Dans cette thèse on étudie un invariant topologique des variétés de dimension 3, la torsion de Reidemeister, comme un objet global sur les variétés de caractères du groupe fondamental dans SL(2,C). Dans le cas du complexe cohomologique associé à la représentation adjointe, on définit la torsion « adjointe » comme une forme différentielle méromorphe sur la variété des caractères. On reliera l’apparition de pôles ou de zéros à :-des singularités de la variété des caractères-la topologie de certaines surfaces incompressibles plongées, produites via la théorie de Culler-Shalen.On obtiendra, comme conséquence de ces résultats, une formule reliant le genre de ces surfaces incompressibles, et celui de la variété des caractères.Dans le cas du complexe standard, la torsion « acyclique » est une fonction méromorphe sur la variété des caractères. Une étude poussée des pôles apparaissant aux points à l’infini nous permettra, entre autre, de donner des conditions suffisantes pour que la torsion soit non constante. / In this PhD dissertation, we study a topological invariant of 3-manifolds, namely the Reidemeister torsion, as globally defined on character varieties of the fundamental group in SL(2,C). The « adjoint » torsion will be the torsion of the cohomological complex associated to the adjoint representation. We explain that it can be seen as a meromorphic differential form on the character variety, and we aim to understand its poles and zeros. They will be related with -singular points of the character variety -the topology of incompressible surfaces embedded in the 3-manifold, provided by the Culler-Shalen theory. As an application, we prove a relation between the genus of those incompressible surface and the genus of the character variety. The « acyclic » torsion of the standard complex is a rational function on the character variety. We study its poles at infinity in the character variety, and we give sufficient conditions for this torsion to be non constant.

This Master’s thesis explores three contemporary Swedish poets’ – Lars Mikael Raattamaa, Anna Hallberg and Johan Jönson – understanding of their work as a political activity. By using Jonathan Culler’s theory on literary competence and literary conventions as a theoretical tool for an idea analysis, the three poets' arguments for or against certain literary techniques, and their ideas about readers and reading, are explored and discussed. In what ways are established literary methods questioned by the three poets? In what ways are established theories on readers and reading questioned? In what way can their poetic work be regarded as political? As a background, the debate about poetry in Swedish newspapers and literary magazines is presented, as well as the common focus on readers and reading in social sciences and in humanities and arts. The trend is to interpret the reader as active and creative. Following this trend, and surpassing it, the three Swedish poets challenges established literary techniques and established theories on readers and reading. The ideas of the three poets can be summarized as follows: The poet must be very conscious about different literary techniques and their effects. Poetry and literature must not be written in ways that is hierarchic or undemocratic. That is: literary competence is actually not important. The meaning of the poem or the text is in the mind of the reader, not in the mind of the poet or the writer. The poets aim and goal must be to write a kind of poetry that is accessible to all people, unregarded literary competence or such things as literary conventions. / Uppsatsnivå: D

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Florida, 1984. / Description based on print version record. Typescript. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 256-259).

The objective of this paper – Trusting the reader: On impressionistic narrating in Stig Claesson's writings with the novel Brev till en hembygdsgård as starting point – is to examine narrative techniques used by the Swedish author Stig Claesson, specifically some which fall within the broad field known as literary impressionism: e.g. omission, repetition, juxtaposition, episodic narration and how access to the narrator’s as well as individual characters' consciousness is handled. The method used for the study will be that of illustrative comparison. The analysis will seek its theoretical grounds in the works by Gerard Genette and Jonathan Culler. In the major parts of the study, narrative techniques used by Claesson in the novel Brev till en hembygdsgård (1974), is examined with the help of Robert Paul Lamb and James Nagel, and their studies concerning the crafts of Ernest Hemingway and Stephen Crane. In addition, other novels by Claesson are used in order to find, illustrate and then compare his craftsmanship with techniques already studied and described by scholars and critics. The main result from the analysis is that a need to trust the reader follows from Claesson’s choice of narrative techniques; by having the narrating instance mainly represent perception – without allowing the narrator, or the characters of the narrative, to interpret what’s rendered – the reader is left to experience sensation on her own. To assist the reader, Claesson binds together his episodic narration with a frequent use of juxtaposition, in which colors, objects and scenes already used, are re-used – hence having one scene charge the next, and so on, with previously evoked emotions. Furthermore, Claesson frequently uses omission in conjunction with repetition as a narrative technique; often when the narrator returns to an already used scene, she is excluding some of the information given to the reader earlier in exchange for some previously omitted information or for elements belonging to other scenes. The study finds that a consequence of Claesson’s combination of the above mentioned techniques, is that his texts calls for a reader to take an active part in creating meaning both from the text and from their own experience. Finally, the study suggests that Claesson, like any craftsman, recognized that once the work is done and delivered, it is up to the recipient to use it according to their own ability, imagination and discretion.

This thesis addresses critical conceptions of Scottish literary development in the twentieth-century which inscribe realism as both the authenticating tradition and necessary telos of modern Scottish writing. To this end I identify and explore a Scottish ‘counter-tradition’ of modern uncanny fiction. Drawing critical attention to techniques of modal disruption in the works of a number of post-1970s Scottish writers gives cause to reconsider that realist teleology while positing a range of other continuities and tensions across modern Scottish literary history. The thesis initially defines the critical context for the project, considering how realism has come to be regarded as a medium of national literary representation. I go on to explore techniques of modal disruption and uncanny in texts by five Scottish writers, contesting ways in which habitual recourse to the realist tradition has obscured important aspects of their work. Chapter One investigates Ali Smith’s reimagining of ‘the uncanny guest’. While this trope has been employed by earlier Scottish writers, Smith redesigns it as part of a wider interrogation of the hyperreal twenty-first-century. Chapter Two considers two texts by James Robertson, each of which, I argue, invokes uncanny techniques familiar to readers of James Hogg and Robert Louis Stevenson in a way intended specifically to suggest concepts of national continuity and literary inheritance. Chapter Three argues that James Kelman’s political stance necessitates modal disruption as a means of relating intimate individual experience. Re-envisaging Kelman as a writer of the uncanny makes his central assimilation into the teleology of Scottish realism untenable, complicating the way his work has been positioned in the Scottish canon. Chapter Four analyses A.L. Kennedy’s So I Am Glad, delineating a similarity in the processes of repetition which result in both uncanny effects and the phenomenon of tradition, leading to Kennedy’s identification of an uncanny dimension in the concept of national tradition itself. Chapter Five considers the work of Alan Warner, in which the uncanny appears as an unsettling sense of significance embedded within the banal everyday, reflecting an existentialism which reaches beyond the national. In this way, I argue that habitual recourse to an inscribed realist tradition tends to obscure the range, complexity and instability of the realist techniques employed by the writers at issue, demonstrating how national continuities can be productively accommodated within wider, pluralistic analytical approaches.