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.

Dietary habits which seriously erode health and quality of life are widespread. Effective clinical strategies for overweight, obese and eating disordered individuals are needed. Such treatment options are usually based on constructs generated by theoretical models of causation and maintenance. Underpinning the current enquiry, the Hypno-socio-cultural model hypothesises links between the aetiology of dysfunctional eating behaviours and higher levels of hypnotic susceptibility, fantasy ability and dissociative capacity, as well as acknowledging the social genesis of the self-defeating approach to diet. Empirical evidence has supported the socio-cognitive theory of causation and remediation, on which this research is based. The literature has suggested that hypnotic, imaginative and dissociative strategies have contributed to clinical efficacy, and that aetiology and maintenance of such self-defeating eating might be linked to higher than average hypnotic susceptibility, imaginative ability and dissociative capacity. Generalization of research findings across studies is limited by the uncertainty introduced by the variety of measuring instruments utilized, and gender and age differences which have emerged. As well, possible individual preferences for specificity of hypnotic suggestions, which may affect responsivity levels, could dictate a need for reinterpretation of the results of relevant research. As an initial step in exploration of these issues, a group of University students responded to a number of assessment instruments, designed to tap self-perceptions in relation to weight, shape and size concerns, eating behaviours, and use of imaginative, dissociative and hypnotic capacities, as well as responding to hypnotic suggestions embedded in a formal assessment thereof. In this current research, expected relationships between elements of the Hypno-socio-cultural model were probably affected by a complex array of factors, which are difficult to measure using current instruments. Case studies drawn from the participants in this study have further elucidated the possible connections underlying the proposed Hypno-Socio-Cultural model, as well as highlighting the complexity of the relationships of all the factors involved. The Phenomenology of Consciousness Inventory, which was used to access the subjective experience of the individual’s responsivity to hypnotic suggestion, and which also tapped imaginative and dissociative experiences in relation to same, appears to have unique potential for further exploration of issues related to the connections highlighted in this study Findings in the current study suggested that some widely used assessments were not measuring the same constructs. Because of such factors, results which suggested links between weight, shape and eating measures, and those assessing hypnotic susceptibility, fantasy-proneness and dissociative capacity, although in the expected direction, were not as strong as was expected. In light of the anecdotal evidence of effective clinical use of imaginative, dissociative and hypnotic techniques with self-defeating eaters, the results were reassessed. It seemed feasible to interpret these results as suggesting that higher reliance on self-protective and defensive modes of using imaginative and dissociative capacities may mark the self-defeating eater. A modified Hypno-Socio-Cultural model, incorporating such a possibility, has been proposed as the basis for further study. It is recommended that such research be undertaken, employing a variety of relevant measures, with a larger group of participants of both genders with DSM-IV criterion diagnosed self-defeating eating. The importance to clincial work of investigating the proposed model as a basis for treatment remains paramount in this field of self-defeating eating.