As the United States' population ages and grows more diverse, scholars and practitioners have grown increasingly concerned about persistent disparities in the cost and quality of end-of-life health care, particularly with regard to African Americans. Although a variety of factors may influence these disparities, most scholars agree that the underutilization of hospice care by this population is an important contributor. Drawing from the culture-centered approach to health communication and narrative theory, the present study explores African American patients and caregivers' experiences with hospice care and takes an initial step toward addressing disparities in end-of-life care. I begin this study, first, by positioning it within existing literature on health disparities and the underutilization of hospice care. I then outline the study's context and the ethnographic methods I used to complete it. Next, I discuss (a) participants' understanding of disparities in hospice utilization, (b) how participants' narrate their decisions about and experiences with hospice care, and (c) co-constructed solutions for addressing disparities in end-of-life care by creating partnerships between community members and local hospice organizations.

This study is devoted to five Irish language texts composed in the period between 9th and 21st centuries: four prose tales, an Old Irish tale Loinges Mac nUislenn (The Exile of the Sons of Uisliu (before 10th c.)), two Middle Irish texts Toruigheacht Dhiarmada agus Ghrainne (The Pursuit of Diarmaid and Grainne (c. 12thc.)) and Tochmarc Etaine (The Wooing of Etain), an 18th century Romance of Mis and Dubh Ruis, and a narrative poem Mis published by the contemporary Irish poet Biddy Jekinson in 2001. It examines the heroines of these texts, Derdrui, Grainne, Etain, and Mis, focusing particularly on their roles in the development of their respective narratives and their influence on the overall message of their texts. The texts share a strong connection in that they all, in a more or less direct way, touch upon the female experience reflected in their leading female characters, yet none of them, except for Jenkinson's poem, focuses expressly on representing female characters. Instead the texts use these characters as a means for the elaboration of male characters, reinforcing at the same time the contemporaneous patriarchal viewpoint, thus creating the ideological scheme of the text. Jenkinson's Mis reveals the underlying narrative force of these traditional female characters. It uses a traditional tale to create a new narrative which is re-centered on its female character, thus narrativizing its inherent strength. Beneath their explicitly assigned roles, the female characters in question serve as powerful narrative agents. Their impact transforms the overt ideologies of their respective narratives so that they diverge from the traditional role of the conveyors of conventional values. The examination of the female characters concentrates particularly on the effect their speech has on the development of the narrative. Although modestly represented in the discussed texts, the female words nevertheless subvert the explicit ideologies of their text by the introduction of skepticism as to the objective values suggested by the texts, thus allowing for a conversation with the prevalent discourses and in the end for the consideration of alternative discourses. The dissertation employs Mikhail Bakhtin's theory of dialogism and heteroglossia, as well as his examination of the Bildungsrom, which allows for the theoretization of the connection between the texts, as well as for their re-interpretation. / Celtic Languages and Literatures

During the summer of 2013, fierce protests broke out against a test-mining operation in Gállok (Kallak) outside Jokkmokk, Sweden. Environmental activists joined with local indigenous Sámi in the protest. The incident made national and international headlines, resonating with other instances of conflict between mining companies and indigenous peoples around the world. This thesis aims to explore political discourses and historical narratives behind those, and other, protests and tensions in relation to mining between, on the one hand, the Swedish state which express – through various institutions – to be a proud 'mining nation' with a firm environmental legislation, and, on the other, indigenous Sámi in the Swedish north. Using discourse analysis in combination with a novel application of concepts from narrative theory (the concept of masterplots), the narratives and ideologies of the national institutions responsible for decision-making in mining affairs in Sweden – the government, the parliament, and the Mining Inspectorate – are investigated by analyzing various written and verbal sources. The investigation show a coherent trend within the institutions in making the Sámi people, their rights to land and water, and Sweden's colonial history towards them and their land, Sápmi, invisible, misunderstood, and/or belittled. Mining is understood as an evidently vital and typically Swedish industry, fundamental for the rise of Sweden as a modern welfare state, and an industry which 'makes the world better' by providing the necessary raw materials for the (assumed) inevitable progress and benefit of (western) technology and (western) civilization. The exclusion of certain histories allow for a hegemony in which a certain future is naturalized, made out to be unavoidable. Furthermore, the plot structures employed to create and sustain the hegemony draw on several colonial masterplots. The conclusion of this thesis is that the hegemonic discourse sustains a colonial attitude towards Sápmi and the Sámi people, without it ever being expressed nor understood as such.

At a time when scholars have rekindled the old debate about what is world literature and how can one study it (Casanova, 2004; Moretti, 2000, 2003; Damrosch, 2003, 2009), this thesis analyses the canonisation of Central American Revolutionary women's writing as it moves toward the 'centre' and becomes part of the world literary canon. Drawing on a core-periphery systemic model, this thesis examines how translation for the Anglophone market involves the marginalisation at various levels of the narratives of political radicalism and the erotic that feature in the life writing works of Gioconda Belli, Claribel Alegría and Rigoberta Menchú. The dataset chosen for this study consists of the Spanish originals and English translations of La mujer habitada (1988) and El país bajo mi piel (2001) by Belli; No me agarran viva (1983) and Luisa en el país de la realidad (1987) by Alegría, in collaboration with her husband Darwin J. Flakoll; and Me llamo Rigoberta Menchú (1983) and Rigoberta: La nieta de los mayas (1998) by Menchú. To develop this core-periphery systemic model, I have drawn on the work of scholars in the field of the sociology of translation such as Pascale Casanova (2004), Johan Heilbron (1999, 2010) and Gisèle Sapiro (2008). In the context of the study, peripheralisation has been reconceptualised to assist in locating the texts included in the dataset within a hierarchical power structure (external level of peripheralisation); and identifying the shifts that arise during the translation and circulation of the ontological and public narratives underpinning such texts (internal level of peripheralisation). The study of the internal level of peripheralisation will draw on narrative theory, as elaborated by Margaret Somers and Gloria Gibson (1994), Somers (1997) and Mona Baker (2006). The choice of narrative theory employed in the thesis aims to foreground the impact that translation and the publishing field have on the selection and consecration of a literary genre; facilitate the comparison between the texts and paratexts of the originals and their English translations, and disclose the mechanisms through which the agency of the woman/author is neutralised, and the narratives of sexuality, body, political radicalism and feminine subjectivity are constructed in the original and reinterpreted through translation. This comparative (para)textual analysis questions the nature of the process by which peripheral texts have accessed the Western canon. In light of the findings, the thesis advocates the need to redefine the concept of canonisation in order to acknowledge a possible conflict between the new assumed centrality of the consecrated/translated text and the layers of peripheralisation that might still be constraining the original narratives. Secondly, these findings draw attention to a gap in world literatures scholarship. By assuming the autonomy of literature as an artistic form, world literature scholars might be in danger of obscuring the potential for manipulation inherent in translation practice, particularly in spaces favouring domesticating approaches to translation. Thirdly, this work aims to serve as a reminder to scholars and activists not to overlook the impact of literary translation on the circulation of theories and narratives, particularly in the case of highly canonical texts such as that of Rigoberta Menchú (1984).

The aim with this essay is, through the lens of narratology, to study J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, and find as many examples of different narratological aspects as possible. These narratological aspects will then be presented in a thorough analysis. Furthermore, the difference in narratological theory between realistic and unrealistic literature is highlighted. The aim is also to try and find out whether the narrative structure might have influenced the novel’s popularity among its numerous readers. The analysis shows that the primary narrator is omniscient, the novel is well structured with good descriptions of the settings and well depicted portrayals of the characters. The analysis also shows that time and space are equally as important as in a classical work of fiction. Moreover, it is evident that the narrative structure is an essential aspect of the success and longevity of the novel, in which the narration and the characterizations are vital. The analysis also highlights the unrealistic features of the novel.

There are two disciplines that are concerened with the same object of study, narratives, but that rarely exchange insights and ideas, let alone engage in collaborative research. The first is Narrative Theory (NT), an analytical discipline from the humanities that attempts to analyze literary texts and from these instances derive a general understanding of the concept of narrative. The second is Compuatational Story Composition (CSC), a discipline in the domain of Artificial Intelligence that attempts to enable computers to autonomously compose fictional narratives in a way that could be deemed creative. Several reasons can be found for the lack of collaboration, but one of them stands out: The two disciplines follow decidedly different research methodologies at contradistinct levels of abstraction. This makes it hard to conduct NT and CSC research simultaneously, and also means that CSC researchers have a hard time validating whether they use NT concepts correctly, while NT scholars have no use for the outputs created by work in CSC. At the same time, a close exchance between the two disciplines would be desirebale, not only because of the complementary approach to their object of study, but also because comparable interdisciplinary collaborations have proven to be productive in other fields, like for instance linguistics. The present thesis proposes a research methodology called generative modeling designed to address the methodological differences outlined above, and thus allow to conduct simultaneous NT and CSC research. As a proof of concept it performs several cycles of generative modeling, in which it computationally implements concepts and dynamics described in two frameworks from NT, namely Marie-Laure Ryan's possible worlds approach to plot, and Alan Palmer's fictional minds approach to characters. In detail, the first cycle attempts to implement Ryan's possible worlds semantics and the resulting dynamics of plot, but falls short in a way that suggests that the first principles layed out in the theory are not sufficient to capture an example plot, for a number of reasons. The second cycle resolves these hypothesized problems by extending Ryan's plot understanding with affective dynamics based on Palmer's understanding of fictional minds. With plot dynamics completed, the third cycle implements Ryan's concept of tellability, which represents a quantifiable measure of the structural quality of plots. The last cycle implements a Genetic Algorithm based search heuristic that is capable of searching the plot space spanned by the employed formalism for plots high in tellability, which provides additional insights on properties of tellability. The resulting implementation is a in-depth computational representation of plot ingrained into the CSC System InBloom, which is capable of autonomusly composing novel plots and evaluating their quality. The study reported in this thesis demonstrates, how implementing narratological theories as generative models can lead to insights for NT, and how grounding computational representations of narrative in NT can help CSC systems take over creative responsibilities. Thereby, it shows the feasibility and utility of generative modeling.

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Globalization asserts increasing pressure on marginalized cultures and languages. While faced with the pragmatic, often economic, need to communicate via global languages such as English and Chinese, communities of non-dominant language users struggle to maintain or reestablish their own cultural and linguistic practices. This thesis considers three areas of theory to further inquiry into how revitalization contexts may operate within an increasingly borderless world. The specific focus is the CHamoru/Chamorro revitalization context on Guåhan /Guam. First, readers enter the discussion through the conduit of narrative theory which focuses on how legends spanning generations may lend insight into how the dispositions of local inhabitants developed. Second, affect theory is considered to illustrate how narratives are constructed about the future through fear and anxiety. Third, revitalization rhetoric and the emergent theory of translingualism are addressed as they lie at the intersection of narratives about the past and future. The thesis works to initiate conversations between theories which previously worked apart from one another in a context infrequently considered in an effort to establish a foundation for future research and activism on the the island of Guåhan

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