Det här är en berättelse om personer och händelser i min släkt, där vi huvudsakligen får följa min morfars och min mammas liv. Historien startar i en tidigare text där jag berättar om min morfars uppväxt i ett fattigt hem i Högstena i Västergötland, hans flytt till Stockholm och etablering av ett eget skrädderi där. Hans historia utspelar sig från 1907 och cirka fem decennier framåt. Min morfars liv har jag skrivit om i Kreativt skrivande I-II.  När vi nu kommer in i historien har vi kommit fram till år 1954. Då är min mamma nybliven mor och familjen är bosatt i Skövde. Hon har därmed gjort samma resa som sin far fast åt motsatt håll. Vi får följa min mammas liv under cirka trettio år. Mitt mål med den här släktkrönikan är framför allt att ge barn och barnbarn kunskap om och minnen från tidigare generationers liv. Samt vetskap om hur dessa generationers livsval haft avgörande betydelse för deras egna liv.

No description available.

This thesis aims to assess the representations of Black same-sex desiring women, specifically in the contexts of the United States of America and Nigeria. The primary aim of this study is to explore and critique the notion of U.S. sexual exceptionalism and homonormativity as theorised by Jasbir Puar's Terrorist Assemblages. In doing so, I aim to show that while the United States of America positions itself as more progressive than countries that continue to criminalise and persecute same-sex desiring people, queer people in both contexts continue to be marginalised and face similar challenges that are a result or cause of this marginalisation. This comparative thesis of Chinelo Okparanta's Under the Udala Trees and Leona Beasley's Something Better Than Home examines the ways in which religion; notions of secrecy and censorship; as well as compulsory heterosexuality and homophobic violence contribute to the marginalisation of Black queer women in both the United States of America and Nigeria.

Press Anywhere is a collection of short stories that depicts the various inadequacies of the third millennium male. Each story concerns a man, a boy, or a family on the cusp of change. These characters, burdened by their family tragedies, try to shake off their histories and renew themselves. But, in one way or another, home always finds them. Set in a shared universe, some characters appear in multiple stories, including one boy who dreams of an unlikely superhero to save him from an abusive sibling, and a man determined to outlive a family curse.

The Former Lives of Buildings is a novel about thirty-one-year-old architect Adelle Corey. Adelle is a woman in denial. A nightmare figure called the Baron steals memories of her closest relationships and most poignant experiences. He hides the memories in Adelle’s dreams, where he reconstructs them into buildings. The only way she can recover the memories is by cutting or tattooing these buildings into her skin. Adelle uses notebooks, mnemonic devices, and academic trivia to keep track of her daily routines. The novel takes place in contemporary times and opens in the burn unit of Bridgeport Hospital, Connecticut, where Adelle has been recovering for two months. She does not remember her stay prior to the opening day of the story, but she retains her memories from this day forward. Adelle’s parents, her husband, and the mysterious woman Celesse St. Armand, who has been given charge over her care, refuse to allow Adelle to see her six-year-old son, Ben, until she can recover the missing days. Adelle suspects that something has happened to Ben. She seeks the help of Sam, her tattoo artist, to recover memories. The search uncovers painful truths about Adelle’s childhood and marriage, ultimately forcing her to face that the Baron is a device she created to protect herself, not an outside force acting upon her. Adelle goes from a lonely, untrusting existence to a willingness to form deep friendships. She gains the capacity to face the whole truth instead of selecting only the comfortable parts. She does not find her son in any of the buildings. However, confronting the experiences hidden there gives her the strength to accept that she has passed her memory problems on to her son, who has not been able to remember his family since the fire. Although their marriage does not survive, Adelle and De learn to work together as parents.

This dissertation explores the film adaptations of two of the novels of Herny James, namely Washington Square (1880) and The Portrait of a Lady (1881). The Introduction discusses issues relating broadly to the problems and attractions of film adaptation. I draw especially on the work of James Naremorc, Brian Mcfarlane and George Bluestone. Naremore surveys the history of film adaptation, pervasive in many countries with a film industry. Mcfarlane looks at the reasons for this interest in adapting novels to film as well as the issue of authenticity with regard to film adaptation. Bluestone looks at what film and literature have in common. In Chapter One, I discuss the novel Washington Square and two adaptations, William Wyler's 1949 version and Agnieszka Holland's 1997 version. The chapter opens with a discussion of the novel, focussing on themes such as marriage, money and status in society. I then examine selected aspects of the two films. In The Heiress, I look at the inclusion of scenes that don't appear in the novel, and how these scenes drive the narrative in the film. I also look at how the characters are portrayed in the film and how they bring their own uniqueness to the screen. In Holland's Washington Square, I examine both the characters and the sets, while also looking at Holland's feminist interpretation of the story. In Chapter Two, I examine the novel The Portrait of a Lady and Jane Campion's film version of this story. The discussion of the novel looks at themes like tragedy, the European experience, marriage, and the displaced American. I also discuss the various characters in the novel and the role that each of them plays. With regard to Campion's film, I look at unusual filmic devices that have been used as well as the way in which the characters from the novel have been translated to the screen. I conclude by noting how films have inspired people to read classic works once again.

No description available.

No description available.

In this dissertation I query a notion that is prevalent among contemporary literary critics, cultural policy-makers, and media representatives in Canada: the notion that Canadian literature is national "soul-stuff" and thus not an ordinary commodity. I argue that this notion obscures the crucial nexuses at which the literary, economic, and political spheres blur inside Canada. My analysis of Canada's literary conditions under contemporary globalization examines just these nexuses. It pries apart the discourses of national literature and national identity in order to investigate how they function and onto which economic, political, and social values they project themselves. With this approach, I do not intimate that Canadian literature does not have any non-market value. Rather, I want to draw attention to the fact that the traditional focus on literature as a trope of non-material, national values masks what is really at stake at the present moment -namely questions of "value." What are the social and political values that structure contemporary Canadian society: its political organization, public sphere, cultural production, public policies? How are literary-cultural decisions made and by whom? These questions open to scrutiny nationalist narratives of globalization, which tend to reduce contemporary processes of globalization (such as global cultural commodification) to the totalizing force of U.S. neo-imperialism. Not only is Canada's relationship to cultural imperialism, capitalism, and globalizing forces more complicated than assumed in such reasoning, but globalization also is a more complicated phenomenon than the currently widespread notion of U.S. neo-imperialism suggests. I show that this notion has in substantial ways distracted from the active and voluntary involvement of other parties and countries in the current neoliberal restructuring of global power, which asserts as inevitable the commercialization and privatization of cultural and social goods, policies, and public functions, and the deregulation of markets. In Canada, claims of cultural-national sovereignty and strategies of cultural protection have tended to omit the fact that the increasing conversion of Canada's "national literature" in economic terms is symptom of this neoliberal restructuring process in which the Canadian government actively participates by depoliticizing its functions and handing control over markets to multinational corporations, international trade agreements, and international judicial and political instruments. Subsequently, I propose that we should not, at this point, study (and teach) Canadian literature in order to protect a national tradition and assert the image of an autonomous literature of multicultural "Canadianness," but in order to approach the question of globalization and the issue of neoliberalism from alternative perspectives. Hence, I also distance myself from postmodernist approaches to the literary study of globalization, which tend to read the latter in purely textual terms that emphasize transnational and transcultural images and narratives. While this postmodernist focus has in many ways countered the totalizing implications of the term globalization, it has run the risk of excluding the material realities of literary globalization from its inventory of study objects. So has the more recent North American discourse of "global literary study," which has been largely limited to postmodernist idealizations and transnational histories of globalization. As an alternative to these readings, I propose a materialist literary approach that emphasizes that an understanding of the contemporary literary conditions in Canada requires an understanding of neoliberal globalization as the context within which literary studies articulates itself as an academic discipline and within which the production and consumption of literature takes place today. Materialist literary criticism engages in a process of critical interdisciplinarity -at the junction of the fields of English-Canadian literary studies, cultural studies, postcolonial studies, and globalization studies -that is non-nationalist and unsettling of the neoliberal power structures and values that increasingly pervade universities and cultural policies and markets. The dissertation chapters explore the possibility and emphasize the actual existence of alternative globalization processes and narratives. The first chapter does so by engaging in the more recent North American debate on the literary study of globalization. The second chapter discusses the neoliberal orientation in the present practice of modernrepresentative democracy in Canada in order to test the grounds for alternative methods of more inclusive cultural decision-making, especially as it relates to literary production. In opposition to the still-prevalent modernist ideal-purported most notably by Northrop Frye and A.J .M. Smith -of a globally vanguardist Canadian literature, the study of Aboriginal and ethnic minority writers undertaken in the third chapter brings forth an "allochronic" (or differently-timed) understanding of Canadian literature, globalization, and their interrelations. The fourth chapter complicates the cultural nationalist binary of Canadian-owned, government-funded publishing and foreign-owned, market-driven publishing. It explores the idea of alternative publishing by means of interviews with small-scale Aboriginal and EuroCanadian publishers and an analysis of radical Canadian writers that publish with big publishing conglomerates such as Random House and HarperCollins. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Full is a novel.