Despite incredible sales success, popularity, and a fifty year history, easy readers are one of the most neglected forms of children’s literature. Called everything from “the poor stepchild of the more glamorous picture book or children’s novel” to “literary flotsam,” easy readers are too-often regarded as insubstantial, superficial, sub-par literature. This thesis provides the first comprehensive, theoretically grounded examination of easy readers and endeavors to prove that a surprising complexity lurks beneath the easy reader’s decodable surface. In order to illuminate both extra-textual and textual complexity, easy readers are treated generically and examined using the contemporary genre theories of Amy Devitt and Adena Rosmarin. This thesis ultimately unearths a heretofore unexplored complexity in the easy reader’s publication history and generic emergence, and finds that the easy reader genre has literary potential and can accommodate works of artistic merit.

Thesis (Ed. D.)--Illinois State University, 2006. / Title from title page screen, viewed on April 30, 2007. Dissertation Committee: Thomas Crumpler (chair), Dent Rhodes, Ellen Spycher. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 189-195) and abstract. Also available in print.

Despite incredible sales success, popularity, and a fifty year history, easy readers are one of the most neglected forms of children’s literature. Called everything from “the poor stepchild of the more glamorous picture book or children’s novel” to “literary flotsam,” easy readers are too-often regarded as insubstantial, superficial, sub-par literature. This thesis provides the first comprehensive, theoretically grounded examination of easy readers and endeavors to prove that a surprising complexity lurks beneath the easy reader’s decodable surface. In order to illuminate both extra-textual and textual complexity, easy readers are treated generically and examined using the contemporary genre theories of Amy Devitt and Adena Rosmarin. This thesis ultimately unearths a heretofore unexplored complexity in the easy reader’s publication history and generic emergence, and finds that the easy reader genre has literary potential and can accommodate works of artistic merit. / Arts, Faculty of / Library, Archival and Information Studies (SLAIS), School of / Graduate

I dagens samhälle finns ett enormt stort musikutbud. Under de senaste decennierna har tillgängligheten alltmer ökat för envar att gå på konserter och uppleva levande musik. Denna studies syfte var att utveckla mina möjligheter som utövande musiker och flöjtist att berika en konsertpubliks upplevelse och kommunicera musik oavsett publikens förkunskaper. Det gestaltas genom framförandet av Amy Beach’s Theme and Variations for Flute and String Quartet (1916/1920). För att uppfylla syftet utarbetades tre frågeställningar som behandlade hur jag kunde öka medvetenheten om performativa aspekter i mitt musicerande, på vilka sätt en publiks konsertupplevelse kan förhöjas och hur jag kunde använda scenisk gestaltning och musikkommunikation på min examenskonsert vid Kungl. Musikhögskolan i Stockholm. Studien genomfördes metodiskt genom musikanalys och instudering av notbild och konsertbesök för att erhålla publikperspektiv. Dessutom genomfördes två intervjuer med sakkunniga personer, en tidigare musiker och en forskare tillika pedagog. Studiens resultat indikerar att ett manus bidrar till att skapa ramar och struktur i att genomföra en konsert med god kommunikation med publik och medmusiker; musikanalys ger ökad förståelse för hur musiken bäst kan framföras; visuella markörer som val av klädsel har stor betydelse för publikens upplevelser av konserten då synintryck påverkar övriga sinnen. Till sist kan slutsatsen dras att kärnan i konsertupplevelsen är att etablera en dialog och kommunikation med musiker och publik vilket betyder att den individuella musikupplevelsen hos den enskilda åhöraren under en konsert är ett resultat av ett kollektivt skapande.

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La critique de la romancière américaine Amy Tan se concentre principalement sur la dimension humaine de ses romans, négligeant la dimension matérielle de l’existence qui occupe une place prépondérante dans ses romans. Sous l’influence d’une conception anthropocentrique qui privilégie l’être humain ou le sujet, la critique s’est concentrée essentiellement sur la relation mère / fille, sur l’importance du langage et de la mémoire et sur les conflits entre les cultures chinoise et américaine. Néanmoins, dans le contexte de ce qu’il est convenu d’appeler le “retour aux choses” et l’accent nouveau mis sur le “non humain”, mouvement qui s’est mis en place dans la critique des années 1990, je porte mon attention sur les choses, plus particulièrement sur les interactions entre humains et non-humains dans ses romans. Sous la double influence des cultures chinoise et américaine, Tan dépasse l’opposition binaire, qui caractérise la tradition occidentale, selon laquelle le sujet est supérieur à l’objet. Les humains et les non-humains ainsi que les entités naturelles et spirituelles sont tous des choses-Qi dans l’univers textuel. En mettant en dialogue la réflexion occidentale contemporaine sur les choses avec les philosophies chinoises, notamment le taoïsme, cette thèse examine les caractéristiques des choses-Qi et leurs interactions de nature à provoquer un retour écologique à l’harmonie entre les humains et les non-humains, entre le microcosme et le macrocosme dans l’ordre textuel. / Comments on Amy Tan's novels mainly focus on what we associate with human culture, ignoring the material dimensions of existence that figure prominently in her novels. Influenced by the anthropocentric idea that the human being/the subject is superior to things/the object, critics mainly focus on the mother-daughter relation, the importance of language and memory and the conflicts of Chinese and American culture. However, in the context of the so-called “return to things,” “back to things,” and “turn to the non-human” which has become visible in the humanities since the 1990s, I concentrate on things, specifically on the interactions between humans and nonhumans in her novels. Under the influence of both American and Chinese culture, Tan breaks with the western tradition of binary opposition in which the subject is superior to the object. Qi-things include natural and man-made things, human beings, and even spiritual things and things in the textual world. Bringing the twenty-first century western revision of things into dialogue with Chinese philosophies, especially Taoism, this dissertation discusses the traits of Qi-things and how they interact with each other to foster an ecological return to harmony within the textual world that reconciles humans and non-humans, microcosm and macrocosm.

Uppsatsens syfte är att studera porträtteringen av nationell identitet i Don DeLillos Falling Man och Amy Waldmans The Submission i förhållande till efterverkningarna av 9/11. Studien utgörs av undersökande och jämförande analyser av romanerna utifrån ett litteratursociologiskt samt postkolonialt perspektiv med fokus på nationalism, religion och commemoration.   Studien har presenterat hur amerikansk identitet har ifrågasatts och problematiserats i romanerna Falling Man och The Submission, och visat hur religion, commemoration och nationalism hänger samman med den amerikanska identiteten. En identitet som visat sig föränderlig och problematisk i efterverkningarna av 9/11. Studien har också kunnat visa att böckerna inte ämnar att lyfta fram en gestaltning av identitet som något allenarådande eller fast, utan att de istället visar hur identitet ständigt förändras och skiljer sig från karaktär till karaktär, genom problematiserandet kring tillhörighet, trygghet och trauma.

Poets such as Thomas Hardy, Augusta Webster, and Amy Levy portray prostitutes who seem guiltless about their choice of profession. Hardy's Amelia seems to symbolize the mutation of a pure country girl into a soiled disciple of evil; yet in the poem the changes in her life brought on by prostitution are evident in her drastically changed physical appearance and mannerism. Webster's Eulalie is an intelligent and well-spoken woman who undermines the stereotypical generalizations about prostitutes, relocating the source of the Great Social Evil from her profession to the institutionalized educational failure that trains women for nothing better than housekeeping. Levy's unnamed Magdalen, disease ridden and dying, may resemble a fallen woman. However, her lack of regret over the out-of-wedlock relationship with a man would make her an unrepentant prostitute in the eyes of the Victorians and she openly points to the real unmentionable of Victorian prostitution—the male client.

I would like to understand what kinds of connections exist between musical rhythm and poetic and linguistic rhythm, particularly the phenomenon of accent, so I investigated accent in art songs, examining twelve songs in an attempt to further understand how and if the accents and patterns found in poetry correlate to those found in songs based on this poetry. This study examines how the patterns of stressed and unstressed syllables in Lieder by Amy Beach, Richard Strauss, and Camille Saint-Saëns correlate with musical rhythmic and accent patterns in the resulting music. I systematically determined what kinds of accents were present, where they were present, and how they were related. I tracked nine different types of musical accents: agogic, contour, dynamic, articulation, metric, pitch, phrasing, structural, and textural. I then tracked the linguistic accents in the poems themselves, with the categories of meter, individual word stresses (if different from the meter), rhyme scheme, internal rhymes, and cadences (ends of sentences and questions). I then compared the accents found in the music to the accents found in the poetry. I then compared the correlation of linguistic and musical accents through graphic representation of the values I found. I found significant correlation between musical and linguistic accents in the twelve different pieces I studied. These results suggest that, for at least these three composers, the text does in fact influence the accent patterns of the music. For the songs of Beach and Strauss, there is a visual pattern in the graphs, which matches the meter of the text. The linguistic and musical accent patterns in both Beach and Strauss songs tended to be regularly alternating in a binary fashion, in keeping with the iambic meter. For Saint-Saëns, there was overall close correlation as well. The main difference between graphs for Saint-Saëns and the others seems to be the lack of a pattern in the relative accent strengths, which can be found in both the English and German graphs. French poetry does not have an iambic pattern to it; correspondingly the music doesn't show the regular binary alteration of accents. This pattern or lack thereof is part of the correlation that all of the pieces share between the music and the language, and the lack of pattern seems to demonstrate a particularity in the music in the case of French. Though showing how accents in music and text correlate in the songs of English-, German-, and French-speaking composers, this thesis does not fully determine how and if musical and linguistic accents correlate in music composers other than Amy Beach, Richard Strauss, and Camille Saint-Saëns.