Children use many cues to differentiate reality from fantasy, including context, testimony from others, and physical evidence in the world around them. However, due to individual differences, some children hold strong reality status biases that interfere with their ability to infer reality status from these cues correctly. This research identified two general cognitive skills, inhibitory control and a metacognitive understanding of certainty, which serve as mechanisms for overcoming biases to infer reality status. In general, children with a high interest in fantastical play and older children with poorer developed inhibitory control skills are more likely to display a reality status bias. Additionally, children with reality status biases are more likely to overcome them to infer reality status correctly when they have a better metacognitive understanding of certainty and better developed inhibitory control. This research informs both the fantasy/reality literature and the scientific reasoning literature in demonstrating how biases can affect children's judgments. / text

This dissertation is a cultural history of deviance in the United States. I use a series of case studies to examine the way deviant figures have been represented and experienced within American culture. The dissertation covers four historical eras and examines a representative deviant figure in each of them. The first chapter deals with the figure of the witch in Puritan New England, the second examines the libertine in the early American republic, the third deals with freaks in Victorian America and the fourth studies the flapper in the roaring twenties. Each of these chapters is focused on a particular historical crisis, trial or scandal that produced a rich body of historical evidence for study and analysis: the Salem Witch Trial of 1692, the Apthorp-Morton Scandal of 1788, the sensational Beecher-Tilton Affair of 1875 and the Ruth Snyder Trial of 1927. My overarching thesis is that representations of deviants reveal a deep cultural preoccupation with failure and inadequacy, which are projected onto deviant figures. This interpretation is an attempt to move beyond viewing representations of deviance as simply being attempts to repress those who do not conform to societal norms, or to shore up fragile social identities by creating ‘others’ against whom the normal American could be negatively defined. Instead, I argue that representations of deviance were compelling to the Americans who created them primarily as powerful fantasies about failure, lack and inadequacy. On to the rich symbolic canvas of the deviant figure, Americans projected their anxieties about personal and social failure. In different ways at different times, deviants have been used to articulate the various possible ways in which a person could fail to meet their society’s ideals and expectations, and to imagine the consequences of such failures for both individual personhood and society as a whole. The deviant has therefore historically served as a kind of mirror to the culture which produced him or her: a mirror in which a culture might darkly glimpse its own values, distorted by the terrifying failure to achieve that which is most prized.

This work is about the study of the children's free play in kindergartens. The study aims to investigate what significance free play has in kindergartens and what role pedagogues have in their children's free play. This study was conducted in two different kindergartens located in the same municipality.  One of the kindergartens is located in a monocultural area and the other in a multicultural area. That provides the opportunity to explore what differences exist between the two kindergartens. A qualitative investigation, consisting of interviews and participatory observation, was performed to answer the above research questions. The results confirm my own original conviction that the free play develops children's social interaction, fantasy and language. The pedagogues role in the children's free play is to help children during their free play, to give them confidence, to make them happy, to give them new and developmental toys and to provide an environment to safe play in.  The difference between the monocultural and multicultural kindergarten was that children with multiethnic background had problems with understanding each other because of differences in language, and this affected their social interaction and fantasy, thus their playing too. The pedagogues had to make an extra effort in helping these children to start to play together.

Historically, the study of fantasy has been one of the innermost workings of the psyche, making it largely inaccessible to those unwilling to work with a psychoanalytic model of the mind. This means that an important area of study remains largely unexplored by those working within alternative paradigms. However, with recent work by theorists such as Billig (1999), Burkitt (2010a, 2010b) and Durrheim (2012) on the dialogic unconscious and repression, areas previously confined to psychoanalytic study are becoming more accessible to interactionist approaches. Building on works such as these, and those of theorists such as Butler (1990, 1993, 1997), this paper theorises the production of fantasy in talk, space and embodied practice. Fantasy is argued to be produced on the boundaries of that which is speakable or performable within a given context, referencing taboo in performative and dialogic disavowal or repression. This framework for the production of fantasy is then applied to talk around, and the performance of, a provocative, gendered practice known as the screaming orgasm, which is performed in club spaces in South Africa and abroad. This paper reports on an ethnomethodologically informed ethnographic study which took place at one South African night club over the course of several months. / Thesis (M.Soc.Sc.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 2013.

This thesis is about a problem of interest to reading theorists, psychological anthropologists and cultural studies researchers alike: why we find some narratives, plots, and images compelling and what this phenomenon can tell us about the cultural bases of human motivation. Gesturing to the interdependence of emotion, cognition, and motivation, the notion of the '(dis)positioned self' is proposed as a conceptual tool by which to address how motivation is both acquired and expressed in the way the self as 'feeling-mind' reads, that is, negotiates an interpretation of the signifying systems of a text to render it personally meaningful. (Dis)position allows us to overcome the sociocultural determinism of French structuralist and some poststructuralist reductions of the self to a precipitate of cultural constructs by reconceptualizing the interpreting self as an embodied, affective agent who employs unconscious knowledge that itself draws on another form of sociality. On this account, reading performance is culturally informed action and interpretations are motivated. Emotion is introduced as symptomatic of the intrapsychic investments which mediate how readers internalize cultural knowledge. The thesis looks at three soundings from social discourse--Janice Radway's Reading the Romance; The Singing Detective, a contemporary metafictional text; and the literature and group therapy practices associated with the codependency movement--in order to examine how presuppositions about emotion and the psychical reality of fantasy appear in cultural representations of the 'ill self as reader' while being fundamental to psychological notions of the self upon which healing practices themselves depend for their efficacy.

The purpose of this thesis is to explore the following research question: How does immersion occur in a virtual game environment? Specifically, this study will focus on the Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game (MMORPG) World of Warcraft. Approaching the question using a grounded theory methodology, the study finds that immersion takes place in two primary areas: Environmental and Social. Environmental immersion concerns technical aspects of the game including aesthetic detail, sensory stimulation, and narratives. Social immersion evolves as a paradigmatic opposition of cooperation and intimidation. Players are not fully immersed in the world until they have accepted cooperation as their dominant paradigm for play. / Department of Telecommunications

Denna uppsats analyserar hur genus gestaltas i fantasyserien Game of Thrones. Analysen är baserad på två kvinnliga gestalters skildringar i den första säsongen av teveserien. De två valda karaktärerna, Daenerys Targaryen och Arya Stark, analyseras och jämförs med Yvonne Hirdmans genuskontraktsteori och Paulina de los Reyes och Nina Lykkes intersektionalitets begrepp men även med Maria Nikolajevas schema om hur manligt och kvinnligt gestaltas i litterära texter. Resultatet visar att det förekommer en genuskontraktspakt i karaktärsskildringarna men också att maktpositionerna mellan manliga och kvinnliga karaktärerna beror på andra intersektionella kategorier än enbart kön. Undersökningens resultat tyder även på att Daenerys och Aryas karaktärer bryter mot de stereotypa skildringarna i Nikolajevas schema. Orsaken kan vara att genuskontraktet finns djupt inpräntat i våra samhällsnormer om hur manligt och kvinnligt bör vara. Mannen förväntas vara den starka och beskyddande medan kvinnan förväntas vara den svaga och omhändertagna. En annan anledning till att stereotyperna är svåra att bryta kan vara författarnas rädsla att läsarna inte kommer att kunna identifiera sig med karaktärerna.

Terry Pratchett, author of the best-selling Discworld series, and winner of multiple literary awards, writes satirical fantasy for adults and children. The academic community has been slow to accept Pratchett's work as worthy of notice. Factors that contribute to this reticence include writing fantasy, writing for children, a high volume of work, and popularity in general society. This thesis will provide a comparison between Pratchett's work and that of Evelyn Waugh by focusing on their academic satire, shedding new light on Pratchett's work from a literary perspective, thus lending greater value to his Discworld series as a collection of novels with measurable literary value to the academic community.

Following the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, Afghan women suddenly gained high visibility all over the world. Since then, representations of Afghan women in the Western media and notably in the U.S. news media provide a critical concern to scholars. Much of the relevant literature on this topic speaks to the fact that the dominant portrayal of Afghan women in the Western media has shown them as passive victims of war and violence, to be liberated only by the Western military intervention. However, the question remains as to how the popular fictional narratives, as another vivid source of information, represent Afghan women to the Western readers. To address this question, A Thousand Splendid Suns, as a popular novel authored by Khalid Hosseini, an Afghan novelist, was selected. Bormannian fantasy theme analysis of this novel conveys the passivity of women in the context of Afghanistan. The findings reveal that the portrayals of Afghan women in the novel correspond with the images of Afghan women in the Western media. Moreover, an examination of a sample of book reviews of the novel unveils the important contribution of Khalid Hosseini to the Orientalist discourse.

In this essay, I make a queer feminist analysis of Mats Strandberg’s and Sara Bergmark Elfgren’s teenage novel ”Cirkeln”, which is about six teenage girls who learn that they are witches with a mission to save the world from demons. Using Judith Butler's theories, I examine the norms of sex/gender, ethnicity, class and sexuality found in the text and how these standards are created. I also analyze whether, and if so how, these standards may change when the magical elements enter the text. I also discuss the fact that older Gothic novels with magical elements often have been regarded as queer through history.