This dissertation examines how multiple, hybridized literacy practices exist in the "contact zone" of the classroom, a "social space where cultures meet, clash, and grapple, with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power, such as colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths as they are lived out in many parts of the world today" (Pratt, 2002, p. 4). The rural high school English class under study here operates as such a "contact zone," as the teacher and students engage in conflicted negotiation, rather than assimilation or acculturation, when multiple literacy practices vie for recognition. Fieldnotes collected during two months of participant observation, collected artifacts in the form of student written texts, teacher syllabi and school documents, i.e., student handbooks, as well as interviews with three male students, one female student, one teacher, one special education aide, and a school principal provided the data for this study. Findings make problematic the beliefs that 1) literacy is a homogenous, static, singular either/or phenomenon, i.e., official school literacy or unofficial, and that 2) classrooms represent homogeneous, unified communities of obedient students who share literacy practices. Rather, classrooms, as "contact zones," can represent heterogeneous groups of students whose literacy practices are hybrid and intercultural, grafting together often reactionary, oppressive sociopolitical intentions with officially sanctioned literacy goals. This inquiry raises questions about literacy as only a local social practice, as well as literacy pedagogical discourses that students do not simply assimilate or acculturate, but contest, appropriate, resist, and use to harass and oppress others, even as they accomplish school literacy assignments. / Ph. D.

To accurately describe the past, historians strive to learn the cultural ideologies of the time and place they study so their interpretations are situated in the context of that period and not in the present. This exploration of historical context becomes critical when researching marginalized groups, as evidence of their rhetorics and cultural logics are usually submerged within those of the dominant society. This project focuses on how factors, such as rhetor/audience perspective, influence cross-cultural historical interpretation, and how a community history database can be designed to illuminate and affect these factors. Theories of contact zones and rhetorical listening were explored to determine their applicability both to history-making and to the creation of a community history database where cross-cultural, multi-vocal, historical narratives may be created, encountered, and extended. Contact zones are dynamic spaces where changing connections, accommodations, negotiations, and power struggles occur, and this concept can be applied to history-making, especially histories of marginalized groups. Rhetorical listening focuses on how perspective influences understanding the past, and listening principles are crucial to both historians and the consumers of history. Perspectives are grounded in cultural ideologies, and rhetorical listening focuses on how tropes, such as race and gender, describe and shape these perspectives. Becoming aware of tropes-both of self and other-can bring to view the commonalities and differences between cultures, and allow a better opportunity for cross-cultural understanding. Rhetorical listening steers the historian and the consumer of history towards looking at who is writing the history, and how both the rhetor and the audience's perspective may affect the outcome. These theories of contact zones and rhetorical listening influenced the design of the project database and website by bringing perspective to the forefront. The visualization of rhetor/audience tropes in conjunction with the co-creation of history were designed to help foster cross-cultural understanding.

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Syllabi are an integral part of any college experience and an understanding for how the genre functions on a rhetorical level is an under-researched area in the field of higher education. Using the tools of rhetorical analysis—looking at language and genre structures—I gathered a selection of 25 First-Year Writing syllabi within the Department of English at Virginia Tech to help address this concern of a lack of research. Using qualitative research methods—specifically those dealing with language and genre coding—I worked through my syllabi selection to ascertain how the genre functions rhetorically. Using Mary Louise Pratt's idea of the "contact zone" as well as Rhetorical Genre Theories and Actor-Network Theory, I argue that beginning with an understanding for how the genre of syllabi function rhetorically will also help us understand how the genre can be communicative, in the sense that it sends a message, as well as performative. / Master of Arts / Syllabi are an integral part of any college experience and an understanding for how the genre functions on a rhetorical level is an under-researched area in the field of higher education. Using the tools of rhetorical analysis—looking at language and genre structures—I gathered a selection of 25 First-Year Writing syllabi within the Department of English at Virginia Tech to help address this concern of a lack of research. Using qualitative research methods—specifically those dealing with language and genre coding—I worked through my syllabi selection to ascertain how the genre functions rhetorically. Using Mary Louise Pratt’s idea of the “contact zone” as well as Rhetorical Genre Theories and Actor-Network Theory, I argue that beginning with an understanding for how the genre of syllabi function rhetorically will also help us understand how the genre can be communicative, in the sense that it sends a message, as well as performative.

Around 1900 an interest towards non-Christian spirituality could be observed in Swedish society. There have been studies in spirituality, but little attention has been given in considering the circulation and transcultural exchange of knowledge production. The aim of this thesis is to show how knowledge of alternative spiritualty was constructed by the press’ description of encounters between spiritual go-betweens from India and America and the Swedish public between 1899 and 1926. By studying articles from daily papers, I propose that actors from diverse cultures, Swedish institutional arenas, and the public had a crucial part in the knowledge production of alternative spirituality. I argue that in the process of circulating and reformulating knowledge, a narrative was created: a mediation of alternative spirituality, custom-made and conducive for the Western audiences and their needs.

Jews have been represented in Latvian literature for centuries. This dissertation investigates the images of Jews in a comprehensive selection of Latvian novels published between 1934–1944 in order to establish whether, and to what extent, the traditional images are subject to change under the pressure of modernity, nationalism and a rapidly changing political situation. Since most representations of, and references to, Jews in this literature are very brief, it is necessary to initially deprive the individual works of their titles and authors and let them form an authorless entity, a Corpus, however diverse, yet representative of Latvian society at the time. Through this approach the centres of attention are put aside, and the scattered images of Jews are brought into focus. With the help of a Matrix designed for this purpose, all ‘Jews’ are sorted and analysed. The Matrix, including also linguistic references, illustrates how Jews in the discourse are made to represent the ‘other’ through the provision of certain pieces of information and the omission others. The Jews in the Corpus, with very few exceptions, are thus systematically and consistently reduced to blank images and stereotypes. Through this process they are also subject to ‘othering’ and dehumanisation, albeit not necessarily articulated as such. The social distance between Latvians and Jews becomes more pronounced in the Corpus compared to in the Latvian literary tradition, and there are several examples of negative attitudes and anti-Semitism. Yet, with regard to the extreme political situation, especially under Soviet and Nazi occupations, these examples are fewer than expected: the investigated literature follows its own traditions and, with hardly any exceptions, does not reflect societal and political changes immediately.

This essay applies human-animal studies in relation to the Swedish author Kerstin Ekman's books Guds barmhärtighet (1999), Sista Rompan (2002) and Skraplotter (2003) together called Vargskinnstrilogin. Kerstin Ekman's authorship is characterized by a coexistence between human, nature and animals where the stories entangle them into a dense complexity. As a reader, one is constantly reminded of this coexistence through Ekman's narrative approach as her stories contain many contact zones between humans and animals, which creates space for problematizing this entangled coexist from a posthumanistic perspective. The animals in the stories are at different distances to the human being based on their characteristics of being regarded as wild, domesticated or ferral. Based on these three categories, the wolf as a representative of the wild animals is analyzed in a theoretical context focusing on the function of different power structures within the anthropocentric paradigm. Ferral conditions are analyzed on the basis of, among other things, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's theories of animal-becomings, escape lines and rhizom where the dog mainly exists when it is embodied in close interaction with humans in Ekman's stories. The domesticated animals are analyzed on the basis of the tension between rural and urban, where the progress of the civil society are rapidly changing during the 20th century which creates changed relations between people and agricultural animals.

In dieser Dissertation werden die Repräsentationen von Kulturtransfer in zeitgenössischen britischen Romanen untersucht (Monica Ali: Brick Lane (2003), Nadeem Aslam: Maps For Lost Lovers (2004), Gautam Malkani: Londonstani (2007) und Maggie Gee: The White Family (2002)). Für die Analyse der Begegnungen und Kulturtransferprozesse werden narratologische Analysekategorien mit denen der Kulturtransferanalyse verknüpft. Neben den textimmanenten Aspekten werden außerdem die Produktions- und Rezeptionskontexte der Romane mitberücksichtigt. Dazu gehören u.a. auch das Buchmarketing und Buchumschlagdesign sowie Rezensionen und öffentliche Reaktionen auf die Romane. Mit diesem Instrumentarium werden z.B. folgende Fragen untersucht: Wie werden Begegnungen und Austauschprozesse repräsentiert und bewertet? Welche Gründe für Aneignung oder Abschottung werden formuliert? In diesem Kontext konzentriert sich die Arbeit auf die Repräsentation von Mediatorinnen und Mediatoren, Kontaktzonen und -situationen, Machtstrukturen sowie Selektions- und Ablehnungsprozesse. Außerdem wird untersucht, mit welchen ästhetischen Mitteln die Austauschprozesse gestaltet werden, beispielsweise durch die Untersuchung der Plotmuster und der Charakterisierungen auf Stereotype hin. und welche Effekte dies bewirkt. Die Analysen haben ergeben, dass Kulturtransfer als erstrebenswert bewertet wird. Gleichzeitig findet aber oft nur Assimilierung statt und kein reziproker Austausch auf Augenhöhe. Die ausgewählten Romane setzen sich vorwiegend mit Hindernissen des interkulturellen Austauschs auseinander. Besonders häufig werden in diesem Kontext Gründe wie mangelnde Bereitschaft, mangelnde Bildung und extremistische (religiöse) Ansichten der Einwandererfamilien angeführt. Die Romane verstetigen Stereotype, die dem Lesepublikum bereits aus vielen Massenmedien vertraut sind, u.a. durch entwicklungsresistente Charaktere, typisiert als ungebildete und unverbesserliche Migranten, die Parallelgesellschaften entwerfen. / This thesis analyses representations of cultural exchange in contemporary British novels in the context of migration and the British literary field. It offers a multilayered approach: the combination of cultural exchange theory and its categories with narratological tools do justice to the aesthetic side of the novels as well as their socio-political and historical contexts that are particularly relevant for novels dealing with migration. Cultural exchange theory analyses appropriation and transformation processes, i.e. how the concepts, cultural practices as well as representations change when they are transferred into a different cultural context. Furthermore, this thesis takes into consideration that all novels exist as material objects within a literary field that is affected by editors, marketing people, reviewers, and other agents. The results support the following theses: Contact and exchange are implicitly and explicitly depicted as something positive, with two of the novels emphasising the virtues of selective appropriation. However, the exchange processes mainly work in one direction only and contact between (British) Asian and (white) British characters is limited. The blame for this is often put on the immigrants and their families. The selected texts focus on obstacles and conflicts in exchange processes without offering solutions to the conflicts. In this context, religion or religious fervour along with a lack of education are most often depicted as the main obstacle for reciprocal cultural exchange. The aesthetic means employed are analysed as well as their effects, e.g. whether form and content reinforce each other or produce contradictions. Finally, the thesis shows which novels deconstruct and contradict existing stereotypes and which ones are complicit in reproducing them. Primary texts: Monica Ali’s Brick Lane (2003), Nadeem Aslam’s Maps for Lost Lovers (2004), Gautam Malkani’s Londonstani (2006) and Maggie Gee’s The White Family (2002).