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Welsh Writing in English: Case Studies in Cultural Interaction This thesis explores and analyses instances of cultural interaction in the English-language literature of Wales. It explores the encounters that Anglophone Welsh writers have had with non-European territories and cultures, such as the complex textual record of Alun Lewis's experience of 1940s India, Welsh writers' experiences of Australia since the 1960s and Robert Minhinnick's writing about Brazil in the 1990s. It also explores the images and impressions of Llanybri inscribed in the poetry of the Argentine-born modernist poet Lynette Roberts. Using a broad range of theories from the fields of postcolonial studies, travel writing studies and interpretive anthropology, it explores issues such as the construction of cultural difference, the identity politics of cultural assimilation, and the reproduction and subversion of colonial tropes and stereotypes. By examining the diverse ways in which the Welsh have written about their experience of a range of cultures and environments throughout the twentieth century the thesis attempts to uncover hitherto undiscovered territory within the study of Welsh Writing in English.

Philosophiae Doctor - PhD / Literature on multilevel government is replete with the virtues of decentralisation as a governing model. As a result, the discourse of decentralisation has found its way into the constitutions, legislation and policy documents of most African states, including those that are ostensibly centralised. However, the enthusiasm for the juridical form of decentralisation is not reflected when it comes to the actual distribution of state power. In practice, the distribution of power ebbs and flows as states hover between decentralisation and centralisation. In other words, regardless of juridical commitments, states hardly ever promote decentralisation consistently, but move between cycles of decentralisation and recentralisation. Thus, once reforms that promote decentralisation have been adopted, they are shortly followed by a wave of recentralisation, which lasts until it in turn, is replaced by a further push for decentralisation. Consequently, the cycles are repeated. The central quest of this study is to explain the factors driving this cyclical pattern. It raises the following questions: Why are states seldom consistent with respect to decentralisation? What drives decentralisation? What drives recentralisation? What does this mean for the future of decentralisation? A comparative study of five Anglophone countries in Southern Africa was conducted with a view to analyse the waves of decentralisation and recentralisation both within and across countries over long periods of time. The countries were chosen in terms of their similar historical background and regional concentration. They are the countries of Botswana, Malawi, Namibia, South Africa and Zimbabwe. The study traced the process of decentralisation in these countries from the precolonial and colonial period up until 2019, examining historical, legal, constitutional, economic and political documentation and scholarship. In some cases, in-depth interviews with key informants were conducted to supplement evidence collected through desk-top research. The central argument of this study is that ruling elites are rational actors who make calculated moves based on external and internal pressures, threats to their power, and opportunities to increase it. Evidence from the five countries under study indicate that governments always prefer to centralise power and would maintain the status quo until a political or economic crisis arises. Such crises tend to open up spaces in which other actors are able to negotiate for decentralisation. These other actors include opposition political parties, minority ethnic groups and donors. However, because decentralisation is driven by crisis resolution negotiations, it faces challenges at the implementation stage, and this is always accompanied by a fresh wave of recentralisation. In the wake of this vicious cycle, it is concluded that decentralisation can be sustained if measures are put in place to contain the reverse wave of recentralisation and its unravelling effects. The measures include constitutional protection, the strengthening of the rule of law, good governance at local levels, and support from political parties.

As has been reported in Canadian research on the experiences of Francophone patients and Francophone health professionals, active offer is not common or well performed in the Ontario healthcare system (Bernier, 2009; Boileau, 2016; Bouchard & Desmeules, 2013; Drolet et al., 2014; Hien & Lafontant, 2013). This descriptive quantitative research explored the self-reported awareness and implementation of the active offer concept during clinical placements by English language program 4th year undergraduate nursing students. A total of 69 participants were recruited in April 2017 to complete a paper or online-based survey. The survey consisted of questions on French language abilities, awareness of the patient safety risk of language discordance, communication experiences with Francophone patients and opinions of the role of the nurse, healthcare organizations and universities in the implementation of active offer. The participating nursing students reported little knowledge and training for implementing active offer during clinical settings. Despite the lack of preparation, the majority of them (92%) reported caring for a Francophone patient at least once with 25% doing that eight times or more during their clinical placements. More than 84% reported finding a way to communicate with Francophone patients in French, by speaking to them in French themselves or by asking Francophone colleagues, a professional interpreter or the patients’ family to interpret for them. Study recommendations include training nursing students during their undergraduate studies about the patient safety risks of language discordance, active offer and how to implement it. All English program nursing students should also be taught how to access and work with a professional interpreter. Those with French language skills should be encouraged to take healthcare specific language training. New research should be done to explore communication between English language program nursing students and Francophone patients to identify if it is safe and adequate from both the student and the patient’s point of view.

In this thesis I argue for a repositioning of Edith Wharton’s short stories in relation to both the twentieth century and modernism. Whilst Wharton was acclaimed for her novels, I argue that the short story, the genre in which she felt most proficient as a writer, yet is still habitually overlooked by critics, presents Wharton at her most experimental and "renovat(ive)", to use her own words. I consider how the restrictive confines of the short story, both in terms of its brevity and commercial value, particularly in relation to the magazine market, were exploited by Wharton to her own advantage, and how her literary craft flourished in such a contained form. I do not argue for a re-envisioning of Wharton as a modernist writer, rather for recognition of her modernist tendencies both in terms of her narrative technique and her interaction with the literary marketplace. Accordingly this thesis is divided into two parts; the first considers Wharton's poetics: her use of myth, modes of narration, creation of narrative gaps, and her notable use of ellipsis points (closely associated by critics such as Henry with modernist writing). The second part of this thesis explores Wharton's modernist practices outside her texts. Here I investigate Wharton's short story magazine publication history, outlining the uneasy balance between her challenges to editorial policy in both the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, and her businesslike attitude toward the profession of writing. Finally, given recent critical reassessments of modernism and its relationship with both the short story and the magazine industry, I argue for the timely recognition of the distinctly modernist nature of Wharton's popular, mass marketed short fiction.

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"Paradoxes of Particularity: Caribbean Literary Imaginaries," explores Caribbean literary responses to nationalism by focusing on Anglophone and Francophone post-war Caribbean novels as well as a selection of short fiction published in the 1930s and `40s. Because many Caribbean nations gained their independence relatively recently (Jamaica and Trinidad in the 1960s, the Bahamas, Grenada, Dominica, St. Lucia, and St. Vincent in the `70s, Antigua and St. Kitts in the `80s) and because some remain colonial possessions (Aruba, Martinique, Guadeloupe, etc.), nationalism and its alternatives are of major literary concern to Caribbean authors. This project considers how and to what extent the writings of such authors as Edouard Glissant, Maryse Condé, and Robert Antoni counter nationalist tendencies with Pan-Caribbean alternatives, arguing that the Caribbean texts under examination propose that we view the Caribbean as a unified region despite substantial differences (racial, linguistic, colonial, etc.) that otherwise tend to encourage separate, nationalist sentiments. Moreover, these Caribbean texts paradoxically emphasize discrete identities based on racial pasts and language communities, even as they forward a Pan-Caribbean ideology: uniqueness is, for many Caribbean writers, the fundamental basis for a unified sense of "Caribbeanness." This project dubs the phenomenon the "paradox of particularity," and identifies it as a postcolonial rhetorical strategy in twentieth-century Caribbean fiction. After an historical introduction, Chapter One examines the increasingly Pan-Caribbean content of Barbadian literary journal Bim, Martinican ex-patriate journal La Revue du Monde Noir, and BBC radio program Caribbean Voices. Each of these media sources encouraged contributors to focus on topics that were of central and unique concern to his/her island community. However, these concerns often overlapped: authors from multiple islands submitted fiction and essays touching on labor struggles, the plight of the poor, wartime anxieties, and racial inequalities. Thus, in printing that which was nominally unique and particular to individual islands, these widely digested media sources in fact highlighted similarities throughout the archipelago, setting the stage for bolder expressions of a particularity-based regionalism. Chapter Two focuses on the Pan-Caribbean antillanité of Edouard Glissant. In Glissant's fiction, the only character capable of both recovering this past and of uniting the Caribbean is the defiantly isolated maroon (and, occasionally, his male descendants). Set against the backdrop of Martinique's fight to become a semi-autonomous département of France and the emergence of Jamaica and Trinidad as independent national entities, Glissant's novel La Lézarde (1958) at once celebrates postcolonial zeal for independence, and emphasizes that national autonomy is the first step in a process of regional unification. Chapter Three looks at gendered and cultural counterpoints to Glissant's notion of "marooning," through novels that reimagine the history of New World slavery and the Caribbean Black Power Movement. The chapter focuses on Simone Schwarz-Bart's Pluie et Vent Sur Telumée Miracle (1972), in which an ostracized sorceress attempts to unite her fragmented community, Maryse Condé's Moi, Tituba, Sorcèriere Noire de Salem (1988), which imagines a Glissantian link between Barbados, other Caribbean islands, and North America through the benevolent workings of a black female maroon, André and Schwarz-Bart's La Mulâtresse Solitude (1972), which both recuperates an historical maroon figure (as, indeed does Condé) and imaginatively reconstructs the African past which informs her New World rebellion, and Michelle Cliff's Abeng (1984), which features a psychologically marooned heroine who imagines not only a unified Caribbean, but also a Caribbean that serves as the racially inclusive bridge between diasporic communities in North and South America. Ultimately, in identifying female maroons as the unifying agents of cultural transmission, Schwarz-Bart, Condé, and Cliff's experimental fiction not only proposes a feminist, regional alternative to patriarchal nationalism, but imaginatively links colonized Caribbean citizens to broader, nation-less communities of suffering. Chapter Four focuses even more explicitly on formal and linguistic experimentation by examining Trinidadian Robert Antoni's Divina Trace (1991), and Martinican Patrick Chamoiseau's Texaco (1992) in relation to literary postmodernism. Rather than casting a wise maroon as the oracular voice of wisdom, both novels deluge us with a heteroglossic babble of voices, paradoxically suggesting that the potential for Caribbean interconnectedness lies in the collision of multiple, idiosyncratic uses of language. Moreover, by testing the boundaries of the novel form, these texts gesture toward the possibility of formally innovative alternatives to the nation-state. Thus, this project both identifies the "paradox of particularity" (in which difference is the defining component of group identity) as a postcolonial tactic in twentieth-century Caribbean fiction and demonstrates the intense political engagement of experimental modernist and postmodern Caribbean fiction. By strategically keeping individuality and collectivity in tension with one another, these writers offer a model for postcolonial independence that both preserves autonomy and avoids mimicking the colonial Western nation-state.

Le but premier pour la plupart des apprenants d'une L2 est de se faire comprendre par les locuteurs natifs de cette langue dans différents contextes. Même si un accent étranger peut quelquefois faire entrave à cet objectif, la recherche a démontré qu'il ne fait pas toujours obstacle à la communication. Peu de recherches se rapportant au discours en français L2 ont été entreprises dans le but d'étudier comment l'intonation, en tant que facteur prosodique, agit sur la compréhension globale des locuteurs natifs. L'objet de ce mémoire est d'étudier le rôle joué par l'intonation dans le discours en français québécois par des locuteurs natifs de l'anglais nord américain. Par notre étude, impliquant trois locutrices natives de l'anglais nord-américain s'exprimant en français L2, nous avons observé dans quelle mesure l'intonation affecte la perception par des locuteurs natifs du français québécois sur le niveau d'intelligibilité, le degré d'accent étranger et la compréhensibilité. Nous avons eu recours à quinze juges de L1 français québécois pour faire l'écoute et l'évaluation de phrases stimuli lues et enregistrées par nos trois locutrices. L'évaluation des enregistrements s'est déroulée en deux séances. Suite aux évaluations de la première séance, les phrases ayant obtenues les moins bons scores d'évaluation selon les trois critères ci-hauts mentionnés ont été retenues pour la seconde séance. Les phrases retenues ont été modifiées synthétiquement, afin de rendre leurs contours intonatifs aussi près que possible des contours d'une locutrice native du français québécois. Six semaines plus tard, nos juges ont réévalué les phrases modifiées selon les trois mêmes critères d'évaluation. Notre hypothèse voulait que les scores d'intelligibilité et de compréhensibilité montrent des signes d'amélioration tandis que les scores d'accent étranger demeureraient semblables. Les résultats ont démontré que les scores d' intelligibilité se sont améliorés, que ceux de l'accent étranger sont demeurés stables, tandis que la compréhensibilité a subi un léger recul. ______________________________________________________________________________ MOTS-CLÉS DE L’AUTEUR : Intonation, Prosodie, Intelligibilité, Compréhensibilité, Accent étranger.

Reproduction de : Thèse de doctorat : Littérature anglaise : Lyon 2 : 2003. / Titre provenant de l'écran-titre. Bibliogr. Index.

Texte remanié de: Diss.--Fachbereich Historisch-Philologische Wissenschaft--Göttingen--Universität, 1994. / Bibliogr. p. 323-326. Notes bibliogr.