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The main purpose of this dissertation is to answer the question of how one can understand the fact that we mean very different things when we say that God exists and when we say that chairs, mountains and trees exist, and that it is still a matter of existence. On the one hand it seems that we talk about the same thing when we say that something exists, irrespective of what it is, on the other hand it seems to be a question of very different things depending on what it is we are talking about as existing. This dissertation seeks to give an understanding of the relation between the concept of truth and the concept of reality. The conclusion is not only that we presuppose these concepts in everything we do, say, believe and think, but that we presuppose a specific understanding of these concepts, namely a concept of objective truth and a concept of an external and mind independent reality. In this dissertation it is also argued that our use of these concepts and that we use them in everything we do – that they are as basic as they are – says something about how it is, about reality. The use of these concepts does not only say something of what we conceptually presuppose but it also says something about what we assume in relation to reality. The conceptual aspect, in this way, has consequences ontologi.

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New, old novels, contemporary fictions that parody the forms, conventions, and devices of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novels, form a significant and increasingly popular subclass of postmodernist fiction. Paradoxically combining realistic and metafictional conventions, these works establish an ironic dialogue with the past, employing yet simultaneously subverting traditional fictional techniques. / In this dissertation, I subject five new, old novels--John Barth's The Sot-Weed Factor and LETTERS, Erica Jong's Fanny, T. Coraghessan Boyle's Water Music, and John Fowles's The French Lieutenant's Woman--to a detailed analysis, which compares the parodic role of archaic devices in each contemporary novel to the serious use made of such devices in the past. I argue that new, old novels, by juxtaposing old and new world views, foreground the ontological concerns of fiction and suggest that literary representation is constitutive rather than imitative of reality. Their examination of the relationship between fiction and reality places them at the centre of contemporary concern.

This comparative essay discusses feminist and post-feminist concepts in the novels Fear of Flying by Erica Jong (1973) and Trip Reports by Tone Schunnesson (2016) from a generational perspective. The term feminism embraces both second-wave and third-wave feminism, while the term post-feminism represents the contradictions between and within the two. The analysis centers on the first-person narrators, Isadora Wing, in Fear of Flying, and the anonymous narrator, in Trip Reports. A phenomenological close-reading was employed to uncover generational differences, contradictions, and similarities in the texts, which were then analyzed through the lens of feminism and post-feminism. Examination of the texts was facilitated through the use of three categories: love, the body, and artistry. The primary theory utilized in the analysis is Toril Moi’s feminist theory developed out of Simon de Beauvoir’s reflections on “the body as situation,” where it is argued that a person’s lived experience, one’s whole subjectivity, is dependent upon and reflected through one’s body. The body forms the relationship to ourselves and our experience of the world, as well as how others view us. Thus, the female lived experience and each woman’s individual project is in this regard connected to having a female body. The results define differences in the narrators’ lived experiences and how the two women view themselves and others, in relation to societal norms and each narrator’s specific generation. Furthermore, the narrators’ are both ambivalent in their thoughts and actions. The identified similarities center around male dependency, various degrees – or lack of - female identification and traditional gender norms, independent of generation. The results of the analysis could offer a cultural and generational contribution to the current feminist literary discussion. / <p>Godkännande datum 2019-06-03</p>

This thesis presents a cross-national, cross-regime examination of foreign policy decision-making in the Spratly Islands dispute, focusing on China, Malaysia and the Philippines. It argues that how and why these countries have acted in particular ways towards the dispute relates to the relationship among foreign policy decision-making, government behaviour and domestic politics. The theoretical foundation of the study is foreign policy analysis. It applies the decision units approach advanced by Margaret and Charles Hermann and Joe Hagan to investigate who made foreign policy decisions on the Spratly Islands dispute in the three countries during the period 1991-2002, and how this influenced government behaviour. In addition, the contextual influence of domestic politics is considered. Four case studies inform the empirical analysis: the approaches taken by Malaysia and the Philippines to bolster their respective sovereignty claim, China???s establishment of a comprehensive maritime jurisdictional regime covering the Spratly Islands among other areas, China-Philippines contestation over Mischief Reef and the development of a regional instrument to regulate conduct in the South China Sea. Three conclusions are drawn. First, the decision units approach identifies the pivotal foreign policy decision-makers in each of the countries examined and the process involved. Second, it explains the relationship between decision unit characteristics -- self-contained or externally influenceable -- and each government???s behaviour towards the dispute. Injecting domestic politics into the analysis highlights motivations of and constraints faced by decision-makers, conditioning the form and content of government action. Third, it demonstrates a low predictive capability: the ???fit??? between hypothesised and actual government behaviour is poor. While it is not a comprehensive analytical tool, the combined decision units-domestic politics approach offers deeper insight into government decisions and behaviour on the Spratly Islands dispute than hitherto reported in the literature.

<p>A commonly held assumption among literary critics is that the motif of the European journey is exhausted in American literature in the post-World-War-II period. Challenging this view, the present study claims that the Old World journey narrative lives on, but in new guises, and that it continues to be a forum for the discussion of American national identity. Studying four novels about Americans traveling to Europe – William Styron’s Set This House on Fire (1960), Mary McCarthy’s Birds of America (1971), John A. Williams’s The Man Who Cried I Am (1967) and Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying (1973) – this thesis examines the ways in which the European journey is utilized for a questioning of “America.” Informed by the political debates of their time, which lead, for example, to the displacement of hegemonic ideologies such as nationalism, they share a critical stance vis-à-vis the conventional construction of national identity. They represent, however, different strands of the contemporary political counterculture; while the first two texts view national identity from the center of American society, addressing a moral and an ideological/intellectual critique, respectively, the last two represent marginal perspectives, that of the African American and feminist protest movements. The function of the European setting in the four novels is also scrutinized: in all of them the European setting provides the backdrop for a story that deals, almost exclusively, with American culture; it serves in a variety of ways, for example as a many-facetted stage, an experimental ground, or a zone of liberation. The Coda sketches recent developments in the 1980s and 1990s, finding the motif of initiation and the figure of the independent warm-hearted American girl to persist and the myth of American innocence to continue to be contested. </p>

A commonly held assumption among literary critics is that the motif of the European journey is exhausted in American literature in the post-World-War-II period. Challenging this view, the present study claims that the Old World journey narrative lives on, but in new guises, and that it continues to be a forum for the discussion of American national identity. Studying four novels about Americans traveling to Europe – William Styron’s Set This House on Fire (1960), Mary McCarthy’s Birds of America (1971), John A. Williams’s The Man Who Cried I Am (1967) and Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying (1973) – this thesis examines the ways in which the European journey is utilized for a questioning of “America.” Informed by the political debates of their time, which lead, for example, to the displacement of hegemonic ideologies such as nationalism, they share a critical stance vis-à-vis the conventional construction of national identity. They represent, however, different strands of the contemporary political counterculture; while the first two texts view national identity from the center of American society, addressing a moral and an ideological/intellectual critique, respectively, the last two represent marginal perspectives, that of the African American and feminist protest movements. The function of the European setting in the four novels is also scrutinized: in all of them the European setting provides the backdrop for a story that deals, almost exclusively, with American culture; it serves in a variety of ways, for example as a many-facetted stage, an experimental ground, or a zone of liberation. The Coda sketches recent developments in the 1980s and 1990s, finding the motif of initiation and the figure of the independent warm-hearted American girl to persist and the myth of American innocence to continue to be contested.

This thesis presents a cross-national, cross-regime examination of foreign policy decision-making in the Spratly Islands dispute, focusing on China, Malaysia and the Philippines. It argues that how and why these countries have acted in particular ways towards the dispute relates to the relationship among foreign policy decision-making, government behaviour and domestic politics. The theoretical foundation of the study is foreign policy analysis. It applies the decision units approach advanced by Margaret and Charles Hermann and Joe Hagan to investigate who made foreign policy decisions on the Spratly Islands dispute in the three countries during the period 1991-2002, and how this influenced government behaviour. In addition, the contextual influence of domestic politics is considered. Four case studies inform the empirical analysis: the approaches taken by Malaysia and the Philippines to bolster their respective sovereignty claim, China???s establishment of a comprehensive maritime jurisdictional regime covering the Spratly Islands among other areas, China-Philippines contestation over Mischief Reef and the development of a regional instrument to regulate conduct in the South China Sea. Three conclusions are drawn. First, the decision units approach identifies the pivotal foreign policy decision-makers in each of the countries examined and the process involved. Second, it explains the relationship between decision unit characteristics -- self-contained or externally influenceable -- and each government???s behaviour towards the dispute. Injecting domestic politics into the analysis highlights motivations of and constraints faced by decision-makers, conditioning the form and content of government action. Third, it demonstrates a low predictive capability: the ???fit??? between hypothesised and actual government behaviour is poor. While it is not a comprehensive analytical tool, the combined decision units-domestic politics approach offers deeper insight into government decisions and behaviour on the Spratly Islands dispute than hitherto reported in the literature.