This dissertation is a study of contemporary Pashto prose writing in a context of war and crisis based on a corpus of digitally published and/or printed short stories from the 1990s onwards. Out of this larger corpus, 16 stories have been selected and analysed under four topics: "The Terrorist", Female agency: Representations of and by, "The Madman", and Axtar: Longing for peace or imaging disillusion. A central idea is that the analysis should be text-oriented, but the contextualisation of the analysed texts is a secondary important focus. Chapter one presents the material and gives a general context to the study. In the second chapter, after a general conceptualisation of the short story genre, I discuss the borders between prose and poetry. In chapter three I provide an overview of Pashto literature where the aim is to pinpoint certain characteristics of literature in what I call a poeticised community, such as that of the Pashtuns. The fourth chapter contains an introduction to the four topics mentioned above, a summary of each of the four stories belonging to the specific topic with selected parts in direct translation from the Pashto original, as well as a discussion of form and contents of each topic separately. Chapter five consists of a general conclusion. An appendix with the original Pashto text of translated sections is found before the bibliography. One feature that has emerged from this study is the notion of how the narratives are often found to communicate and respond to their immediate surroundings, in time as well as in space. Another important conclusion is that devices normally regarded as belonging to the realm of poetry are not uncommon in Pashto short story writing.

Studies on the career paths of municipal police officers have revealed an emergence of four distinct phases which officers pass through during their professional careers, phases where the perception of their profession changes. These phases are more constant at the patrol officer level where most officers begin and finish their career. Among these four phases is the disillusion phase (between 6 and 13 years), where the expectations at work are not met. The perception of the police administration, the public and the criminal justice system, all become negative and the hope for promotions diminish. These studies were mainly conducted in a period where there were very few or no women in policing. Through a feminist perspective and a social constructionist theoretical framework, this thesis makes the hypothesis that because women have different expectations at work, a varying work/life balance and a contrasting aspiration to attain positions of power, women will live this second phase differently. To explore this hypothesis, data was collected from ten semi-structured interviews with female patrol officers having worked between 6 and 13 years in municipal police departments. A discourse analysis effectively shows significant differences for the reasons underlying our hypotheses. Even if they have some frustrations about certain aspects of their work, we did not see any disillusionment from any women in this phase.

(in English): The focus of this diploma thesis is disillusion in the works of the contemporary novelist Ian McEwan, particularly in his twenty-first century novels. The thesis analyses the disillusionment of the reader based on McEwan's work with traditional narratives and the reader's expectations, which is achieved through the employment of the unreliable narrator in Atonement (2001) and Sweet Tooth (2012), depiction of self-deception in Saturday (2005) and Solar (2010), and the misunderstanding on the interpersonal and intrapersonal level in On Chesil Beach (2007) and The Children Act (2014). The analysis uses the method of close reading and critical evaluation through the hermeneutic process in combination with Iser's theory about the reader, Foucault's definition of discourse and some generally accepted ideas based on psychology. The analysis reveals that Ian McEwan uses disillusion in his novels as a device through which he tries to encourage the reader to critically evaluate the reader's preconceptions about the world, the conventional narratives, and the roles the reader ascribes to him/herself and to the society around him/herself. By allowing the reader to build his/her expectations of the story's denouement and then crushing them, McEwan points out the reader's routine regarding a given...

Studies on the career paths of municipal police officers have revealed an emergence of four distinct phases which officers pass through during their professional careers, phases where the perception of their profession changes. These phases are more constant at the patrol officer level where most officers begin and finish their career. Among these four phases is the disillusion phase (between 6 and 13 years), where the expectations at work are not met. The perception of the police administration, the public and the criminal justice system, all become negative and the hope for promotions diminish. These studies were mainly conducted in a period where there were very few or no women in policing. Through a feminist perspective and a social constructionist theoretical framework, this thesis makes the hypothesis that because women have different expectations at work, a varying work/life balance and a contrasting aspiration to attain positions of power, women will live this second phase differently. To explore this hypothesis, data was collected from ten semi-structured interviews with female patrol officers having worked between 6 and 13 years in municipal police departments. A discourse analysis effectively shows significant differences for the reasons underlying our hypotheses. Even if they have some frustrations about certain aspects of their work, we did not see any disillusionment from any women in this phase.