic literature positions are discussed further and state that physical components can be used as an entrance into texts from different time periods. All thanks to extensive reading experience, where body and mind are provided with narrative through multiply senses. The discussion continues and suggests that due to the fact that pupils are experiencing the narrative in the texts, they are able to perform more extensive analysis which is the focus of the curriculum.

In this essay, I analyze and compare the representation of social actors in six different author presentations from the teaching aid Svenska Impulser 2, (2012). More specifically, I investigate similarities and differences in the representation of men and women and, thus, what meanings are ascribed to these gender categories. Consequently, these presentations belong to three different literary epochs or -isms: the enlightenment (Jean-Jaques Rousseau and Anna Maria Lenngren); romanticism (Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Shelley), and modernism (James Joyce and Virginia Woolf). The analysis is further grounded on Judith Butler’s theory on performative gender and systemic functional grammar as developed and defined by Michael Halliday. The method of analysis is critical discourse analysis (CDA) where I quantify and analyze different types of representational strategies and process and participant functions (transitivity). In addition, these two sections of quantifications are each followed by a qualitative analysis with a certain focus on different epiteths, attributes, general descriptions, and agency. My findings show that the presentations of women are more populated and, that they are portrayed as dependent on men, whereas men are portrayed as independent explorers, innovators, influencers, rebels or radical political debaters and thinkers. While some of these qualities are implied, however more or less muted, in the presentations of women, they are explicated or, by other means, more evident in the presentations of men. Moreover, my analysis shows that the women’s gender identity is marked and thus emphasized in their presentations to a significantly greater degree than the men’s gender identity is in their presentations.

Literary descriptions of shifting from and transgressing assigned sex were common in 19th Century Sweden. This thesis forms a contribution to the larger project of writing a history of Swedish trans literature, and develops new interpretations of certain works of fiction by applying a transgender studies perspective. Through trans readings the thesis also examines what potential and possible implications literature might have for trans people beyond the literary realm. Trans readings are able to supplement earlier research by providing a nuanced understanding of the production of trans- and cisgenders. The theoretical perspectives used in the thesis are drawn for the most part from queer and transgender studies. The thesis adopts a conceptual understanding of trans as a movement, and aims to widen the scope of what may be considered relevant to a history of trans literature. The primary objects of analysis are the 1833 autobiography of widely known thief and cross-dresser Lasse-Maja (Lars Molin), C.J.L. Almqvist’s Drottningens juvelsmycke (1834), and Aurora Ljungstedt’s Moderna typer (1874). In closing, two texts from the fin-de-siècle are also closely read; Amanda Kerfstedt’s Reflexer (1901) and Frida Stéenhoff’s “Ett sällsamt öde” (1911). A wide range of other fiction is additionally studied in order to establish a contextual pattern of trans literary traditions. The thesis demonstrates that trans permeates all kinds of fiction, and that the characters analysed construct both trans and cis gender categories. It concludes that trans is done in a variety of ways, and with a variety of meanings in 19th and early 20th century literature. Trans is often depicted as a positive, fruitful and desirable act, through trans characters who are both themselves subjects of erotic desire and who become symbols of liberty and emancipation. Other trans figures however are often counter images of what are considered to be correct sexes, and are depicted as threatening and/or ridiculous. Both these negative and positive representations of trans affirm the gender binary. At the same time, they also break and destabilize that same binary, and the trans characters in the study both can and cannot be interpreted as transgressing cis- and heteronormativity respectively.