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  • About
  • The Global ETD Search service is a free service for researchers to find electronic theses and dissertations. This service is provided by the Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations.
    Our metadata is collected from universities around the world. If you manage a university/consortium/country archive and want to be added, details can be found on the NDLTD website.
1

Neil Gaiman's The Sandman : From interpretive narrative to postmodern myth

Skikne, Taryn Sara 21 October 2008 (has links)
This thesis will explore the proposal that Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman is, as Gaiman describes it in its epilogue, a “story about stories” (The Wake, epilogue). Its particular focus will be on Gaiman’s conception of humans as essentially narrative beings, who use narratives to interact with the world around them, to impose order on information, to provide interpretive paradigms, and as models for their behaviour. Gaiman has not only explored this idea, but used the fantastic mode to create a universe in which these types of ‘interpretive narratives’ directly affect physical reality. Gaiman’s ideas about the way narratives work have been heavily influenced by both postmodern and Jungian legacies. The thesis will propose that the dynamic between postmodern intertextuality and the Jungian idea of the archetypes is a driving force in The Sandman. While Gaiman embraces a playful, bricoleur intertextuality, he also retains a belief that humans can invoke the archetypes to access profound meanings, which transcend the particularities of their expression in any individual instances. Under these influences, Gaiman concieves of a postmodern, Jungian approach to mythology. We will see that Gaiman’s interactions with narrative, postmodernism and Jungianism eventually lead him to formulate an ethic for the contemporary world, and that he encodes it in his own mythology. This ethic both empowers individuals and demands that they take responsibility for their power. It also focuses on how the individual can productively and tolerantly interact with a heteroglossic world. Instead of a fact to be sought out, meaning becomes a process of active creation.
2

Composition portfolio

Foster, Christopher January 2013 (has links)
Composition is a process of applied research. In a portfolio of eight original pieces, the technical and aesthetic components of this process are investigated from the perspective of several theoretical precepts which both inform and underpin its creative strategy. Drawing on theories of intertextuality, composition is collocated within a broad current of thought in which ideas and material from pre-existing ‘texts’ across a variety of disciplines are utilised and explored to create new compositional ‘texts’. This procedure is tested from several, key perspectives, characterised variously as: (i) problem-seeking, (ii) serendipitous, (iii) transgressive, and (iv) transcriptive. The first of these draws on John Dewey’s notions of art as a form of creative problematisation. In the second, techniques are developed in which performance flexibility is balanced against structural exactitude, aided by a series of parametric tables that outline a range of variables across the different elements of musical sound. As a transgressive process, compositional procedure is informed by Viktor Shklovsky’s theory of aesthetic defamiliarisation. Finally, as a form of transcription, the research draws on Ferruccio Busoni’s observations about notation and its key transmutational role in manipulating and recasting musical ideas. By adopting an eclectic attitude towards materials and techniques, a compositional strategy is formulated which offers an alternative to the assumption that advancement in the field is inevitably shaped by an ineluctable, dialectical process. A polyvalent approach and direct interaction with materials, it is argued, are the important creative ingredients which present valuable and meaningful developments in compositional language, form and technique.
3

Defamiliarising the Zoo : Representations of Nonhuman Animal Captivity in Five Contemporary Novels

Prattley, Hadassa January 2012 (has links)
While human-animal relations have always been part of human cultures the public zoo is a relatively recent phenomenon that reflects very specific elements of Western cultures’ modern ideas about, and relationships with, nonhuman animals. By becoming such a familiar part of popular culture the zoo naturalises these ideas as well as certain modes of looking at and interacting with animals. In this thesis I argue that as literary works contemporary novels provide a valuable defamiliarisation of zoos which encourages the re-examination of the human attitudes and practices that inform our treatment of nonhuman animals. Through my analysis of J.M. Ledgard’s novel 'Giraffe', Diane Hammond’s 'Hannah’s Dream', Lydia Millet’s 'How The Dead Dream', Valerie Martin’s 'The Great Divorce' and Ben Dolnick’s 'Zoology' I explore the inherently anthropocentric social construction of nonhuman animals in human discourses and the way the novels conform to or subvert these processes. I demonstrate that nonhuman animal characters are constructed through a process of identification which involves naming, recognising the existence of their emotions and mediating their nonhuman forms of communication. Anthropocentric tendencies both aid and hinder this identification, for example the human valuing of sight over the other senses that sees eyes become important literary symbols and the gaze a crucial part of interaction and attributing meaning. Gaze and observation are also fundamental to the concept of the zoo where human treatment of nonhuman animals is represented in visual terms in the relationship between powerful spectator and disempowered object. Drawing on texts from multiple disciplines I argue that the anthropocentric nature of socially constructed nonhuman animals in human discourses means that any study of these animals is actually concerned with the human ideologies and processes that create them; as a site of captivity that markets wildness and freedom the paradoxical nature of the zoo provides the literary setting for an exploration of these themes.
4

Overcoming the barriers of customary perception : Foregrounding elements in Seamus Heaney’s poem “Digging” and the potential implementation in the EFL classroom

Wall, Niklas January 2020 (has links)
The aim of this paper was to analyse foregrounding elements in Seamus Heaney’s poem “Digging.” The analysis shows that deviances from everyday non-literary language, i.e. foregrounding, are both likely to evoke defamiliarisation in readers and also provide readers with the likelihood of having an aesthetic experience. This has been done by adhering to the literary theory of Cognitive stylistics and to its related literary concepts, namely the theory of foregrounding. Furthermore, this paper also aimed to provide examples of how “Digging” can be taught in a pedagogical setting. In short, this paper argues for a teaching of poetry that focuses on the sensual aesthetic qualities in a poem. Therefore, this paper supports the claim that students need to attentively read, watch and perform poetry in order to experience its sounds and textures fully. Such an approach corresponds well to an aesthetic education which aims at developing, in students, a heightened awareness of and appreciation for all that touches our lives. Lastly, the pedagogical implementations showed that a foregrounding analysis of “Digging” can be fruitful to incorporate in the EFL classroom. Apart from evoking defamiliarisation and aesthetic reactions, a stylistic analysis can also serve to raise students' linguistic and literary awareness. As a result, students can discover why poets make particular language choices as well as develop their ability to interpret literary works.
5

Graecum est, non legitur : Främmandegöringens och genrens didaktiska potential i Umberto Ecos Rosens namn / Graecum est, non legitur : The didactic potential of defamiliarisation and genre in Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose

Bjälvegård, David January 2023 (has links)
Syftet med uppsatsen är att undersöka vilken didaktiska potential som kan finnas i Umberto Ecos roman Rosens namn (1980) i gymnasieskolans svenskundervisning. Ansatsen är litteraturvetenskaplig och rör dels hur elever kan tänkas lära sig hantera litterära texters egenart, dels elevers användning av genreteori för att förstå romanen. För att utforska det första ämnet används Viktor Sklovskijs teori om automatisering, främmandegöring och medvetet försvårad form. Det andra ämnet utgår i huvudsak från Tzvetan Todorovs artikel ”Kriminalromanens typologi”. Det visar sig att romanens didaktiska potential är stor om eleverna ges god vägledning. Romanens omfattande användning av latin och andra främmande språk är en tillgång vid tillämpning av Sklovskijs teorier om främmandegöring, då det finns gott om utrymme för tolkning och reflektion. Även genreanalysens didaktiska potential är hög eftersom romanen på både typiska och otypiska vis anknyter till spänningslitteraturen. / The aim of the paper is to examine what didactic potential may exist in Umberto Eco’s novel The Name of the Rose (1980) in the education of the Swedish language for the upper secondary school. It is approached from a literary scientific angle and is in part about how pupils can learn how to manage the uniqueness of the literary texts and in part how pupils can use genre theory to understand the novel. To explore the first subject Viktor Shklovsky’s theories about automatism, defamiliarisation and roughened form are used. The other subject is mainly studied with Tzvetan Todorov’s article “The Typology of Detective Fiction” as a starting point. It is deduced that the didactic potential of the novel is great if the pupils are given good guidance. The novel’s extensive use of Latin and other foreign languages is an asset when using Shklovsky’s theories, because there is a lot of room for interpretation and reflection. The genre analysis too has great didactic potential because the The Name of the Rose relates to suspense novels in both typical and atypical ways.
6

Chestertonian dramatology

Reyburn, Duncan 18 February 2013 (has links)
This study proposes an answer to the question of what the contemporary relevance of the writings of GK Chesterton (1874-1936) may be to the field of visual culture studies in general and to discourse on visual hermeneutics in particular. It contends that Chesterton’s distinctive hermeneutic strategy is dramatology: an approach rooted in the idea that being, which is disclosed to itself via language, has a dramatic, storied structure. It is this dramatology that acts as an answer to any philosophical outlook that would seek to de-dramatise the hermeneutic experience. The structure of Chesterton’s dramatology is unpacked via three clear questions, namely the question of what philosophical foundation describes his horizon of understanding, the question of what the task or goal of his interpretive process is and, finally, the question of what tools or elements shape his hermeneutic outlook. The first question is answered via an examination of his cosmology, epistemology and ontology; the second question is answered by the proposal that Chesterton’s chief aim is to uphold human dignity through his defenses of the common man, common sense and democracy; and the third question is answered through a discussion of the three principles that underpin his rhetoric, namely analogy, paradox and defamiliarisation. After proposing the structure of Chesterton’s dramatology via these considerations, the study offers one application of this dramatology to Terrence Malick’s film 'The tree of life' (2011). This is sustained in terms of the incarnational paradox between mystery and revelation that acts as the primary tension and hermeneutic key in Chesterton’s work. / Thesis (PhD)--University of Pretoria, 2012. / Visual Arts / unrestricted
7

The attraction of sloppy nonsense: resolving cognitive estrangement in Stargate through the technologising of mythology

Whitelaw, Sandra January 2007 (has links)
The thesis consists of the novel, Stargate Atlantis: Exogenesis (Whitelaw and Christensen, 2006a) and an accompanying exegesis. The novel is a stand-alone tie-in novel based on the television series Stargate Atlantis (Wright and Glassner), a spin-off series of Stargate SG-1 (Wright and Cooper) derived from the movie Stargate (Devlin and Emmerich, 1994). Set towards the end of the second season, Stargate Atlantis: Exogenesis begins with the discovery of life pods containing the original builders of Atlantis, the Ancients. The mind of one of these Ancients, Ea, escapes the pod and possesses Dr. Carson Beckett. After learning what has transpired in the 10,000 years since her confinement, the traumatised Ea releases an exogenesis machine to destroy Atlantis. Ea dies, leaving Beckett with sufficient of her memories to reveal that a second machine, on the planet Polrusso, could counter the effects of the first device. When the Atlantis team travel to Polrusso, what they discover has staggering implications not only for the future of Atlantis but for all life in the Pegasus Galaxy. The exegesis argues that both science and science fiction narrate the dissolution of ontological structures, resulting in cognitive estrangement. Fallacy writers engage in the same process and use the same themes and tools as science fiction writers to resolve cognitive estrangement: they technologise mythology. Consequently, the distinction between fact and fiction, history and myth, is blurred. The exegesis discusses cognitive estrangement, mythology, the process of technologising mythology and its function as a novum that facilitates the resolution of cognitive estrangement in both fallacy and science fiction narratives. These concepts are then considered in three Stargate tie-in novels, with particular reference to the creative work, Stargate Atlantis: Exogenesis.

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