The personal essay provides a vibrant method of inquiry for exploring migration. Migration tests the individual on all levels and the personal essay bears witness to that lived experience in writing. In applying Montaigne’s maxim “What do I know?” to experience, the joint endeavor of trial and assessment coincide in the migrant and the personal essay. Yet to date, no study of how the personal essay and the migrant intersect and reinforce their parallel journey of discovery has been published. Emphasizing observation, reflection and synthesis, the personal essay provides a rigorous and innovative approach to investigate what migrants encounter firsthand. Both the genre and the migrant try, weigh and test experience for its value and significance in writing and in the real world. This study of the nexus between migration and the personal essay genre addresses a crucial gap in the research, a space of increasing relevance in a progressively more mobile and globalized world. Migration is a lifelong experience, and New Zealand is a nation of migrants. This research examines personal essays written by contemporary migrants to New Zealand from twenty different countries. By probing the roots and routes of migration, migrant essays address complex questions around identity and belonging to assess the lived stakes of migration. Migrants cross geographic, linguistic and existential frontiers, and their personal essays bear witness to the contact zones between self and other, self and text. The migrant personal essay reflects and analyzes experience from the outsider perspective and testifies to the dominant culture how belonging is predicated on mutual acceptance of the other. As this study demonstrates, the personal essay is the ideal genre to explore how migrants negotiate and assess the space between inner and outer, home and journey, experience and meaning – abstractions intrinsic to our sense of self and world.

This project traces the ways universities articulate a desire for diversity through the gateway genres of college admissions, composition course placement, and first-year-composition (FYC). Together, these genres serve as points of access for a theoretical study that seeks to better understand the ideological function of writing programs to socialize borderline college applicants into the rhetorically constructed role of a Diverse College Student. I focus on what I call bootstraps genres--reoccurring rhetorical situations that call for students to recount social hardships like racism and classism as personal hardships to be overcome through personal heroics. Despite being immersed in rhetorics of individualism, the college application essay, the directed self-placement guide, and the literacy narrative all call for the mimetic construction of disadvantage as an appeal to college-readiness. As new college students move through the initiation rituals of admissions, orientation, and FYC, they are presented with rhetorical tasks that are both raced and classed. Bootstraps genres ask students to first read the university's desire for diversity and then fulfill that desire through personal stories of difference and disadvantage.

This thesis describes and analyzes the context and the evolution of the Quebec literary essay between 1970 and 1990. It is supported by a body of texts which, in our opinion, reflect the structure of contemporary essayistic discourse in Quebec. / By studying three dimensions of the Quebec essay--the socio-political, the personal and the feminist--we will attempt to understand and interpret the various modes through which the essayistic "I" deals with its cultural and ideological contexts. Beyond this principal goal, we offer an account of recent studies on the definition of the literary essay. / This vast panorama of Quebec essay is accompanied, in the second part of this work, by the bibliography of texts published during the last two decades. In order to facilitate a clearer assessment of the development of the "genre" in question, we have appended a chronological listing of these texts.

Kita Morio has been one of the most successful humorists of Japan's postwar period, but his work has received little attention from scholars. The intent of this study is to provide an introduction to the humorous essays of Kita Morio. In particular, after the principles of the humor mechanism are established, the nature of the essays as a type of I-novel is examined. The focus is then turned to the authorial persona that Kita uses in his humorous essays, and an overview of that manufactured fictional character and the world he inhabits is created. Finally, five individual essays are examined in the context created by the preceding chapters, with particular attention given to the manner in which humor functions in the essays, as well as the manner in which the reader can find comfort in them. Translations of the five essays examined in the final chapter are provided in the Appendix.

This dissertation examines the periodical essay as a site for women's political activity in the nineteenth century. I suggest that the essays and articles of well-known writers Fanny Fern, Marie Corelli, and Sarah Grand, and others who are less well-known, such as Ignota and Mary Livermore, together form a significant body of prose non-fiction that highlights women's active involvement in political debate. I focus primarily upon women's contributions to general-interest periodicals---where women were competing for space against a wider variety of male writers---rather than on ladies' magazines or the suffrage press, whose more narrow goals diminish the potency of women's appearance in the press. Much of my study focuses on the British Nineteenth Century and the American North American Review , both of which turned to series of articles and carefully organized groups of essays to showcase women's inclusion in the debate, often summarized as the Woman Question, over women's position in nineteenth-century society. Throughout, I posit that women's publication on topics concerning women's rights constitutes culturally and generically sanctioned political activity. The five chapters represent increasingly specific aspects of this activity. The first positions women's involvement within the press's penchant for diversity. The second argues for a connection between the influential function of the periodical press and the role of women as positive influences on others. While this influence is generally interpreted as purely domestic, I suggest an alternative reading that endorses women's publication in periodicals. The third chapter examines how women play on notions of gender and identity to create viable public voices in the press. In chapter four, I turn my attention to the ways in which women occupy the forum of the periodical to comment on and prescribe male behavior. Finally, in chapter five I discuss the ways women exert their powers to interpret and comment upon p

This thesis explores the poetics of editing in the films and multimedia works of Chris Marker. From his first essay films of the 1950s to his 1998 CD-ROM Immemory, the director’s work has attracted critical attention for its beauty and originality of expression. Much existing analysis engages with this work in terms of its subject matter and themes and their relationship with its associational, rather than linear, narrative form, with relatively little focus on the stylistics of Marker’s editing. While questions of the director’s thematic concerns also arise in my study, I argue that Marker’s contribution to cinema and the visual arts cannot be fully appreciated without a systematic understanding of his stylistics—his expressive use of cinematic forms and patterns. In developing such an understanding, this thesis utilises the work of a number of film writers explicitly concerned with the expressive use of cinematic space and time. From Andr?? Bazin, I take the idea of rapprochement to mean the way the comparison between two juxtaposed events or images suggests or expresses the meaning of their juxtaposition. From Jean-Andr?? Fieschi, I draw on the idea that the dialectical interaction of the plastic, formal and narrative elements of a film gives meaning to its cinematic space and time. My approach synthesises and builds upon both ideas for its account of the stylistics of Marker’s work. Starting with a preliminary analysis of one cinematic comparison in The Case of the Grinning Cat (2004), I then consider Marker’s exploration of the imaginative potential of a single image sequence in The Last Bolshevik (1993). After this, I explore examples of the stylistic figure of rapprochement in Letter from Siberia (1958), and the stylistic figure of transformation in Sunless (1982). The thesis then studies articulations of rapprochement and transformation in the museum installations Zapping Zone: Proposals for an Imaginary Television (1991), Silent Movie (1995) and the CD-ROM Immemory.

This thesis explores the poetics of editing in the films and multimedia works of Chris Marker. From his first essay films of the 1950s to his 1998 CD-ROM Immemory, the director’s work has attracted critical attention for its beauty and originality of expression. Much existing analysis engages with this work in terms of its subject matter and themes and their relationship with its associational, rather than linear, narrative form, with relatively little focus on the stylistics of Marker’s editing. While questions of the director’s thematic concerns also arise in my study, I argue that Marker’s contribution to cinema and the visual arts cannot be fully appreciated without a systematic understanding of his stylistics—his expressive use of cinematic forms and patterns. In developing such an understanding, this thesis utilises the work of a number of film writers explicitly concerned with the expressive use of cinematic space and time. From Andr?? Bazin, I take the idea of rapprochement to mean the way the comparison between two juxtaposed events or images suggests or expresses the meaning of their juxtaposition. From Jean-Andr?? Fieschi, I draw on the idea that the dialectical interaction of the plastic, formal and narrative elements of a film gives meaning to its cinematic space and time. My approach synthesises and builds upon both ideas for its account of the stylistics of Marker’s work. Starting with a preliminary analysis of one cinematic comparison in The Case of the Grinning Cat (2004), I then consider Marker’s exploration of the imaginative potential of a single image sequence in The Last Bolshevik (1993). After this, I explore examples of the stylistic figure of rapprochement in Letter from Siberia (1958), and the stylistic figure of transformation in Sunless (1982). The thesis then studies articulations of rapprochement and transformation in the museum installations Zapping Zone: Proposals for an Imaginary Television (1991), Silent Movie (1995) and the CD-ROM Immemory.

Univ., Diss.--Tübingen, 2005. / Literaturverz. S. [923] - 945.

Zugl.: München, Univ., Diss., 2006

We propose a neural network-based system for automatically grading essays written in Swedish. Previous system either relies on laboriously crafted features extracted by human experts or are limited to essays written in English. By using different variations of Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks, our system automatically learns the relation between Swedish high-school essays and their assigned score. Using all of the intermediate states from the LSTM network proved to be crucial in order to understand the essays. Furthermore, we evaluate different ways of representing words as dense vectors which ultimately have a substantial effect on the overall performance. We compare our results to the ones achieved by the first and previously only automatic essay scoring system designed for the Swedish language. Although no state-of-the-art performance is reached, indication of the potential from a neural based grading system is found.