This dissertation offers a new exploration of the relationship between geographic awareness and literary realism in Alice Munro’s depictions of female identity-formation. It demonstrates how Munro, the winner of the 2013 Nobel Prize in Literature, uses the discourse of place and positionality not just as a Canadian regionalist writer, but also as a writer implicitly concerned with the paradigms of intersectionality as advanced in Susan Stanford Friedman’s 1998 book Mappings and in the recent work of feminist geographers. These theories shed light on Munro’s efforts to represent her female protagonists’ individual and communal identities authentically. Following an introduction in which I explain how Munro’s cautious statements about feminism relate to these recent geopolitical theories, my chapters examine groupings of Munro’s stories through concepts associated with locational feminism. Chapter 2 compares Munro to one of her major influences, the American regionalist writer Willa Cather, through the concept of geopolitical space. Chapter 3 applies this concept more closely to Munro’s portrayals of female maturation in Lives of Girls and Women and The Moons of Jupiter, focusing on a thematic tension between belonging and alienation. Munro sees women’s dilemmas of identity as deeply connected to their sense of place and their definitions of their home places and positions. Chapter 4 examines how issues of place and space, especially regarding what Munro calls “home ground,” affect the construction of relational identity in the title story of Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage, and in several stories from the collection Runaway. Chapter 5 demonstrates how Munro employs the tropes of women’s mobility and travel -- usually seen as tools of empowerment -- to depict their unsettled lives, characterized by instability, insecurity and imbalance. Because these experiences have to do with multiple nodes of difference, Munro’s depictions of mobility as a mixed reality overlap with recent theories of transnational feminism. Chapter 6 deals with the question of narrative agency vis-à-vis locational identity and positionality in her collection, Who Do You Think You Are? In sum, the dissertation argues that Munro’s realistic focus on women’s lives and experiences, and her emphasis on strategic place-awareness rather than the goal of equality, does carry an inspiring message to her readers about the nature of empowerment in today’s world.

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The aim of this study is to investigate the illustrations in a classical children’s book in order to see how the pictures can support reading comprehension during reading aloud in the classroom. The study analyses three different Swedish editions of Alice in Wonderland with the aid of analytical questions inspired by Maria Nikolajeva’s analysis in Bilderbokens pusselbitar (2000). The three editions show dissimilarities in the use of illustrations to assist pupils in their understanding of the text. One of the editions in particular stands out in that it provides detailed pictorial information in connection with descriptions of people and places that pupils might otherwise find hard to understand. The aim of this study is to investigate the illustrations in a classical children’s book in order to see how the pictures can support reading comprehension during reading aloud in the classroom. The study analyses three different Swedish editions of Alice in Wonderland with the aid of analytical questions inspired by Maria Nikolajeva’s analysis in Bilderbokens pusselbitar (2000). The three editions show dissimilarities in the use of illustrations to assist pupils in their understanding of the text. One of the editions in particular stands out in that it provides detailed pictorial information in connection with descriptions of people and places that pupils might otherwise find hard to understand.

<p>Uppsatsen ingår i kursen Skapande svenska C, 30 hp,  inom ämnet Litteraturvetenskap vid Umeå universitet</p>

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Whether classified as realist, modernist, or postmodernist, the fiction of Alice Munro combines a strong mimetic impulse with a recognition of the limitations of mimesis. This dissertation examines the ethical dimensions of the balance between mimesis and the recognition of its limits. Chapter one provides an overview of Munro scholarship and brings particular attention to the manner in which this balance between mimesis and metafictional self-reflexivity has been analyzed since the earliest days of Munro criticism. Chapter two draws on the Munro scholarship of Naomi Morgenstern, Robert McGill, and Robert Thacker to argue that Munro’s fiction is connected, though not reducible to, her experience of reality. This connection, however imperfect, gives her aesthetics its ethical weight, particularly when the subject of her writing is the human Other. Munro’s combination of a sense of alterity with a powerful feeling of reality reflects a desire to understand and represent the Other without compromising the Other’s radical alterity. The tension that arises from this desire can find a resolution in an aesthetics of love akin to eros as described by Emmanuel Levinas and refigured by Luce Irigaray: a representation, inscribed in each story’s form, of the possibility of a subject-to-subject relationship that preserves difference and ends in mutual fecundation. Chapter three compares the ethical vision in “The Ottawa Valley,” which ends on a moment of continuing, uncompromised alterity, with the feeling of love and catharsis produced in “The Moons of Jupiter.” Chapter four reads “Material” as an oblique gesture at the possibility that literature can open a relationship to the Other that is a kind love. Chapter five examines “Deep-Holes” as an attempt to reconcile the ethical tensions inherent in writing by representing a collaborative mode of meaning-making linked to love and fecundity. This dissertation also, however, follows Derek Attridge and Munro herself in observing some distinction between the self-Other dynamic as a face-to-face relation and this dynamic as a problem of literary representation, even if the two cannot be neatly separated. / Thesis (Ph.D, English) -- Queen's University, 2012-12-04 20:14:50.513

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Faculty of Humanities School of Language and Literature 9807000g russelle@webmail.co.za / This study is a historical analysis of readers and the practices of reading in the late nineteenth century Eastern Cape, with particular focus on the Lovedale Institution. Well known as the progenitor of an African elite, the Lovedale mission institution, school and Press have been well-documented and studied, as has the Eastern Cape frontier – but the role of books and reading in their social and material practice has seldom been examined in very close detail in relation to this imagined textual community. A close examination of the contemporary evangelical journal, The Christian Express, reveals much in terms of what was being read, and how reviews and secondary matter on texts that were in circulation may have influenced conceptions of what books and literacy meant to the people reading the journal. These ideas have been traced through advertisements, reviews, columns and letters in order to understand the ways in which the journal portrayed books as material and intellectual objects. Delving deeper than the materiality of the book in an empirical world, however, this study seeks to analyse how books and readers were both constructed and represented, and involves an attempt (although admittedly a highly theoretical undertaking) to reconstruct the various reading strategies employed by readers on the frontier of race, class, and nation.

Student Number : 0204446N - MA dissertation - School of Geography, Archaeology and Environment Studies - Faculty of Humanities / This research investigates the role of small towns in local development, using the example of Alice in South Africa. Emphasis is placed upon the relationship between a small town and its rural hinterland with specific reference to agricultural and nonagricultural activities. The perceived conditions and the role of the town itself as observed by both rural and urban residents are highlighted by survey findings. The surveys involved eighty interviews with urban dwellers, eighty with rural dwellers and thirsty with local businesses. It is shown that there are unfulfilled community needs in terms of local business development and municipal efforts aimed at ensuring that the small town offers the economic services required to grow community incomes and the local economy.