<p>This dissertation defends the <i>microrrelato</i>, an extremely brief work of narrative fiction, as the “fourth narrative genre,” as informed by research in embodied cognitive science, often referred to as the field of “neurohumanities.” The hallmark brevity of the <i>microrrelato </i>means that the literary perception of the text—and the creation of an imagined story world—is highly influenceable by its context, though the traditional literary criticism often published regarding the <i>microrrelato </i>does not seem to defend its distinction. I offer a reexamination of the <i>microrrelato </i>by defining it using a radial-structure conceptualization as informed by research from cognitive science on prototypes to inform a more comprehensive approach to defining the <i>microrrelato </i>and its relationship to other narrative, fictional, and literary forms. By looking at the prototypical conceptualization of the <i>microrrelato </i>through the lens of the neurohumanities, its distinction as its own category of narrative prose becomes clearer. Whereas the vast majority of research in the neurohumanities uses larger works of literature as summative case studies, very little has yet been applied to such short, “sudden” pieces of narrative fiction. It is through this examination that I demonstrate that fictional texts do not need to be extensive in order to afford the realization of cognitive processes in readers that construct imagined story worlds or afford them enriched narrative experience. The brevity or “suddenness” of the <i>microrrelato </i>is precisely what affords the reader the opportunity to do so. Furthermore, by applying empirical research from the field of neurohumanities, including data that I have collected, to the <i>microrrelato</i>, this dissertation also provides insight into the nature of fiction and the act of reading itself. </p>

This study investigated the approximations of disciplinary literacy in high school English Language Arts students’ writing. To study the development of these disciplinary conventions, the portfolios of written literary analyses were examined from fourteen twelfth-grade students over their last two years in high school. The conceptual framework for analysis of data was informed by a developmental approach. Intermediate forms, approximations, or incremental moves students made as they progressed toward the more expert or conventional forms of literary discourse were identified. Analysis focused on macro-characteristics of literary analysis, adapted from the literature on literary studies, rhetoric and composition, and systemic functional linguistics, including Appreciation, Interpretation, Textual Evidence, Warrant, and Response to Literature Genres. Analysis included a cross-case descriptive analysis of macro-characteristic scores on a rubric designed for the study and a cross-case analysis of literary discourse approximations as seen in students’ writing portfolios. Analysis of scores on midterms and finals found that students’ scores increased from Year 1 to Year 2, with Appreciation scores increasing the most. Analysis of literary discourse approximations resulted in several findings: 1) Development in Interpretation was characterized by increasing accuracy of comprehension, logical consistency, and depth of interpretative meaning; 2) Development in Appreciation was characterized by a growing awareness of the role of the author in a literary text; and 3) Response to Literature Genres demonstrated a range of genres, including Character Analysis, Thematic Interpretation, Thematic Analysis, Critical Response, and alternative or hybrid genres. Thematic Analysis is a proposed new genre that differed from the Thematic Interpretation on the elements of subject, audience, and purpose. Additional analysis of student writing portfolios found a growing awareness in many students of the values and beliefs of the academic literary community, or habits of mind of literary disciplinary literacy, including 1) Increased level of familiarity with the audience’s common knowledge in the field, as demonstrated in use of definitions; 2) Understanding of the value of multiple interpretations of literature, as demonstrated in use of graduation resources, such as epistemic hedges or epistemic boosters; and 3) Ability to engage with multiple voices, as demonstrated in instances of intertextuality.

Thesis advisor: Maia McAleavey / My dissertation explores how nineteenth-century novelists imagined rational thinking as a cognitive resource distributed through physical, social, national, and even imperial channels. Scholars studying nineteenth-century discourses of mind frequently position rational thinking as the normalized given against those unconscious and irrational modes of thought most indicative of the period's scientific discoveries. My project argues, in contrast, that writers were just as invested in exploring rational thinking as multivalent procedure, a versatile category of mental activity that could be layered into novelistic representations of thinking by "thinking with games": that is, incorporating forms of thinking as discussed by popular print media. By reading novels alongside historical gaming practices and gaming literatures and incorporating the insights of twenty-first century cognitive theory, I demonstrate that novelists Maria Edgeworth, Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, George Eliot, and Rudyard Kipling experimented with models of gaming to make rational thinking less abstract and reveal its action across bodies, objects, and communities. If Victorian mind-sciences uncovered "thinking fast," games prioritized "thinking slow," a distinction described by psychologist Daniel Kahneman in his recent book, Thinking, Fast and Slow (2013). Scenes of games often slow thinking down, allowing the author to expose the complex processes of rational, cognitive performance. Furthermore, such scenes register the expanded perspective of recent cognitive literary studies such as those by Alan Palmer and Lisa Zunshine, which understand thinking, at least in part, as externalized and social. In effect, by reading scenes of thinking along the lines proposed by strategic gaming, I demonstrate how novels imagined social possibilities for internal processing that extend beyond the bounds of any individual's consciousness. Of course, games easily serve as literary tropes or metaphors; but analyzing scenes of gaming alongside games literature underscores how authors incorporated frameworks of teachable, social thinking from gaming into their representations of rational consciousness. For strategy games literature, better play required learning how to read the minds of other players, how to turn their thinking inside out. The nineteenth-century novel's relationship to games is best understood, I suggest, within the landscape of popular games literature published at its side - sometimes literally. An article on "Whistology" appears just after an installment of The Woman in White in Dickens's All the Year Round; the Cornhill Magazine published a paean to "Chess" amid the serialization of George Eliot's Romola. As a genre, strategy manuals developed new techniques for exercising the cognitive abilities of their readers and, often along parallel lines, so do the novels I discuss. Prompting the reader to think like a game player often involved recreating the kinds of dynamic, active thinking taught by games literature through the novel's form. My dissertation explores how authors used such forms to train their readers in habits of memory, deduction, and foresight encouraged by strategy gaming. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2017. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: English.

A review of contemporary South African and European critical approaches 'to "Soweto poetry" is undertaken to evaluate their efficacy in addressing the diverse and complex dynamics evident in the poetry. A wide selection of poetry from the 1970's and early 1980's is used to argue that none of the critical models provide an adequate methodology free from both pseudo-cultural or ideological assumptions, and "reader-grid"(imposition of external categories upon the poems).From this point of entry, three groups of critics with similar approaches are assessed in relation to Soweto poetry. The second chapter illustrates the deficiency in critical method- ology of the first group of critics, who rely on a politicizing approach. Their critique presupposes a coherent shift in the nature of Black Consciousness poetry in the 1970's, which is shown to be vague and problematic, especially when they attempt to categorize Soweto poetry into "consistently thematic" divisions. In the third chapter, it is argued that ideological approaches to Soweto poetry are impressionistic assessments that depend heavily on the subordination of aesthetic determinants to materialistic concerns. The critics in this second group draw a dubious distinction between bourgeois and "worker poetry" and ignore the inter- play between the two styles. Pluralized mergings within other epistemological spectrums are also ignored, showing an obsessive materialist bias. The fourth chapter examines the linguistic approach of the third group of critics. It is argued that they evaluate the poetry in terms of a defined critical terminology which assumes an established set of evaluative criteria exist. This is seen to be empiricist and deficient in wider social concerns. In the final chapter, it is submitted that each of the critical approaches examined foregrounds its own methodology, often ignoring the cohabitation of different systems of thought. In conclusion it is argued that a critical approach can only aspire to the formulation of a "black aesthetic" if it traces the mosaic of cultural borrowings, detours and connections that permeate Soweto poetry. Michel Serres, with his post-deconstructionist "approach", is presented as the closest aspirant. Bibliography: pages 117-123.

Barnafödande är ett komplicerat och mångfacetterat ämne. Att föda är både en högst privat, intim upplevelse och en kulturell och politiskt kodad händelse. Hur ett samhälle behandlar sin födande befolkning beror på politik, normer och ideal som sträcker sig längre än den födande individen. En förlossningsberättelse är unik då den existerar i tvärsnittet mellan det privata och det publika, vilket gör den ett intressant ämne för litterära studier. Denna masteruppsats är en undersökning av förlossningsskildringar i samtida svensk skönlitteratur. Materialet för uppsatsen är tre svenska romaner som alla publicerades år 2021 – Bära Frukt av Emilia Millares, Vård, skola och omsorg av Linn Spross och Den stora kyrkan av Tove Folkesson. Analysen utgår från tre centrala teman; hur kroppen och det kroppsliga gestaltas under förlossningsscenerna, hur sjukhuspersonalen porträtteras och om, och hur, barnafödande sammankopplas med uppfattningar om kvinnlighet. För att utföra studien vänder jag mig till Tess Cossletts Women Writing Childbirth: Modern discourses of Womanhood (1994) som huvudteori. Jag tar även stöd i Yi–Lin Yus Mother, She Wrote (2005) och Emily Martins The Woman in The Body: a cultural analysis of reproduction (1987). Det teoretiska ramverket ger insikt i de framträdande diskurser som omger förlossningar och moderskap, samt hur dessa kan gestaltas inom skönlitteraturen.  Analysen är uppdelad i tre kapitel, där varje roman analyseras separat. Varje analysdel är i sin tur uppdelad i tre delar, där varje sektion motsvarar ett av de tre temana kroppen, kvinnlighet och gestaltningar av vårdpersonal. Analysens resultat kan summeras med att kroppen porträtteras som att vara både en källa till kraft för den födande kvinnan, och som en separat enhet som agerar självmant utan att hon kan kontrollera den. Kroppen och dess reproduktiva funktioner beskrivs ofta med naturbildspråk och paralleller dras till barnafödande som en primitiv kraft, inneboende i kvinnan.  Detta förhöjs ytterligare genom att rollfigurerna söker matrilinjära kontakter, framför allt genom att återknyta till sina mormödrar. Vårdpersonalen porträtteras både som änglar som hjälper och guidar den födande kvinnan med sin expertis, samt som ett osympatiskt, opersonligt ”dem” som behandlar kvinnan mer som en bebisproducerande maskin än en person. Ingen av romanerna kan sägas ansluta sig till en specifik bild av förlossningar, i stället reproducerar och kritiserar de samtliga dominerande diskurser som medföljer graviditeter och barnafödande. / Childbirth is a complicated and multifaceted phenomenon. Giving birth is a both highly private, intimate experience and a culturally and politically coded event. How a society treats its birthing population is dependent on politics, norms and ideals that stretches beyond the individual woman giving birth. A birth story is unique in that it exists in the cross section between private and public, which makes the literary depiction of childbirth an interesting focus for literary study. This master’s thesis is an examination of depictions of birth in contemporary Swedish fiction through analysis of three novels, all published in 2021 – Bära Frukt (Bear Fruit) by Emilia Millares, Vård, skola och omsorg (Care, education and nurturing) by Linn Spross and Den stora kyrkan (The grand church) by Tove Folkesson. The analysis focuses on three main themes; how the body is depicted throughout the birthing scenes, how hospital staff is portrayed and, if, and how, the experience of birth is linked to ideals surrounding womanhood. To conduct the study I turn to Tess Cosslett’s Women Writing Childbirth: Modern discourses of Womanhood (1994) as the main theoretical foundation, as well as Yi–Lin Yu’s Mother, She Wrote (2005) and Emily Martin’s The Woman in The Body: a cultural analysis of reproduction (1987). The theoretical framework provides insight into what the dominant discourses surrounding childbirth and motherhood are, and how these can manifest in literature. Within the study the novels are examined separately, with each analysis being sectioned into three parts, corresponding to the three main themes body, womanhood, and portrayal of hospital staff. In summary, the study concludes that the body is portrayed as both a source for control for the birthing woman, as well as acting on its own accord without her being able to regulate its actions. The body and its reproductive functions are often depicted using nature imagery and parallels are drawn to childbirth being a primitive, ancient force inherent to womankind. This is highlighted by the characters continuously seeking matrilinear connections, mainly by asserting their link to their grandmothers. The hospital staff is portrayed both as angels helping and guiding the birthing woman through labor, as well as an unsympathetic, impersonal “they” who treats the woman more as a baby-producing machine rather than a person. None of the novels can be seen as promoting one singular view of childbirth – instead, the novels can be seen as reproducing and critiquing the dominant discourses surrounding pregnancy and childbirth.

This thesis explores the role of Euromerican maritime tattoos in Herman Melville’s early sea fiction. Through layers of historic and scholarly obfuscation, Euromerican maritime tattoos have been delimited to a marginal role in the cosmopolitan shipboard culture of 19th-century Pacific whaling and trade networks. This project extracts and contextualizes that cultural practice as formative in the creation of sailors’ hybrid embodied identities. With this intervention in mind, Euromerican maritime tattooing emerges as a small but important feature in Melville’s first six books. Probing issues such as race, class, slavery, and colonialism, this project deploys an intimate reading practice, which seeks to engage Melville from within the text. Tattoos serve as a symbol by which he grapples with larger social formations. Through prolonged engagement with marked bodies, Melville unfurls a cast of characters who demonstrate how identity is shaped by the various domineering axes of modernization. He also reveals how a series of interconnected and somewhat autobiographical first-person narrators strive to find embodied alternatives to the violent forms of exploitation alive in the colonial Pacific and interconnected 19th-century global shipping networks. Ultimately, this project seeks to think, feel, and read alongside Melville to gain insight into how he made sense of the world. Through the lens of tattoos in his early sea fiction, Melville reveals the power of interrelation, the human potential to defy subjugation, and charts a path toward new social embodiments. Disclaimer: The views expressed in this thesis are those of the author and do not reflect the official policy or position of the United States Air Force, United States Space Force, Department of Defense, or the U.S. Government.

This thesis analyzes groundbreaking experimental texts by Asian American writers that employ genre-bending formal innovations to resist the uneasy containment of social hierarchies and aesthetic categories. After a brief discussion of Monica Youn’s 2019 poem, “Study of Two Figures (Pasiphaë/Sado),” I trace such experimentation back to the late twentieth century, focusing on two other texts that explore similar strategies of literary experimentation and that present themselves as novels but, as Youn does with poetry, resist that classification at the same time. The experimental expansions of form in both Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee (1982) and Pamela Lu’s Pamela: A Novel (1998) defy categorization and the containments of genre. Further, the formal resistances of both texts repudiate social categorizations on the basis of ethnic, racial, and gender containment. The hybrid forms of Dictee and Pamela: A Novel act as corollaries for resistance to the racial and gender markers constructed by society to contain Asian American identities.

A dissertação propõe uma leitura crítica do romance Albedrío, do mexicano Daniel Sada (1953-2011). O trabalho se inicia com uma apresentação sobre a literatura do Norte do México, para discutir as especificidades do autor, seu afastamento do realismo tradicional e o tom de fábula que se perfila em suas obras. Uma categoria forte na leitura é a do estilo, a partir de autores como Antoine Compagnon, Susan Sontag e Roger Fowler, a fim de amparar uma análise sobre a construção formal, mas sem se limitar a ela. São avaliados também antecedentes da obra, seja na cultura popular, como os poemas romances e os corridos, seja no diálogo com outros escritores latino-americanos, como Juan Rulfo e Guimarães Rosa. Além de aspectos formais, como a pontuação, a escolha lexical, os pontos de vista e aspectos da instância narrativa, é importante a revisão da questão espacial, o que leva a indagações sobre o nomadismo e a importância de certos motivos específicos recorrentes ao longo da narrativa. / This thesis proposes a critical reading of Daniel Sadas novel Albedrío. It initiates with a presentation of North Mexican literature, in order to discuss some of the authors particularities, his distance from traditional Realism and the fable tone that pulses throughout his work. A strong category is the notion of Style, discussed in the perspective of authors such as Antoine Compagnon, Susan Sontag and Roger Fowler, to support a formal study of its construction, although not limited to it. The background of the novel is also our subject here, both upon popular culture (as in the romance poems and the corridos), and dialogues with other Latin American writers, such as Juan Rulfo and Guimarães Rosa. Besides formal aspects like punctuation, lexical choices, points of view and the narrators characteristics, the spatial component is also examined, leading us to subjects like nomadism and specific structural motives that can be found along the novel.

Der Sammelband umfasst die Beiträge des 10. Arbeitstreffens slavistischer Nachwuchswissenschaftler im Rahmen des Jungen Forums Slavistischer Literaturwissenschaft (JFSL), das vom 26. bis zum 28. März 2010 an der Universität Trier stattfand. Präsentiert wird ein Überblick über aktuelle Forschungsrichtungen und -themen der deutschsprachigen Slavistik, der trotz der weiter bestehenden Dominanz der Russistik eine zunehmende Tendenz zu Studien über verschiedene slavische Literaturen zeigt. Die Beiträge lassen sich in drei große Bereiche differenzieren: Der erste Teil ,Texturen' beinhaltet literaturwissenschaftliche Studien, die sich mit den textimannenten Effekten literarischer Werke auseinandersetzen. Der Text als Gewebe wird auf seine Fadendichte und -verkreuzung wie Entstehung und Tradierung bestimmter Motive und Topoi, Decodierung intertextueller Referenzen oder Allegorisierungs- und Symbolisierungprozesse hin analysiert. Der zweite Teil vereinigt unter dem Begriff ,Identitäten' Arbeiten aus dem Bereich der kulturwissenschaftlich orientierten Literaturwissenschaft, die mit Geschlechter-, Raum-, Erinnerungs- und postkolonialen Konzepten den Fragen der literarischen Identitätsgenese nachgehen. Untersucht werden ästhetische Umsetzungen von Machtdispositiven, Hierarchiebildungen und Ausschlussmechanismen. Die Beiträge des dritten Teils ,Theorien' reflektieren entweder die Literaturforschung und ihre Ästhetiktheorien oder unternehmen einen Theorieimport aus verschiedenen Disziplinen wie Philosophie, strukturalistische Psychoanalyse, Neuro-, Geschichts- oder Translationswissenschaften, die sich für die Analyse literarischer Texte als fruchtbar erweisen und damit das Literaturverständnis erweitern. / This collection covers the articles compiled in the 10th workshop of Slavonic Study PhD-Students and postgraduates within the framework of the ‘Young Forum of Slavonic Literary Studies’ (JFSL) which took place at Trier University between March 26 and March 28 2010. Participants presented an overview of the current fields of research in German language Slavonic studies, which, despite a prevalence of Russian Studies, shows a growing trend towards multi-Slavonic literature studies. The articles can be divided into three different categories: The first category, textures, comprises literary studies which expose anticipated text effects of literary works. Text is analyzed in the context of its fabric density, for instance, development of particular motives and topics, and the decoding of intertextual references or allegories and symbology. The second category, identities, aggregates works from culturally-oriented Literary studies, which follow questions of the literary genesis of identity concerning gender, space, memory and post-colonialism. Here, the aesthetic shifts of power disposition, demonstrative hierarchy and the mechanisms of exclusion are evaluated. The third category, theories, reflects literary research and its theories of the aesthetic or importation of theory from a variety of disciplines such as philosophy, structural psychoanalysis, neuroscience, history and translation studies, which show themselves as fertile literary texts for analysis and as such may extend our understandings of literature.

University of Macau / Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities / Department of Portuguese