Kwok, Yat Kam. / Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2007. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 105-109). / Abstracts in English and Chinese. / Abstract --- p.i / 論文摘要 --- p.iii / Acknowledgments --- p.iv / Introduction --- p.1 / Chapter Chapter One: --- A Romantic Poet with a Roving Vision: Walt Whitman's Poems --- p.20 / Chapter Chapter Two: --- A Medley of Images: Stephen Crane's Youthful War --- p.45 / Chapter Chapter Three: --- Survivors under Siege: Ambrose Bierce's Modern War --- p.71 / Conclusion --- p.100 / Works Cited --- p.105

Stephen Foster is acknowledged as America’s first composer of popular music. His legacy can be seen in the number of songs that are embedded in our cultural heritage – “Oh! Susanna,” “Beautiful Dreamer,” and “My Old Kentucky Home,” are but a very few of his most popular works. Stephen Foster’s songs have been incorporated into every facet of American culture including both popular and classical musical culture, television, and film. However, his legacy is complicated as it is tainted by connections to blackface minstrelsy in some works. This document seeks to trace the threads of racial sensitivity and cultural appropriation in works arranged for choral ensembles based on Foster’s songs. The arrangements chosen for this document provide a glimpse into three distinct periods of American history – pre-Civil Rights, the Civil Rights Era, and post-Civil Rights. Using a process of comparative analysis of the music and text of the originals to that of the arrangements, this document traces expected and unexpected changes in music and text associated with each period. Perhaps through the continued study of one of America’s first purveyors of popular culture, we can begin to understand our national legacy of racism more clearly and find a path towards reconciliation.

This thesis comprises a creative work, the manuscript of a book of poems, Goddess of Mercy, and an exegesis, A Further Existence, which explores the creative, aesthetic, philosophical and other ideas and inputs that went into writing the poems. Goddess is a collection of idylls of the electronic age, narratives, dramas, fictions and meditations. The poems are various in style and subject matter. The exegesis begins with the author's earliest remembered experiences of poetry, considers a wide range of poetries and goes some way to proposing an open poetic that allows a writer versatility in approach to subject matter and writing style. Poems can transcend their time and place to create a 'further existence' where temporality is irrelevant. A diverse range of poems are examined -- from ancient Babylonian to contemporary Australian -- to determine the aspects of a poem that take it beyond daily speech. The usefulness and limitations of theory are considered. The art's mystical dimensions are not easy to analyse but are still worth thinking about: the mysterious spark or talent for poetry, how and where a poem occurs, epiphanies, 'being in the zone' and when all the words come rushing at once. The persistence of poetry is noted: poetry still manifests itself in public life through newspapers, sport, pop music, radio commentary, television, and politics, as well as in everyday living. Poetry adapts to new environments like the internet. Conversely, events in the 'real world' influence poetic thought and writing as evidenced by the barrage of poems and publishing in response to the US invasion of Iraq. Some recent Australian poems are explored with regard to establishing contexts and areas of interest for the practice of poetry in the opening years of the twenty-first century, with a view to establishing the contexts in which the poems in Goddess exist and the world they address. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--School of Humanities, 2005.

This essay is an exploration of the debate between John Finnis and Stephen Macedo on the value of homosexuality. In “Is Natural Law Theory Compatible with Limited Government?” Finnis, a natural law theorist, rejects value-neutralist arguments, stating that the political community can and should make value judgments about its members’ life-choices and that such normative evaluations are compatible with liberalism. Particularly, Finnis argues that homosexuality is in its essence always harmful and degrading, thus unable to participate in the basic human goods it imitates. Furthermore, he argues that the political community in liberal democratic societies is justified in discouraging homosexual conduct as a viable way of life. Macedo, while also rejecting pure value-neutralist liberalism, carefully considers but rejects Finnis’s argument, which rests on an unrealistic description of value and ends of human sexual activity.

<p>Det här examensarbetet handlar om skrivundervisning. Undersökningen är huvudsakligen en fallstudie. Syftet är att få ökade kunskaper om en gymnasielärares arbetssätt för att utveckla sina elevers skrivande. Den huvudsakliga forskningsfrågan i detta arbete är: Hur beskriver en erfaren gymnasielärare sin skrivundervisning för att öka sina elevers skrivförmåga inom svenskundervisningen i gymnasiet?</p><p>Examensarbetet börjar i en teoretisk utgångspunkt med tre olika teorier om skrivande och skrivundervisning. Sedan fortsätter det med den empiriska delen som är en djupintervju med en lärare vid namn Emmy (fiktivt namn) på en gymnasieskola i Småland. I resultaten, analysen och diskussionen i examensarbetet visas det hur en lärare har försökt att svara på frågeställningen ovan.</p><p>Den huvudsakliga slutsatsen är att läraren är flexibel och att hon har ett antal olika metoder att arbeta med när hon försöker öka sina elevers skrivförmåga i sin dagliga undervisning. Den här fallstudien visar också något av hennes syn på skrivundervisning inom svenskämnet på gymnasiet. Emmys teoretiska grundsyn ligger nära skrivprocessteorin som representeras av den svenska forskaren Siv Strömquist.</p><p>Det är omöjligt att dra några generella slutsatser om alla lärare bara på basis av en enda fallstudie. En försiktig tanke som dock uppstår i diskussionen är att det kan vara svårt att vara lärare, om man tittar på och lever sig in i Emmys bild av sin skrivundervisning. Några av hennes ledstjärnor är värdegrunden, den lokala kursplanen, skrivprocessteorin, en bra lärare–elev-relation, mycket läsning, textanalys, bra skrivuppgifter, tydliga uppgiftsinstruktioner, mönsterexempel, mycket skrivträning, nyttig textrespons, infärgning, goda råd till eleverna samt sist men inte minst humor och lust i skrivundervisningen. Allt detta ska leda henne framåt för att öka skrivförmågan hos eleverna.</p>

This paper investigates narrative and thematic structures in Damien Echols’ autobiography Life After Death (2012) and Stephen King’s horror novel ’Salem’s Lot (1975). In Life After Death Echols tells the tale of his eighteen-year incarceration on Death Row in Arkansas/USA. He also uses his childhood memories to overcome hardships in the prison system. ‘Salem’s Lot by Stephen King deals with the invasion of vampires in a small town in rural Maine in the North East corner of the United States.  The author of this study discusses if and how Damien Echols was inspired in his writing by the writings of Stephen King. Considering the length of this study the author has chosen to limit the comparison of Echols’ autobiography with Stephen King to only one of King’s novels, ‘Salem’s Lot. One issue of discussion in this study is as to wether it is legitimate to compare two different genres and to what length they correspond with each other on a literary level. Thus the choice of certain narrative tools for the analysis. The author of this study uses theories based on the works of literary theorist Gérard Genette and also discusses autobiography as genre. Themes that are explored in the analysis are memories, horror, evil places and children at risk, the latter especially in the modern American horror genre. The study highlights that Damien Echols frequently read works by Stephen King, both during his adolescence and in prison, and was inspired by a certain “beat” in King’s novels. Furthermore, both authors use themes as the above mentioned memories, horror, evil places and children at risk in their works. This paper concludes with showing that Echols is influenced in his writing by King’s horror novels, both on a narrative level and a thematic level.

This dissertation combines performance analysis, rhetorical criticism, and psychoanalytical theory to analyze three performance “texts” as sites of haunting in post-9/11 America: Tony Kushner’s 2001 U.S. debut of Homebody/Kabul, the Broadway musical Wicked, and ABC’s television drama Lost. It contributes a nuanced, theorized reading of the civil implications of post-9/11 popular American culture as “more than memory” by demonstrating how these performances suggested “what might be” in ways that subverted Bush’s responses to the attacks. The first chapter reads Homebody/Kabul against the national addresses delivered by Bush in the first weeks after the attacks and argue that the 2001 New York Theatre Workshop performance created a space for audiences to reconsider the version of “mourning” encouraged by the Bush administration. The type of mourning modeled/enabled by Homebody/Kabul, I assert, is different from that against which Derrida warns. Rather than “silencing ghosts” (Gunn 82) through the integration of loss, Homebody/Kabul makes a space for conversing with, and models living with, ghosts. The second chapter argues that the Wicked’s Ozians are stuck in a state of melancholia, refusing to speak to/with the ghost of Elphaba. Because they refuse to reckon with Elphaba, they literally finish exactly where they began—with “No One Mourn[ing] the Wicked.” By reading Wicked against the celebratory rhetoric of the Bush administration after declaring “Mission Accomplished” in Iraq, we can understand the way the United States as a nation was (and may still be, in 2010) haunted by the Bush administration's failure to lead the nation in mourning effectively and ethically and by its incessant rhetoric of evil. The third chapter advocates for Lost as a hauntological reckoning with 9/11 that models ethical witnessing as a potentially generative meeting of human beings across cultures at the site of trauma. An alternative to the fear that the Bush administration encouraged leading up to Lost’s premiere and through its final season, ethical witnessing as modeled on Lost suggests that civilization stands to thrive where difference is honored—and risks toppling into chaos where the alternative “us against them” mentality (Other anxiety) prevails. / text

In James Joyce’s Ulysses, I believe that Stephen Dedalus enacts a heteroglossic discourse in episode 15, “Circe,” that critiques both English imperialism and the nationalist bourgeois of Ireland. Moreover, Stephen engages not only in an aesthetic and political rebellion through the style of his discourse, but he also engages in the only anticolonial violence in Ulysses against the British soldier Private Carr. Thus, I believe that Stephen separates himself from the ideology of the colonizer and from the bourgeois nationalists through aesthetic, political, and violent means. I will conduct my examination of Stephen as a revolutionary colonial intellectual in three parts using the work of three respective theorists: Mikhail Bakhtin, Frantz Fanon, and Benedict Anderson. Ultimately, I intend to show that Stephen can be read as a gateway through which Joyce represents a new heterogeneous, anticolonial, and antinational community in Ireland. / Department of English

This thesis comprises a creative work, the manuscript of a book of poems, Goddess of Mercy, and an exegesis, A Further Existence, which explores the creative, aesthetic, philosophical and other ideas and inputs that went into writing the poems. Goddess is a collection of idylls of the electronic age, narratives, dramas, fictions and meditations. The poems are various in style and subject matter. The exegesis begins with the author's earliest remembered experiences of poetry, considers a wide range of poetries and goes some way to proposing an open poetic that allows a writer versatility in approach to subject matter and writing style. Poems can transcend their time and place to create a 'further existence' where temporality is irrelevant. A diverse range of poems are examined -- from ancient Babylonian to contemporary Australian -- to determine the aspects of a poem that take it beyond daily speech. The usefulness and limitations of theory are considered. The art's mystical dimensions are not easy to analyse but are still worth thinking about: the mysterious spark or talent for poetry, how and where a poem occurs, epiphanies, 'being in the zone' and when all the words come rushing at once. The persistence of poetry is noted: poetry still manifests itself in public life through newspapers, sport, pop music, radio commentary, television, and politics, as well as in everyday living. Poetry adapts to new environments like the internet. Conversely, events in the 'real world' influence poetic thought and writing as evidenced by the barrage of poems and publishing in response to the US invasion of Iraq. Some recent Australian poems are explored with regard to establishing contexts and areas of interest for the practice of poetry in the opening years of the twenty-first century, with a view to establishing the contexts in which the poems in Goddess exist and the world they address. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--School of Humanities, 2005.

Thesis (M. Div.)--Emmanuel School of Religion, Johnson City, Tennessee, 2001. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 89-92).