Aniara is a versified epos written by Harry Martinson in 1956. The story is about a large group of people who are being evacuated from earth to Mars because the earth is radiated. However something goes wrong. They fall out of course and end up on a never ending journey in space. This essay examines the relations between the epos Aniara and Lars Rudolfssons dramatization for Stockholm City Theater, played during the fall/winter of 2010. Through performativity and narrative theories I analyze narrations and characterization in the text and in the play. I analyze ideas of the characters appearances in the play, how the starship Aniara physically is represented on stage and what the dance and the music of the play represent. The essay has evolved to a study around the most important symbols of both the epos and the play – time and space.

Recently, a division of legal scholarship, Critical Race Theory, began examining the law from a new perspective: creative literature. Within the legal community, CRT legal storytelling has received mixed reception; yet literary scholars have largely ignored this genre. This thesis aims to fill the research gap surrounding legal storytelling, examining the stories not only as works of legal scholarship, but as works of literature as well. Through application of literary theory and close-reading techniques, I argue for the value of literary works to legal scholarship, particularly civil rights. My research concerns four findings. First, literature broadens the scope of legal scholarship to examine how the law operates and our relationship to the law. Second, fiction allows for critique of the law and legal scholarship. Third, counterstories provide alternative strategies for the civil rights community. Finally, Derrick Bell’s science fiction contains elements of fantasy well-suited to judicial critique of racial inequality.

Mémoire numérisé par la Division de la gestion de documents et des archives de l'Université de Montréal / Pour respecter les droits d'auteur, la version électronique de cette thèse ou ce mémoire a été dépouillée, le cas échéant, de ses documents visuels et audio-visuels. La version intégrale de la thèse ou du mémoire a été déposée au Service de la gestion des documents et des archives de l'Université de Montréal.

Denna studie undersöker skönlitteraturens potentiella möjlighet att utveckla historiemedvetande hos elever på svensk gymnasieskola. Syftet med undersökningen är att se om den skönlitterära författaren skapar förutsättningar för historiemedvetande och i så fall hur samt visa på hur skönlitteratur kan användas i en ämnesövergripande svensk- och historieundervisning enligt Gy11. Två romaner undersöks, den historiska romanen Boktjuven samt science-fiction-romanen Hungerspelen. Dessa romaner dekonstrueras med hjälp av analysschemat Inomvetenskaplig och utomvetenskaplig historieskrivning för att se om romanerna kombinerar historieförmedlande och skönlitterära grepp i en växelverkan mellan distans och närhet, något som enligt Carina Renander kan leda till ett potentiellt utvecklat historiemedvetande. Resultatet från denna analys kopplas sedan samman med Gy11 och exempel på undervisningssituationer presenteras. Resultatet av undersökningen är att den historiska romanen Boktjuven potentiellt kan utveckla elevers historiemedvetande i sig självt medan science-fiction-romanen Hungerspelen genom sina skönlitterära grepp kombinerat med ett annat medie med historieförmedlande grepp kan uppnå samma effekt. Hungerspelen har även andra kvaliteter än Boktjuven i egenskap av dystopi då Hungerspelen kan fungera som sedan, en tänkbar framtidsversion, i historiemedvetandets då, nu och sedan. Både Boktjuven och Hungerspelen kan användas i ämnesövergripande svensk- och historieundervisning enligt Gy11, detta på ett sätt som levandegör och dekonstruerar historien samt inspirerar till vidare kunskap.

This is a rhetorical criticism of the science fiction short story, "Profession," by Isaac Asimov. Primary focus is on Asimov's persuasive use of this message to influence potentially creative young people to consider technological careers. A brief synopsis of the story is given, along with a statement of the functional role of science fiction in accustoming individuals to societal changes resulting from technological advancements.Methodology is based upon Kenneth Burke's dramatism which views human action in terms of a drama. Burke's concepts of identification and occupational psychosis are used in discovering the rhetor's use of persuasive strategies. Burke's pentad is used for analysis of significant ratios. The dominance of the act-scene ratio is demonstrated by the supremacy of action over motion.Asimov's work shows the influence of a philosophy of realism, identifiable by the featuring of the pentadic term "act." Asimov's primary motives are identified as a desire to share his belief in the benefits of technology and his own need for creative self-expression. / Department of Speech Communication

Cyberpunk's attempt to imagine the futures that the expanding communications networks will shape, as explored in Sterling's Islands in the Net and Stephenson's The Diamond Age, discovers that the boundaries between the machine and human, the natural and artificial, and the past and present have never been as clear as the modern realist schematic has drawn them. Gothic literature represents transgressions of these boundaries as threatening to the self, and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is the node where the gothic is dismembered and sutured into science fiction, and the modern self faces its monstrous double. Yet if boundaries are represented as sites of interface, gothic threats become opportunities for growth and generation. Individual texts, even realist ones, have always sutured together intertextual ingredients. Jane Eyre offers an alternative model for constructing the subject through sorting texts, a technique which emerges through cyberpunk as the essential survival skill of the future self.

[Truncated abstract] This thesis makes three assertions. The first is that the sublime is a principal pleasure of science fiction. The second is that the conditions for the emergence of both the sublime and science fiction lie in the modern developments of technology, mass economy and imperialism. Maritime and optical technologies; the imagination that accompanied imperialism; and the influence of capitalism furnished the cognition by which the pleasures of both science fiction and the sublime came into being. The third claim is that a historical conception of the sublime, one that changes according to the different circumstances in which it appears, offers privileged insights onto changes within the genre. To make such extensive claims it has been necessary to make a cognitive map of the development of both the sublime and science fiction. This map reaches from the Ancient Romans, Lucian and Longinus; to Thomas More, Jonathan Swift, Johannes Kepler, Voltaire and Immanuel Kant; to Edgar Allan Poe, Mary Shelley, Jules Verne and H.G. Wells. This thesis then examines how the features of these fictions mutate in the twentieth-century fiction of A.E. van Vogt, Clifford Simak, Philip K. Dick, Arthur C. Clarke, Ivan Yefremov, the Strugatsky brothers, J.G. Ballard, Pamela Zoline, Ursula Le Guin, Vonda McIntyre, Octavia Butler, Kim Stanley Robinson, Stephen Baxter, William Gibson, Ken MacLeod and Stanislaw Lem. These writers are considered in their own specific periods, and in their national contexts, as they create pleasures that are contingent upon changes to their own worlds. In representing these changes, their fictions defamiliarise the anxieties of the reading subject. They transcend the contradictions of their times with a sublime that betrays its own conditions of transcendence. The deployment of the sublime in these texts offers a moment of critical possibility, as it betrays the fantasies born of a subject's relation to their world

Thesis (Ed. D.)--Georgia Southern University, 2007. / "A dissertation submitted to the Graduate Faculty of Georgia Southern University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Education." In Curriculum Studies, under the direction of John A. Weaver. ETD. Electronic version approved: May 2007. Includes bibliographical references (p. 386-402) and appendices.

Thesis (M.A.). / Written for the Dept. of Russian and Slavic Studies. Title from title page of PDF (viewed 2007/08/29). Includes bibliographical references.

Zugl.: Halle, University, Staatsexamensarbeit, 2007.