The present dissertation investigates the use of the fantastic and its functions in contemporary prose, the initial hypothesis being that the fantastic is not historically exhausted, but continues to be productive. The major part of this study consists of a close reading of four novels printed between 1995 and 2001: Marie Hermanson’s Värddjuret (1995), Majgull Axelsson’s Aprilhäxan (1997), Karen Duve’s Regenroman (1999) and Elfriede Kern’s Schwarze Lämmer (2001). Tzvetan Todorov’s definition of the fantastic as structural ambiguity is fundamental to the dissertation. In order not to bind the definition to a normative concept of genre, the fantastic is in this study considered as a narrative strategy. The dissertation’s analyses demonstrate that in these contemporary novels there is considerable variation of narrative devices, as well as of intertextual motifs deriving from the ‘archive’ provided by the tradition of the fantastic. The fantastic is to a great extent intertextual, but does not merely function as a “signal of fiction” in a postmodern game where ambiguity is no longer relevant. Instead, the narrated world in these novels is characterized by a deeply-rooted ambivalence, heterogeneity and instability. Both attractive and dangerous, the fantastic corresponds to a meeting with “the other” and the unknown, while dampening the conflict between the supernatural and the natural so clearly seen in Todorov. What is central is not the crisis of perception undergone by the novel’s characters as they choose between two opposing views of reality, but their mental state of mind. These characters are in a condition of “betwixt and between”, which in all four novels is linked to the theme of the artist. Via the fantastic, Regenroman initiates a confrontation with male myths of the artist and images of women. Schwarze Lämmer also engages the romantic fantastic tradition and investigates the link between adolescent delusions of grandeur and artistic creativity. Värddjuret, on the other hand, depicts the genesis of a female artist, while Aprilhäxan presents the female artist’s monstrous image of herself and fantasies of omnipotence. An additional function of the fantastic in these four novels is to thematize a concept of reality that is based, not on the contrast between the natural and the supernatural, but on the possibility of several different realities.

An often discussed issue in the field of second language learning is the influence and importance of individual differences, IDs, such as motivation, personality, previous learning experiences and learning strategies. It has been claimed that IDs form a complex system in the learner, but little consensus has been reached as regards definitions of constructs or their relative importance. Taking the individual learner as a starting-point, this dissertation attempts to demonstrate the complexity of individual differences in the single learner by adopting an in-depth holistic approach. For this purpose a longitudinal case study was designed to follow the learning process of a young Greek woman's acquisition of Swedish during a ten-month intensive course in Sweden. The study is mainly based on self-report and personal diaries, which have been interpreted and analysed qualitatively. The learning process is extensively described and changes in, for example, strategy use, life situation and learning progress are illustrated. There are indeed many complex factors which have the potential to influence learning. In this particular case, seven factors are indicated as having had a positive influence: previous language learning experiences (especially as regards learning strategies), long-term motivation, metalinguistic awareness, social contacts with L2 speakers, access to English as a mediating language, access to a strict and intensive Swedish course, and a well-needed learning break in the middle of the studies. Negative factors were largely of an emotional nature, especially a period of liminality which created feelings of not belonging, of being betwixt and between. It is suggested that IDs form a dynamic variable system in the learner. All the IDs are present in the learner, but they seem to change both in substance over time and in importance for the learner at different times in the learning process. Furthermore, IDs appear to be interconnected in a complex and dynamic way. The results of this study strongly emphasise the importance of both an holistic and a longitudinal approach to IDs in second language learning. / digitalisering@umu

This dissertation presents an ethnography of youth in Liberia and of how their lives became affected by a civil war which raged in the country between 1990 and 1997. The focus is on the experiences, motivations, and reflections of young combatants who fought for a variety of rebel factions. For these young people, the daily prospect of poverty, joblessness and marginalisation effectively blocked the paths to a normal adulthood; drawing them instead into a subculture of liminality, characterised by abjection, resentment and rootlessness. As opportunity came, their voluntary enlistment into one of the several rebel armies of the civil war therefore became an attractive option for many. Based upon one year of fieldwork during 1998, conducted among groups of ex-combatant youths in both the capital Monrovia and in a provincial town in the rural hinterland, I describe and analyse the young people’s own accounts of their involvement in the civil war; their complicity in atrocities, their coping strategies in the context of armed conflict, their position as ex-combatants in a post-war environment, and their outlook on their past, present and future. In the first chapter I set the scene of the Liberian civil war and discuss the central concepts on which my dissertation is built. Chapter two then takes up the methodological issues relating to the particular fieldwork conditions found. This is done by providing an account of my participant observation within a volatile community of ex-combatants in Monrovia. Chapter three deals with the nature of pre-civil war Liberian political and military organisational structures and their rootedness in pre-state institutions such as local warlordism and secret societies. In chapter four I look at the cultural setting of my fieldwork and track elements found within the legacy of violence, to oral literature and patterns of socialisation. Chapter five focuses specifically on the role and predicament of young women in the civil war. Whilst some became active fighters, most participated as auxiliaries in various capacities. Their accounts convey not only the tremendous hardship and suffering, but also reveal mechanisms which helped at least some to survive. In chapter six I discuss the question of a post-war reintegration of ex-combatants into peacetime society and show that the prospects of different groups depend primarily on their social and geographical situation, rather than on the negligible effectiveness of aid programmes routinely executed by international organisations and NGOs.

This essay is an investigation of transnational author Joseph Conrad’s engagement with issues of cultural liminality during the years around the turn of the 20th century. Through an examination of Almayer from Almayer’s Folly, Yanko of “Amy Foster”, and Cornelius from Lord Jim, the common experience of cultural displacement is considered. Conrad placed these three culturally liminal characters in various, carefully constructed social environments. Thus far, these characters have been under investigated in the critical literature, particularly the mixed-culture Almayer and Cornelius. By investigating these three characters and their environments, this essay demonstrates how Conrad depicts cultural displacement in the age of nationalism to be increasingly multifaceted but inevitably disastrous. The essay further reveals the need for more careful critical assessments of the cultural nuances of Conrad’s characters.

Research Doctorate - Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / The genre of travel writing is widely recognised as providing useful insights into the ways that discourse is used to frame the interplay between self, place and Other. Recently, it has been suggested that these writings inform the development of global citizenry literacy because, as cultural texts, they recount an engagement in, and with, cosmopolitanism while informing readerships about the foreign. However, it is important to remember that these writings appear in context and the authors of such texts craft discourse to construct sociocultural imaginings of the self and Other – of a journey told from a particular viewpoint, in a particular time, to a particular audience. Through an analysis of the travel writings of four Western women who travelled to Iran in a particular historical moment – after the Islamic Revolution of 1979 and until Iran was positioned as part of the ‘Axis of Evil’ in 2002 – this thesis examines the ways in which these authors script their gaze through discourse. The author/narrator is an aesthetic cosmopolitan figure, who casts her gaze from a particular ‘viewing platform’ informed by Western discourse and accumulated cultural capital. Attention is paid in this thesis to the ways in which these writers discursively frame their narratives according to the ‘I’ of the gendered experiencing self who focuses the ‘eye’ (or gaze) through a lens oriented by their cosmopolitical imagination or worldview. Notions of authenticity, fear, danger and threat appeared as recurring themes in each of the selected texts and operate to construct place as political, self as heroic and the journey as quest. The authors engaged aesthetic dimensions of time and space to position the liminal in their narratives and, in so doing mobilised discourses of gender and power. Notions of the liminal were employed to describe Iran����s physical and social scapes to position discursive spaces in the texts that were used to affirm traveller identity, build cultural capital and, in the process, make political comments. The texts revealed that while the authors commonly used metaphor and trope drawn from inherited Western discourses such as Orientalism, postcolonialism and imperialism to provide authority, they also drew from the currently circulating discourses of gender equity, human rights and liberal democracy; all of which foreground notions of freedom. However, these currently circulating discourses, when combined with dimensions of heroism, were found to work in the tradition of inherited Western discourse – to authorise the narrator voice and legitimise the ways that self and Other are constructed. The central argument this thesis makes is that Western travel writing is restricted in its contribution to global literacy because these texts reveal more about Western ways of seeing the world and about the author as cosmopolitan than they do about the foreign.

Research Doctorate - Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / The genre of travel writing is widely recognised as providing useful insights into the ways that discourse is used to frame the interplay between self, place and Other. Recently, it has been suggested that these writings inform the development of global citizenry literacy because, as cultural texts, they recount an engagement in, and with, cosmopolitanism while informing readerships about the foreign. However, it is important to remember that these writings appear in context and the authors of such texts craft discourse to construct sociocultural imaginings of the self and Other – of a journey told from a particular viewpoint, in a particular time, to a particular audience. Through an analysis of the travel writings of four Western women who travelled to Iran in a particular historical moment – after the Islamic Revolution of 1979 and until Iran was positioned as part of the ‘Axis of Evil’ in 2002 – this thesis examines the ways in which these authors script their gaze through discourse. The author/narrator is an aesthetic cosmopolitan figure, who casts her gaze from a particular ‘viewing platform’ informed by Western discourse and accumulated cultural capital. Attention is paid in this thesis to the ways in which these writers discursively frame their narratives according to the ‘I’ of the gendered experiencing self who focuses the ‘eye’ (or gaze) through a lens oriented by their cosmopolitical imagination or worldview. Notions of authenticity, fear, danger and threat appeared as recurring themes in each of the selected texts and operate to construct place as political, self as heroic and the journey as quest. The authors engaged aesthetic dimensions of time and space to position the liminal in their narratives and, in so doing mobilised discourses of gender and power. Notions of the liminal were employed to describe Iran����s physical and social scapes to position discursive spaces in the texts that were used to affirm traveller identity, build cultural capital and, in the process, make political comments. The texts revealed that while the authors commonly used metaphor and trope drawn from inherited Western discourses such as Orientalism, postcolonialism and imperialism to provide authority, they also drew from the currently circulating discourses of gender equity, human rights and liberal democracy; all of which foreground notions of freedom. However, these currently circulating discourses, when combined with dimensions of heroism, were found to work in the tradition of inherited Western discourse – to authorise the narrator voice and legitimise the ways that self and Other are constructed. The central argument this thesis makes is that Western travel writing is restricted in its contribution to global literacy because these texts reveal more about Western ways of seeing the world and about the author as cosmopolitan than they do about the foreign.

By setting the writings of Etel Adnan, Annie Dillard, Marilynne Robinson and Rebecca Solnit into dialogue with those of the New England Transcendentalists, this thesis proposes a New Transcendentalism that both reinvigorates and reimagines Transcendentalist thought for our increasingly intersectional and deterritorialized contemporary context. Drawing on key re-readings by Stanley Cavell, George Kateb and Branka Arsić, the project contributes towards the twenty-first-century shift in Transcendentalist scholarship which seeks to challenge the popular image of New England Transcendentalism as uncompromisingly individualist, abstract and ultimately the preserve of white male privilege. Moreover, in its identification and examination of an interrelated poetics and politics of liminality across these old and new Transcendentalist writings, the project also extends the scope of a more recent strain of Transcendentalist scholarship which emphasises the dialogical underpinnings of the nineteenth-century movement. The project comprises three central chapters, each of which situates New Transcendentalism within a series of vertical and lateral dialogues. The trajectory of my chapters follows the logic of Emerson s ever-widening circles , in that each takes a wider critical lens through which to explore the dialogical relationship between my four writers and the New England Transcendentalists. In Chapter 1 the focus is upon anthropological theories of liminality; in Chapter 2 upon feminist interventions within psychoanalysis; and in Chapter 3 upon the revisionary work of Post-West criticism. In keeping with the dialogical analogies that inform this project throughout, the relationship examined within this thesis between Adnan, Dillard, Robinson and Solnit and the nineteenth-century Transcendentalists is understood as itself reciprocal, in that it not only demonstrates how my four contemporary writers may be read productively in the light of their New England forebears, but also how those readings in turn invite us to reconsider our understanding of those earlier thinkers.

Cette thèse étudie les réseaux et des pratiques de banquiers soviétiques à la tête de banques commerciales appartenant à l'URSS établies sur les places financières en Occident à l'époque de la guerre froide à partir de 1971. Membres de l'élite de la Banque du commerce extérieur de l'URSS et de la Banque d'Etat, ils dirigeaient les filiales à Paris, Londres, Singapour, Zurich et Beyrouth parmi d'autres... Située à la croisée de la sociohistoire financière et de la sociologie des élites et des professions, cette investigation puise dans les archives des banques soviétiques et les récits de vie pour comprendre l'identité professionnelle et sociale particulière de ces banquiers. Malgré l'adoption de sociabilités caractéristiques des élites bancaires transnationales, ils entretiennent un rapport d'allégeance fort quoique ambiguë avec Moscou, centré sur leur rôle de défenseurs des intérêts financiers soviétiques dans la finance mondialisée. L'analyse de leur identité comme "liminale" au sens anthropologique permet de comprendre pourquoi une prosopographie de 140 carrières post-sovétiques les place parmi les managers technocratiques et non les propriétaires de nouvelles banques russes. Le concept de "financial statecraft" exercée au nom de la "sécurité économique" sert de grille de lecture pour expliquer ces trajectoires et propose une clef d'analyse pour comprendre la finance russe internationale contemporaine. / This thesis looks at the networks and careers of Soviet capitalist bankers to analyze how global finance interacted with Cold War- and Russian financial history. Part of the elite of the Bank of Foreign Trade of the USSR and of the Soviet State bank, these bankers managed Soviet-owned commercial banks in the West in Paris, London, Singapore, Zurich and Beirut among other financial hubs. Competing with top western financial institutions, they practiced capitalist finance decades before perestroika reforms. At the crossroads of financial socio-history and the sociology of elites and occupations, this investigation draws on the archives of Soviet banks and life stories to understand the particular professional and social identity of these bankers. Despite the adoption of many sociablities characteristic of transnational banking elites, they maintained a strong but ambiguous allegiance to Moscow, centered on their role as defenders of Soviet financial interests on global markets. The anthropological concept of liminality explains why a prosopography of 140 post-Soviet careers shows that they became technocratic managers rather than owners of new Russian banks. The concept of "financial statecraft" in the name of "economic security" serves as a reading grid to explain these trajectories and offers a key to understanding contemporary Russian international finance.

Made available in DSpace on 2016-08-17T18:02:00Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Ana Tereza Ferreira Rocha.pdf: 2445196 bytes, checksum: ef316b6c57091b8c5eaa37291a1dbed1 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2007-02-28 / The present dissetation is fruit of research carried through in the city of Alcântara, more necessarily in agrovila Peptal and deals with the obligatory transformation of a campesinato of use joint in parceling out, from the implantation of the Center of Launching of Alcântara. Such transformation generated a economic disaggregation of segments peasants who occupied ancestrally its old lands, sharing values paved in ethnic principles. Taking as reference the information gotten by means of practical interviews and comment of the social ones of the studied group, apprehended by means of etnography research, the work aims at to analyze, in this context, the events that had compulsively marked the life of the families transferred to agrovila Peptal as well as its constitution as preliminary citizens throughout more than two decades of existence of the Center of Launching of Alcântara. / A presente dissertação é fruto de pesquisa realizada no município de Alcântara, mais precisamente na agrovila Peptal e trata da transformação compulsória de um campesinato de uso comum em parcelar, a partir da implantação do Centro de Lançamento de Alcântara. Tal transformação gerou uma desagregação econômica de segmentos camponeses que ocupavam ancestralmente suas antigas terras, compartilhando valores calcados em princípios étnicos. Tomando como referência as informações obtidas por meio de entrevistas e observação das práticas sociais do grupo estudado, apreendidas por meio de pesquisa etnográfica, o trabalho visa analisar, nesse contexto, os eventos que marcaram a vida das famílias transferidas compulsoriamente para a agrovila Peptal bem como a sua constituição como sujeitos liminares ao longo de mais de duas décadas de existência do Centro de Lançamento de Alcântara.

En 2666, novela póstuma del escritor chileno Roberto Bolaño, asistimos a la representación del mal y la violencia a través de un discurso narrativo que se caracteriza por la fragmentación, la liminariedad y la hipertextualidad.  El objetivo de nuestro trabajo es estudiar el uso de la anamorfosis como procedimiento deformatorio que oculta claves de la novela, y el carácter oblicuo de la violencia narrativa.  Para ello adoptamos como metodología de análisis la hermenéutica analógica del filósofo mexicano Mauricio Beuchot, ya que nos brinda un modelo que nos permite estudiar cómo opera el procedimiento de la anamorfosis en la representación de la violencia narrativa, develando las relaciones analógica intratextuales e hipertextuales, y así la dimensión simbólico-icónica de la novela.  También nos hacemos cargo de los conceptos de liminariedad del antropólogo británico Victor Turner y de ritos de paso del etnólogo y antropólogo francés Arnold van Gennep, y del concepto de hipertextualidad del narratólogo francés Gérard Genette.