The issue of alternative certification teacher training has greatly affected art education over three decades. As a result of training through alternative certification, many art educators enter the profession unprepared and unable to cope with the realities of teaching. This study attempts to understand and represent the experiences and struggles of four alternatively certified art teachers, including myself. By reading these stories, others within the education community can empathize with and provide support for struggling novice teachers. This creative thesis uses a graphic novel format to represent participants' stories. By combining text and imagery, the graphic novel format provides different meanings, interpretations, and insights into the teachers' lives. This medium offered a unique and rich perspective on the stories of what it is like being an alternatively certified art teacher.

Written in the tradition of the classic spy novels of Ian Fleming and the detective novels of Raymond Chandler, The Agolmirth Conspiracy represents the return to the thriller of its traditional elements of romanticism, humanism, fast-moving action, and taut suspense, and a move away from its cynicism and dehumanization as currently practiced by authors such as John Le Carre' and Tom Clancy. Stanford Torrance, an ex-cop raised on "old-fashioned" notions of uncompromising good and naked evil and largely ignorant of computer systems and high-tech ordinance, finds himself lost in a "modern" world of shadowy operatives, hidden agendas, and numerous double-crosses. He is nevertheless able to triumph over that world when he puts his own honor, his own dignity, and his very life on the line, proving to himself and to his adversaries that such things can still make things easier to see amid today's swirling moral fog.

At the beginning of the novel, the main character, J. D. Alfred, is a young, immature college freshman, naive both socially and sexually. In the initial chapter, however, he encounters a "mysterious" dark-haired girl, older than himself and very experienced. Near the middle of the novel J.D. begins a quest, not quite sure what it is he is looking for. As he moves from place to place, he discovers more and more about his family, his friends, the world around him, and the woman with whom he has become entangled, discoveries which he chooses to ignore until too late. He is left with only one choice to make, whether to die a fiery death, or live to deal with problems which he is not yet equipped to handle.

This doctoral thesis is composed of two separate sections: a novel and a contextualising critical discussion. The novel deals with a thirteen-year-old boy named Morgan whose parents are separating, moving him from a comfortable city life to his mother’s hometown in rural Perthshire. There he begins a friendship with a mysterious young girl and together they tap into the landscape’s rich cultural history of Scottish tales and folklore. Split between parents he cannot understand and an ancient world of which he is not a part, Morgan’s flirtations with Scottish storytelling become a search for personal history and heritage, culminating in Morgan crafting his own story. This final story acts as a teller-created bildüngsroman but also challenges the authority and validity of the stories that he is told, highlighting the fallacy of any concepts of “ownership” inherent in them. The critical portion contextualises Morgan’s tale. It discusses how we problematize our interactions with the form of storytelling by fixing it as linear history to promote it as a national signifier or cultural vessel. The paper discusses this by engaging with the novel’s main themes through three distinct sections. The first examines eighteenth century engagements with Scottish storytelling and their role in creating national identity. It focuses on MacPherson’s Ossian scandals, Scott and Burns. The second section examines how this fractious groundwork developed during the twentieth century folk revivals and the cultural engagements of Henderson and the Scottish travellers. The final section discusses methodology and both the problems and strengths of contemporary academic responses. The paper argues that we have developed a methodology that is too rigid and reverential, often essentializing “fixed” understandings of storytelling in attempts to distribute ownership or champion nationalistic priorities. The thesis argues that attempts to preserve or promote the form often work to limit it. To make any progress in developing the “tradition”, we must approach it with a critical methodology that is free of elitism and allows new patrons of whatever experience or knowledge to contribute to it. The discussion poses that this is only possible if our critical and academic interactions become as malleable as the form itself: rather than attempt to absolve or excuse the difficulties and historical contradictions inherent in the form, it must openly embrace them as a vital part of a very “Scottish” form of storytelling.

Abstract N’Awlins Po Boy draws heavily on the author’s memories and recollections of growing up in the New Orleans of the 1940s and 1950s, but it is a work of fiction. Although the settings and scenes are rendered as accurately as memory allows, the circumstances, situations and people are entirely fictional. During the immediate post-WWII decade, the city went through a rapid series of changes, some calm and nearly unnoticed, others turbulent and upsetting to the natural order that had prevailed for more than two centuries. This is an account of those changes as they might have been seen through the eyes of a pre-teen boy.

The novel FAMILY MEDICINE follows three married women as they struggle to define themselves in Foley, South Dakota, a small town where privacy is nearly impossible. Marcy Morrow, a queen bee, in a vulnerable moment reveals misgivings about her second pregnancy to Bridget Cunningham, the wife of Dr. Herb Cunningham and his office manager at the town’s only medical practice. Bridget's offer of off-the-books help begins a chain of secrecy into which Dr. Maka Smith, the practice’s other physician, is reluctantly pulled. Meanwhile Marcy and Bridget’s husbands run for mayor, forcing the women to reexamine their lives, ambitions, and the nature of friendship. The use of multiple perspectives, as in Anne Tyler’s Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, helps reveal motives while heightening tension. FAMILY MEDICINE’s focus on a small community, like that Jane Austen’s Emma, uncovers the rivalries, alliances, and power of gossip in a circumscribed world.

L’introduction de la marginalité et de la contre-culture dans le roman contemporain révèle une certaine crise dans la conception même du statut de la littérature à la fin du XXe siècle et à l’aube du XXIe siècle. On proclame souvent la mort de la littérature et du roman, mais aussi la crise de la fiction, de la narration, du sujet. On remarque ainsi des interférences croissantes dans la littérature contemporaine entre les « mauvais genres » et les genres nobles, entre la Littérature et la « sous-littérature ». Cette idée de fin ne va-t-elle pas de pair également avec la croyance aiguë que le monde court à sa perte et que les fondements « modernes » sont morts également ? De nombreuses œuvres contemporaines explorent la violence extrême, le sadisme et la cruauté afin de montrer de façon désenchantée une humanité emplie d’animalité. Mais cette surenchère de violence et cette survalorisation de la marginalité ne sont-elles pas l’expression d’un désenchantement sans précédent ou a contrario d’une écriture résistante, qui use de son langage acide pour refuser ce nouvel état du monde et de l’art ? Cette écriture, qui enthousiasme la critique journalistique, renouvelle-t-elle profondément la littérature ? Est-elle véritablement novatrice et subversive ou n’est-elle qu’une sous-littérature qui exploite les expérimentations des auteurs modernes ? La critique savante semble partagée quant à sa fonction critique et quant à sa littérarité, mais la violence et l’inscription volontaire des auteurs dans le « Tiers-monde linguistique » montre que la littérature n’a plus les mêmes visées et la même place dans le champ littéraire. En effet, quelle est la fonction de la littérature dans un contexte de mondialisation et de médiacratie ? Ces œuvres ne reflètent-elles pas une évolution profonde du champ littéraire et une remise en question des critères esthétiques traditionnels ? / The introduction of marginality and of the counterculture in the contemporary novel reveals a literature crisis at the end of the twentieth century and at the beginning of the millennium. The death of literature is often claimed as the fiction, narrative or identity crisis. There are increasing interferences between the highbrow Literature and “bad-literature”. Is this idea of End on a par with the extreme belief in the End of the World of Western and in the Death of the modernist thesis? Many contemporary novels explore extreme violence, sadism and cruelty to expose, with disappointment, a brutal and animal humanity. But are not these violence excess and overdeveloped marginality the expression of a radical disappointment or a strong writing that use acid language to refuse this new face of the world and of art? This writing, that elate journalistic critic, does it really change literature? Is it really new and subversive or is it popular literature that follows up the modernists experiments? The highbrow critic seems sceptic concerning its literarity; but the inscription in the “linguistic third-world” reveals the changes of the aims of literature. In fact, what is the function of literature in globalisation and mediacraty? Don’t these novels reveal a deep evolution of literature and a critic of the traditional artistic criterions?

When I first started thinking about writing Family Love I wanted to write it as an autobiographical novel. This meant a radical departure from my usual writing methods. For one thing, it was the first time in my writing life that I was interested in the conscious use of a period in my life as material for a novel. I had never before attempted this and felt a certain amount of apprehension in abandoning tried and true approaches for something so new and risky. Obviously there is an autobiographical basis to all my work but it expresses itself not in facts or events so much as oblique flashes, subconscious truths that arise out of the process of writing. In the creation of fictional characters in my novels, for example, I had never before set out to write about a particular person in the naturalistic sense. I have not been interested in telling someone’s story so much as becoming involved in the process of discovering and developing characters constructed from many sources including my own fantasies. A critic once described me as a method actor in the way I went about writing fiction, and, in particular, finding the voice of a character. This is an observation I find useful because there is something almost actorly about my immersion into fictional characters’ lives. It is a complete identification which results in what could be loosely described as super realism. I am writing from life but from my own intensely observed construction of a life a construction which has its own rules, logic and momentum and often bears little resemblance to the facts or the real people. / Doctor of Creative Arts (DCA)

Nanomedicine is a promising and revolutionary field to improve medical diagnoses and therapies leading to a higher quality of life for everybody. Huge benefits are expected from nanomedicine applications such as in diagnostic and therapeutic field. However, nanomedicine poses several issues on risks to the human health. This thesis aims to defense a perspective of risk governance that sustains scientific knowledge process by developing guidelines and providing the minimum safety standards acceptable to protect the human health. Although nanomedicine is in an early stage of its discovery, some cautious measures are required to provide regulatory mechanisms able to response to the unique set of challenges associated to nanomedicine. Nanotechnology offers an unique opportunity to intensify a major interplay between different disciplines such as science and law. This multidisciplinary approach can positively contributes to find reliable regulatory choices and responsive normative tools in dealing with challenges of novel technologies.

Nanomedicine is a promising and revolutionary field to improve medical diagnoses and therapies leading to a higher quality of life for everybody. Huge benefits are expected from nanomedicine applications such as in diagnostic and therapeutic field. However, nanomedicine poses several issues on risks to the human health. This thesis aims to defense a perspective of risk governance that sustains scientific knowledge process by developing guidelines and providing the minimum safety standards acceptable to protect the human health. Although nanomedicine is in an early stage of its discovery, some cautious measures are required to provide regulatory mechanisms able to response to the unique set of challenges associated to nanomedicine. Nanotechnology offers an unique opportunity to intensify a major interplay between different disciplines such as science and law. This multidisciplinary approach can positively contributes to find reliable regulatory choices and responsive normative tools in dealing with challenges of novel technologies.