La présente étude se focalise sur un des mythes cosmogoniques au fondement de la culture européenne. Mythe de la création et de l’anthropogenèse, le récit biblique du premier couple joue un rôle essentiel pour la compréhension et l’interprétation des rapports entre l’homme et la femme. L’union indissoluble, qui lie Adam et Ève, subit une métamorphose à la suite du péché originel afin de se réhabiliter en tant qu’unité au nom de la famille. Les littératures française, roumaine et bulgare représentent l’objet de l’analyse et nous nous intéressons aux caractéristiques de leur développement pendant la période de l’entre-deux-guerres. Le genre du roman se situe au centre de cette analyse comparative. Il se trouve ainsi saisi au sommet de son épanouissement, il mêle des techniques hétérogènes et traduit l’intérêt renouvelé des écrivains pour des thèmes métaphysiques. Notre entreprise s’appuie sur le modèle du mythe biblique composé de trois phases – création, chute, rédemption – modèle dont l’homme et la femme sont les protagonistes et qui coïncide avec la transition opérée par Adam et Ève du couple à la famille. Nous avons retenu deux représentants de chaque littérature, qui s’insèrent dans les différents courants de pensée de cette époque. Ce sont François Mauriac et Jean Giraudoux (représentants de la littérature française), Liviu Rebreanu et Mircea Eliade (représentants de la littérature roumaine), Tchavdar Moutafov et Anna Kamenova (représentants de la littérature bulgare). La première question, qui se pose devant la lecture comparative de leurs œuvres, concerne les dimensions actuelles, modernes, de l’espace paradisiaque – l’Éden du bonheur absolu et de la plénitude. Des conditions, qui préparent la rupture de la famille éventuelle, se manifestent dès le développement de ce thème. Les écrivains décrivent une nouvelle Ève trouvant difficilement sa place au milieu des conceptions et des attentes traditionnelles. L’étape suivante interroge l’attitude envers les modèles hérités des parents et les caractéristiques de l’image féminine notamment, qui trouble à ce point son créateur – l’auteur. De cette manière, nous nous rapprochons de la réalisation du couple en tant que famille. Nous étudions le discours contemporain sur la position de la famille dans le monde environnant et sur la réconciliation entre les libertés individuelles et la vie ensemble – des thèmes au centre du roman moderne. / The present study focuses on one of the cosmogonic myths аt the heart of European culture. The myth about creation and anthropogenesis, the biblical story of the first couple, plays a fundamental role in understanding and interpreting the relationship between the man and the woman. The inseparable alliance that binds Adam and Eve undergoes a metamorphosis after the Original sin in order to be later restored as a full-fledged unity in the name of the family. The subject of comparison are the French, the Romanian and the Bulgarian literature and we are interested in their development characteristics between the two World Wars. The focal point in the comparative analysis is the novel genre, which is in a stage of development in all three literatures. The genre combines heterogeneous techniques, and is a territory for authors’ renewed interest in metaphysical themes. In this endeavour, adherence to the established structure of the biblical myth as combining three phases is sustained – creation, fall and redemption phases – whose protagonists are the man and the woman, and which coincide with the transition of Adam and Eve from a couple to a family. Two representatives from each of the three regional literatures, belonging to different literary movements during this period, are taken as examples. These are François Mauriac and Jean Giraudoux (representatives of French literature), Liviu Rebreanu and Mircea Eliade (representatives of Romanian literature), Tchavdar Moutafov and Anna Kamenova (representatives of Bulgarian literature). The first question posed in the comparative reading of their works concerns the modern, contemporary dimensions of paradise – the Eden of absolute happiness and completeness. The prerequisites for the break as a transition into a family unit are discernible within this theme. The writers describe a new Eve that hardly fits the traditional perceptions and assumptions for her gender. The next stage of the critical reading examines the attitude towards inherited parental models and the characteristics of the female image as a primary concern to its creator – the author. Thus, a gradual approach towards the realization of the last step in the development of the couple, namely, its conversion to a family unit, is achieved. The present analysis focuses on articulating contemporary discourse on the place of the family unit in the surrounding world and on the reconciliation between individual freedoms and life in a community as central themes of the modern novel.

La postmodernité, modifiant les repères essentiels de l'humanité que sont la durée, l'espace, la constitution du sujet, le statut de la mort et de l'absence, a affecté en profondeur le contexte dans lequel s'élabore le concept de sacré. Il en résulte une forme moderne de sacré dévoyé procédant davantage d'une mythologie résiduelle, d'une initiation tronquée ou, selon les mots de Mircea Eliade, de ritualismes dégradés, que d'un sacré systémique ayant une portée décisive, notamment, dans la détermination des valeurs et l'élaboration d'un destin commun. Or, la crise de l'éducation serait entée sur le déclin du sacré,départi de sa dimension structurelle. Le sujet contemporain, qui se cherche entre jouissance immédiate et relativisme désenchanté, ne semble plus pouvoir compter sur le potentiel fédérateur d'une éducation fragilisée, et l'altération de celle-ci paraît inéluctable, à moins que, nous engageant dans un autre temps nous n'admettions l'évidence de notre attachement phénoménologique et que nous ne sachions, en la préservant dans le langage, accepter la négativité du monde. / Postmodernity, modifying humanity's reference points - duration, space, subject's formation, status of death and non-attendance -, deeply affects the context in which the concept of sacred usually develops. The outcome is a kind of modern sacred, proceeding from a residual mythology, a rigged initiation or, in the own words of Mircea Eliade, from degraded ritualisms, and not a systemic sacred that would have any decisive impact on values determination or would draw up any common destiny.The education crisis would be a consequence of the declining sacred, deprived of its structural dimension. The contemporary subject, who is wavering between instantaneous enjoyment and disenchanted relativism, can't trust anymore the federating power of a weaken education, unless we admit the obvious of our phenomenologic statement and we are able to agree, preserving it inside the language, the negativity of the world.

<p>The study follows the tradition of Cultural Studies, with a special interest in visual culture, and examines how history is being represented in different media, how these representations are interpreted by the audience, and how the outcome functions in the individual knowledge-building about this particular era. Here the notion of what is often called a collective, or cultural, memory, is important; both as a vehicle for a dominant discourse on memory and as a counterpart to individual memory, which might be more or less in agreement or opposition with the dominant. A central theme is the examination of how elements of the mythical enters a historical narrative, how they affect this, and how this is being interpreted by the audience. The media texts examined are mostly films (fiction and docudramas as well as documentaries) and computer games, although there are also some examples from role-playing games and alternative popular music. The audience part of the study consists of 11 in-depth interviews and a number of additional informants.</p><p>I propose that the media material indicates a convergence between myth in the traditional, religiously connected sense, and in the secularized sense of Roland Barthes. The former is made visible by the persistent use of elements of a clearly metaphysical nature, while the latter is made clear through the almost omnipresent authoritarian character of the media presentations. The material in its entirety clearly shows the importance of transmediality, transmedia storytelling and knowledge communities (cf Henry Jenkins) within the context. The audience examined expresses a highly critical attitude towards what is considered to be a “mainstream” media representation of World War II and Nazi Germany that – according to them – transforms the gruesome historical reality into cheap thrills and entertainment. Thus, it becomes fundamentally problematic to look upon the media representations of the theme as an expression of collective memory.</p>

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This research aims to make evident the importance of films serving as a relevant arena for political struggles within a society, struggles that concern highly important concepts such as the nation and the state. This goal is accomplished by building upon the theory of cinematic nationhood and using the method of relational constructivism combined with insight from Lacanian psychoanalytic theory. The research regards films as forms of communication as well as forms of fantasy. The case this research focuses on is Romania. The case was selected because for a certain period of time the myths of nation and state had been strongly embedded-or nested-- within the social contexts-or commonplaces--specific to Marxism, namely work, equality, and the bourgeois enemy, followed by a swift and radical social discourse change that triggered changes within the topography of commonplaces. The films analyzed represent these changes in order to understand the specific ways in which the myth of nation and state are reflected within films produced during radical economic, social, and political transformations. This research reveals that, despite the social, economic, and political upheavals from the pre- to post-transition eras, the underlying national structure of fantasy remained remarkably unchanged, while the nation and the state changed their social relevance with changes in their position occupied within the structure of fantasy.

The First World War has never completely disappeared from the British collective memory since the end of the conflict, but it has especially gained in importance again in the late 1980s and 1990s, both in academia and beyond. The last two decades of the last century indeed saw an explosion in historical writing about the First World War, but also in popular representations. There now exist in Great Britain two main distinct perceptions of the First World War, and their coexistence is seen by some military and political historians in terms of a war of representations that opposes two “Western Fronts”, that of literature and popular culture against that of history. While the latter strives to discover and transmit the “truth” about the past, the former are said to perpetuate what has been called the “myth” of the Great War, understood as an emotionally driven and “false” version of the war. This doctoral dissertation examines fourteen British novels and short stories that were published during the late-twentieth-century “war books boom,” and primarily aims at examining these severe claims of “mythicality,” “ahistoricity,” and lack of creative imagination. It seeks to establish in what forms, to what purposes, and with what effects the First World War has returned in contemporary British fiction. The first part investigates the allegations laid against contemporary WWI fiction by military historians. Chapter 1 first defines the multifaceted term “myth” and looks at the special place it holds in human thought as a foundational story of origins; it also explains how the historical event of the First World War has become part of the British national mythology. Chapter 2 describes the four main elements of the mythical scenario of the Great War (viz. horror, death, futility, and incompetent generalship). It examines how they have shaped the works under scrutiny; it also shows how these writers have attempted to reach beyond the language and imagery handed down by the war poets by telling the “unspoken stories” of the war and rewriting women and the working class back into the postmodern memory of the conflict. Chapter 3 looks at the intertextual dialogue that contemporary WWI writers establish with their poetic forefathers. The second and third parts focus on the recourse to, and conceptualization of, “memory” in contemporary re-imaginings of the First World War. Part Two looks at “shell shock” as the legacy of the war: memory is usually problematized as trauma, as an overwhelming, violent event that has been found impossible to deal with and that therefore lingers, unresolved, in individual and collective memory. Chapter 4 contextualizes the rise of shell shock as a fundamental element in the myth of the war and provides a theoretical framework to the close reading of five novels (i.e. Pat Barker’s Regeneration trilogy and Another World, as well as Robert Edric’s In Desolate Heaven) that follows in Chapters 5 and 6. These two chapters show how the five selected trauma narratives engage with the contemporary fears of the revenant quality of the past and the possibility of a contagious, transgenerational transmission of trauma. They also raise questions concerning the politics of memory, the adequacy of historical narrative, and the ethics of historical representation. Part Three investigates the questions of remembrance and the duty of memory, which are problematized in all the works under scrutiny. Most contemporary WWI narratives have placed the war in the wider perspective of the century, demonstrating their awareness of their posthistorical situation. Chapter 7 examines the fear that the past is in danger and should be rescued from the work of time and history. Chapter 8 shows how this rescue of the past takes the form of a detective investigation, a metaphor of memory which brings to the fore the agency of memory as process and the inherent textuality of the past, and thus questions the possibility of ever knowing the war. Chapter 9 looks at “sites of memory,” the (textual) traces of the past that make this investigation (im)possible. / La Première guerre mondiale n’a jamais complètement disparu de la mémoire collective britannique, mais elle a à nouveau gagné en importance à la fin des années 80 et pendant les années 90, dans et au-delà du monde universitaire. Les deux dernières décennies du siècle dernier ont en effet été marquées par un foisonnement d’écrits historiques et de représentations populaires sur la Première guerre mondiale. Il existe à présent en Grande Bretagne deux visions de la guerre, et leur co-existence est perçue par certains historiens militaires et politiques en termes de guerre de représentations qui opposerait deux « Fronts de l’Ouest », à savoir le front de la littérature et de la culture populaire d’une part, et celui de l’histoire d’autre part. Alors que les partisans de l’histoire tentent de découvrir et transmettre la « vérité » sur le conflit, les autres perpétuent ce qu’on appelle le « mythe » de la Grande Guerre, c’est-à-dire une version erronée et émotive des événements. Cette dissertation doctorale examine quatorze des romans et nouvelles britanniques publiés pendant le « war books boom » de la fin du vingtième siècle et examine ces sévères reproches d’ahistoricité et manque d’imagination créative. Nous cherchons à établir sous quelles formes, dans quels buts et avec quels effets la Première guerre mondiale est revenue dans la fiction britannique contemporaine. La première partie examine les sévères critiques tenues par les historiens militaires à l’encontre de la « WWI fiction » contemporaine. Le premier chapitre définit le terme « mythe » et la place spéciale qu’il occupe dans la pensée humaine en tant qu’histoire fondatrice ; il explique également comment l’événement historique de la Première guerre mondiale est entré dans la mythologie nationale britannique. Le deuxième chapitre décrit les quatre éléments fondamentaux du scénario mythique de la Grande Guerre (c’est-à-dire l’horreur, la mort, l’absurdité, et l’incompétence des généraux). Il montre comment ces derniers ont modelé les œuvres de notre corpus et comment les auteurs contemporains ont tenté de se distancier du langage et des images transmis par les poètes des tranchées en racontant les récits de guerre restés inexprimés et réinscrivant les femmes et la classe ouvrière dans la mémoire postmoderne du conflit. Le troisième chapitre examine le dialogue intertextuel que les auteurs contemporains établissent avec les écrivains des tranchées, leurs « ancêtres poétiques ». Les deuxième et troisième parties se focalisent sur le concept de mémoire dans les réécritures contemporaines de la Première guerre mondiale. La deuxième partie examine le phénomène de « shell shock » en tant qu’héritage de guerre : la mémoire est en général problématisée comme trauma, comme un événement impossible à intégrer et qui subsiste et persiste comme un poids dans la mémoire individuelle et collective. Le quatrième chapitre explique comment le shell shock est devenu un élément central du mythe de la guerre et fournit un cadre théorique aux exercices de « close reading » qui suivent dans les chapitres cinq et six. Ces deux chapitres montrent comment cinq romans appartenant au genre de la « trauma fiction » (i.e. la trilogie Regeneration et Another World de Pat Barker, ainsi que In Desolate Heaven de Robert Edric) se confrontent à la peur contemporaine d’un possible retour du passé comme revenant et d’une transmission par contagion du trauma. Ces chapitres posent également les questions de la politique de la mémoire, de la pertinence de la narration historique, et de l’éthique de la représentation historique. La troisième partie se penche sur les notions de commémoration et devoir de mémoire, problématisées dans toutes les œuvres du corpus. La plupart des romans contemporains de la Grande Guerre replacent le conflit dans une perspective plus large, celle de tout un siècle, reconnaissant ainsi leur position posthistorique. Le septième chapitre examine la crainte d’un passé mis en danger par l’oubli, les effets du temps et le travail de l’histoire. Le huitième chapitre montre que le sauvetage du passé prend souvent la forme d’une enquête, une métaphore qui met en évidence la double nature de la mémoire comme contenu et process ainsi que la textualité du passé, et remet donc en question la possibilité même de connaître le passé. Le neuvième et dernier chapitre examine les lieux de mémoire, les traces (textuelles) du passé qui rendent cette enquête (im)possible.

“VeckoRevyn – your best friend in good times and bad?” is a BA thesis based on a weekly lifestyle magazine, VeckoRevyn, with a female demographic aged 18-25. Issues of the magazine, published in 2009 and on, is analyzed and dissected to better understand and be able to get answers for the questions of issue. What is said in the magazine, and how does the message reach the audience? Furthermore, the message, as well as the tone used to convey it, is reviewed as part of the discussion about consequence. The goal of this study is to show how, based on the material analyzed, a woman is spoken to in the magazine, and what kind of consequences this might have. VeckoRevyn claims it desires tobea close friend to its readers, a friend who enlightens and guides. But the fact is that in every case studied, there is an underlying message on how the readers have the chance to reach something better and more desirable based on her looks and appearance. How is this possible when in fact the magazine creates an artificial reality filled with unattainable ideals? This results in more stress in the lives of women, who constantly long to be “good enough”. The idea of beauty, which is a common theme throughout the issues of the magazine, is unfortunately based on a myth. This in turn results in mental exhaustion, a twisted self- image, low self esteem, anorexia and bulimia among its young female audience. Keywords: weekly magazine, VeckoRevyn, content, tone, the beauty myth, ideals, consequences

Bakgrund: Inom investering förekommer ett flertal tumregler och myter. En myt som cirkulerat bland investerare är att framsidor i branschtidskrifter, benämnt Cover Stories, skulle utgöra en indikator för en contrarian strategi. Våren 2007 presenterade den första studie där det undersöktes om Cover Stories hade utgjort indikatorer för enskilda företag i USA. Vi kommer att undersöka om Cover Stories i Affärsvärlden och Veckans Affärer utgjort en indikator på den svenska marknaden under tidsperioden 1987 till 2006. Utfallen av våra resultat kan eventuellt bidra till att investerare inte fattar beslut utifrån en felaktig myt om samband inte kan påvisas. Finner vi ett samband kan vi fastställa att det funnits fog för myten. Syfte: Vår studie syftar till att undersöka huruvida Cover Stories har kunnat användas som indikator i en contrarian eller momentum strategi under tidsperioden 1987 till 2006. Genomförande: Vår studie har genomförts med den amerikanska studien som utgångspunkt. Affärsvärldens och Veckans Affärers framsidor har undersökts för tidsperioden 1987 till 2006. Under denna tidsperiod fann vi 298 företag som kunde kategoriseras beroende på om Cover Storyn var positiv eller negativ till företaget i fråga. Kategoriseringen som gjorts i ursprungsstudien ansåg vi vara för generell varför en metodutveckling gjordes. Därefter beräknades avkastningen kring publiceringsdagen för olika tidsintervall. Eventuell överavkastning beräknades genom att 1) justera för marknadens avkastning samt 2) justera för respektive bransch avkastning. Detta för att utreda huruvida trender kunde fastställas och om det var möjligt att använda Cover Stories som en indikator. De erhållna resultaten är testade för statistiskt signifikans. Slutsats: Generellt har positiva Cover Stories utgjort en momentum indikator medan negativa Cover Stories utgjort contrarian indikator. Kategorispecifika resultat visar dock på värden som till största del saknar statistisk signifikans. Vidare är spridningen i hur företag avkastar stor. Sammantaget finner vi därför inget stöd för myten och rekommenderar inte en contrarian strategi med Cover Stories som indikator, vilket är i linje med ursprungsstudien. / Background: Myths and rules of thumb are widely spread within finance. One among many others is that Cover Stories of financial magazines are effective contrarian indicators. In spring of 2007 the first study was presented were it had been investigated if Cover Stories could have been used as indicators for companies in the U.S. We will examine whether Cover Stories in the Swedish financial magazines ‘Affärsvärlden’ and ‘Veckans Affärer’ constitute indicators for the Swedish market from 1987 to 2006. The outcome of our study can either prevent investors from making incorrect decisions based on a myth for which we have found no proof or strengthen the myth if we the magazines indeed could have been used as an indicator. Purpose: The purpose of this study is to examine whether Cover Stories could have been used as indicators for either a contrarian or momentum strategy in the period of 1987 to 2006. Realization: The basis of our study has been the study made on the U.S.-market. The Cover Stories of ‘Affärsvärldens’ and ‘Veckans Affärer’ have been categorized for the period of 1987 to 2006, depending on the nature of the Cover Story, i.e. if it is depicting the company in a positive or negative manner. We considered the categorisation which hade been applied in the original study to be too general. Therefore we further developed the methodology regarding the categorisation. Subsequently the change of the stock price, for each company being the object of a cover story, before and after publication was compared. The return was then adjusted for the market return and the return of respective industry, again for each company. This enabled us to determine whether Cover Stories had been useful as an indicator. The results have been tested statistically. Findings: Positive Cover Stories constituted a momentum indicator while negative Cover Stories represented contrarian indicators. The majority of the results in the specific categories lack statistic significance, furthermore are the discrepancy in the returns of the companies considerable. To sum up, our results do not support the myth and we would not recommend a contrarian strategy based solely on Cover Stories as an indicator.

The study follows the tradition of Cultural Studies, with a special interest in visual culture, and examines how history is being represented in different media, how these representations are interpreted by the audience, and how the outcome functions in the individual knowledge-building about this particular era. Here the notion of what is often called a collective, or cultural, memory, is important; both as a vehicle for a dominant discourse on memory and as a counterpart to individual memory, which might be more or less in agreement or opposition with the dominant. A central theme is the examination of how elements of the mythical enters a historical narrative, how they affect this, and how this is being interpreted by the audience. The media texts examined are mostly films (fiction and docudramas as well as documentaries) and computer games, although there are also some examples from role-playing games and alternative popular music. The audience part of the study consists of 11 in-depth interviews and a number of additional informants. I propose that the media material indicates a convergence between myth in the traditional, religiously connected sense, and in the secularized sense of Roland Barthes. The former is made visible by the persistent use of elements of a clearly metaphysical nature, while the latter is made clear through the almost omnipresent authoritarian character of the media presentations. The material in its entirety clearly shows the importance of transmediality, transmedia storytelling and knowledge communities (cf Henry Jenkins) within the context. The audience examined expresses a highly critical attitude towards what is considered to be a “mainstream” media representation of World War II and Nazi Germany that – according to them – transforms the gruesome historical reality into cheap thrills and entertainment. Thus, it becomes fundamentally problematic to look upon the media representations of the theme as an expression of collective memory.

The present essay examines the linguisitc conceptualisation of otherness in the present party platforms of the Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (SPD, Social Democratic Party of Germany) and the Christliche Demokratische Union Deutschlands (CDU, Christian Democratic Union of Germany). The language and the textual structure of their party platforms is analysed, its function described and compared with each other by using representative text excerpts. The theoretical background of this study is grounded in cultural studies. The methodological framework consists of a combination of critical discourse analysis and textual analysis. Criterias of the linguistic analysis are: coherence (including implicit meanings, propositions and presuppositions), modality, thematic roles, deixis and pronouns and keywords.    The study shows that the Other is cleary conceptualized by using binary oppositions whereas those who are reperesented by we can not always be clearly identified. By using both objective and subjective modality authority and legitimacy are linguistically constructed by those who represent we. The analysis shows that stipulations and issues are mentioned which are supposed to be abided by the Others without being justified by those who represent we. Consequently the Other is excluded. Analysing both party platforms shows that the Other is  subcategorized, too. Myths about the Others are confirmed by representing a stereotypical image of the Other through language. However there are differences in the linguistic conceptualization of alterity. The representatives of CDU speak out more explicitly on specific issues concerning the Other than representatives of SPD do. Consequently SPD’s statements concerning the Other are more implicit.   The study shows that meaning is created by language and that myths of the Other are reproduced in political discourse.