This thesis argues for the power of story and, in particular, the story of The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien to help build optimism and hope. The Hobbit is under-used in primary schools and this thesis demonstrates that it is eminently suitable for children. Without imagination children are vulnerable to sadness and despair. The positive development of imagination through heroic tales is likely to benefit children emotionally and psychologically. The story of The Hobbit can be utilised to develop the concept of the Hero's Journey, a persistent trope in oral and recorded literature and an archetype for virtually all human experience. In addition, the thesis shows that critical thinking skills and multiple intelligences can be developed through the use of The Hobbit. Depression in young people is now recognised as a serious public health problem in Australia. Research supports the view that children need optimism. This thesis discusses statistics regarding the increased prevalence of childhood depression and aggression as well as alarming youth suicide reports. The inquiry by the Victorian Parliament into the effects of television violence on children is examined and the scholarly works of Neil Postman, inter alia, are discussed to establish the overall pattern of positive association between television violence and aggression in children. Furthermore, the contention that many contemporary realistic texts do little to promote hopefulness in the young is supported with the opinions of scholars who are respected in the field of children’s literature. Tolkien was a devout Catholic but, even more importantly, he was able to restate traditional values through his imaginative works of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. This has relevance for Catholic educators who strive to relate Gospel values to popular culture. Christian education must extend imagination beyond morality to help young people to find meaning and purpose in their lives. Through the use of The Hobbit and other books of this kind, children can begin to learn not to fear change, failure or setbacks but to see them as important challenges and opportunities for personal growth. This thesis argues for the likely value of a continuum of this type of learning that begins in early childhood, in order to provide a

This study presents an empirical, qualitative investigation of transformations as they occurred in the participants' language during a fiction reading and discussion group in a community mental health setting. Session transcripts have been analyzed from the perspective of researcher as literary critic and through the Deleuzian lens of rhizomatic assemblages (Deleuze & Guattari, 1980/2005). This nonlinear, non-hierarchical and non-referential approach re-imagins the relationship among readers, texts and authors. Three themes follow from the rhizomatic perspective on transcript data. <br>The first of these, Assemblage, details the ways that participants engage in and with fictional story-worlds. This engagement is such that text, readers, author, and other elements of context join together in chains or blocks of becoming. These becomings rely on the mimetic structure of the fictional texts that simulates 'real life' experiences for readers. This special kind of engagement leads to transformations of linguistic forms, images and concepts. <br>Transformations addressed in the next segment, De-formations, include analysis of mental health talk as it encounters the poetic story world in our sessions. One result of this encounter is the vernacularization of mental health talk. Elements of clinical, usually diagnostic, language introduced in our sessions are transformed in the direction of more colloquial and 'plain-language' use. This result suggests that fiction reading moves mental health consumers away from the problem-saturated language of mental health discourse (White & Epston, 1990) that too often reifies and reinforces illness and dis-ease rather than supporting wellness. <br>The final section, Re-narration, examines implications of transformations in participants' language for narrative identity, that is, participants' self-understanding and re-contextualization in light of their encounters with the fictional story-world (Ricoeur, 2005). It is possible to discern nascent or potential changes in narrative identity in the language of discussants and to speculate on what changes participants may carry forward into their lives beyond the reading and discussion group. <br>Finally, implications are discussed for re-understanding the therapist as literary critic and for the development of locally produced bodies of literary criticism as work appropriate to community mental health providers and clients. Also, affinities between literary therapy, bibliotherapy and narrative therapy are discussed. / McAnulty College and Graduate School of Liberal Arts / Clinical Psychology / PhD / Dissertation

This dissertation examines the representation of social memory in British historical fiction from 1810 to 1880. I argue that social memory is crucial to the analysis of historical fiction during this period because it affords us an opportunity to see how authors in the nineteenth century viewed the social dimensions of memory as constructed by communities that envision their pasts in relation to prevailing ideologies and dominant authorities. Specifically, literary representations of social memory are important in understanding how communities come together to achieve common goals or resist dominant authorities through their sense of a common past in one of the most popular genres of nineteenth-century literature, the historical novel. The significance of social memory for the study of nineteenth-century British historical novels centers in the fact that it reveals the processes by which kinship or kindred groups and other social groups can be formed and by which historical consciousness is developed and communicated among those groups within the novel and to the reader. Social memory is defined here as a shared vision of the past, its narratives, and its symbols that embodies the cultural and communal influences on an individual's and broader groups contemporary identity. Social memory can represent a positive, unifying force in an individual's lift and a community's day-to-day lived experiences, a force that can be used to achieve common purposes or resist common foes. The activation of social memory, though, offers a paradox: on the one hand, individuals are united by a powerful sense of togetherness as understood by their relationship to the past and its significance to their present, lived experience; yet, on the other hand, individuals may resist this totalizing or homogenizing sense of the past when it threatens the uniqueness of individual subjectivity, specific characteristics of group culture, or forecloses on the possibilities of social action by those on the margins. This dissertation looks at how social memory is represented in non-canonical and canonical historical novels by Sir Walter Scott, Anthony Trollope, Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, George Eliot, and Philip Meadows Taylor.

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Syfte: Syftet med denna uppsats är att undersöka om det finns skillnader i hur män och kvinnor påverkas av annonsbilder. Ser män och kvinnor i generation Y samma saker i annonsbilden, eller finns här olikheter som påverkar deras syn på annonsbilden. Metodik:  Uppsatsen är genomförd utifrån en kvalitativ forskningsansats. Det empiriska underlaget tagits fram utifrån fyra stycken semi-strukturerade intervjuer och två stycken köns-indelade fokusgrupper. Slutsats: Uppsatsens slutsatser är att respondenterna påverkades av annonsbilderna oavsett kön. Männen i studien gav oftare uttryck för känslor kring annonsbilderna som sedan kunde uttryckas i en fantasi. Kvinnorna däremot lät sin fantasi spegla deras syn och tolkning av annonsbilden som i sin tur väckte olika känslor hos dem. / Purpose: The purpose with this thesis is to examen if there are any differences between how men and women are influenced by the advertisement picture. Do men and women in generation Y see the same things in the advertisement picture, or do differences exist that influence their perception of the advertisement picture. Methodology: The research is implemented with a qualitative method. The empirical foundation is grounded in four semi-structured interviews and two gender divided group interviews.  Conclusion: The conclusions are that the advertising pictures, regardless of their gender affected the respondents. The men participating in the study expressed, more often then the women, their feelings about the advertisement picture, which led to an imagination. The women on the other hand gave expression for their imagination around and about the advertisement picture that awoke their feelings about the picture.

L'être demeure encore et toujours aujourd'hui un objet extrêmement mystérieux et polémique pour les philosophes comme pour l'individu que nous sommes. Face à la réapparition perpétuelle de cet objet sous la forme d'une interrogation fondamentale, la question est celle de savoir si nous sommes face à un problème insoluble pour la raison ou bien confrontés à un problème méthodologique qu'il convient de relever. Au-delà d'une nouvelle tentative de destruction de la Métaphysique sous toutes ses formes et dans toutes ses dimensions chez les postmodernes, nous devons tenter de réfléchir aujourd'hui sur la véritable positivité du questionnement de l'être. Allant de Kant à Bachelard nous voyons alors s'ouvrir progressivement au cours de l'histoire le chemin d'une autre pratique qui peut se définir ici comme une poïétique de soi.

If you knew my thoughts; the dreams that absorb me; and the fiery imagination that at times eats me up and makes me feel Society as it is, wretchedly insipid you would pity and I dare say despise me. (C. Brontë, 10 May 1836) Before Charlotte Brontë wrote her first novel for publication, she admitted her mixed feelings about imagination. Brontë’s letter shows that she feared both pity and condemnation. She struggled to attend to the imaginative world that brought her pleasure and to fulfill her duties in the real world so as to avoid its contempt. Brontë’s early correspondence attests to her engrossment with the Angrian world she created in childhood. She referred to this world as the “infernal world” and to imagination as “fiery,” showing the intensity and potential destructiveness of creativity. Society did not draw Brontë the way that the imagined world did, and in each of Brontë’s four mature novels, she recreated the tricky navigation between the desirable imagined world and the necessary real world. Each protagonist resolves the struggle differently, with some protagonists achieving more success in society than others. The introduction of this dissertation provides critical and biographical background on Brontë’s juxtaposition of imagination/desire and reason/duty. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s The Madwoman in the Attic supplies the basis for understanding the ways that the protagonists express imagination, and John Kucich’s Repression in Victorian Fiction defines the purposefulness of repression. The four middle chapters examine imagination’s manifestations and purposes for the protagonists. The final chapter discusses how the tension caused by the competing desires to express and repress imagination distinguishes Brontë’s style.

The study highlights teachers´ perceptions of creative writing as part of learning processes in the subject of Swedish, based on creative activities. The background to this study comes from the curriculum that describes opportunities to experience different kinds of knowledge. Creative activities in various forms and the ability to one´s own creativity is emphasized. The empirical data in this study is collected through qualitative interviews with four practicing teachers. The result shows that there are two different views according to creative writing as a text creation. The result also shows that many of the teachers have a negative attitude towards creativity. The study also shows that the teacher´s role is important for the students´ creation of texts. The literature highlights the importance of a broader language concept to students´ language development. The creation of texts is an important part of this language development and language itself invites a creative approach. / Studien belyser lärares uppfattningar om kreativt skrivande som en del av lärandeprocesser i ämnet svenska med utgångspunkt från skapande verksamhet. Bakgrunden till denna studie kommer från styrdokument som beskriver möjligheter till att få uppleva olika uttryck för kunskaper. Skapande verksamhet i olika former och förmåga till eget skapande betonas. Det empiriska materialet för studien är insamlad genom kvalitativa intervjuer från fyra verksamma lärare. Resultatet visar att det förekommer två skilda uppfattningar om kreativt skrivande som textskapande. Jag kunde även utläsa att ett flertal av lärarna ger uttryck för ett negativt förhållningssätt till kreativitet. Studien visar även att lärarens roll är viktig för elevers textskapande. Litteraturen belyser vikten av ett vidgat språkbegrepp för elevernas språkutveckling. Textskapande är en viktig del i denna språkutveckling och språket inbjuder till ett kreativt arbetssätt, vilket diskuteras i studien avslutningsvis.

In this thesis, I explored the relationship between Shakespearean tragedy and romance, specifically how each genre treated themes regarding resurrection and the imagination. In romance, I discovered that the imagination became a portal to reality--a way through which characters understood and accepted impermanence, decay, and death. I used romance to illuminate tragedy's failures, showing that in both King Lear and Othello the imagination acts as a mask against the real. I called these imaginative spaces “dream worlds”--fantastical plains in which characters chased their impossible longings for eternity and perfected romantic love. This refusal to engage with the real, I concluded, makes resurrection impossible in tragedy. I was also deeply influenced by the criticism of Harold Goddard, who tends to read Shakespearean tragedy as romance and finds resurrection in both King Lear and Othello. I engaged with his criticism by creating the dream worlds to prove that the imagination can only act as a shield against reality in tragedy.

This thesis proposes that an investigation into the phenomenon of doubling may engage architecture with a type of desire that has deep rooted connections with the complexities of human nature, with the very human condition of desiring to know who/what/where/when/how we are. It proposes that an experience of doubling is suggestive of a specific kind of affective space that tests this relationship, expanding into the interval we have formed between our body, its being and space. The proposal is to explore the material, spatial, and psychological characteristics of such a phenomenon - to understand the virtual space created through this doubling and its architectonic characteristics. The design ambition of this thesis is to construct an architectural fiction that engages with this doubling. If architecture has the capacity to embody the ambitions and anxieties of society, the work produced attempts to invoke, through choreographed doublings manifested by the movement of figure and light through constructions in time, that human condition of desire that is concerned with finding/defining itself in the unknown, not to provide an answer for what the unknown is, but to engage with its enigmatic nature. By engaging in the protean dynamics of doubling and desire, this thesis attempts to poeticize the interval between the body and its built environment.