La fiction de Steven Millhauser est caractérisée par le mouvement perpétuel : un mouvement générique du réalisme au fantastique, avec des intrigues qui résistent aux dénouements et des personnages, des lieux et des objets en transformation constante. Son œuvre nous présente exploration de la métamorphose littéraire, qui se manifeste à la fois comme style d'écriture et comme motif. Enracinée dans une conception typiquement américaine de la métamorphose, née de la philosophie Ralph Waldo Emerson, la métamorphose millhauserienne attire l'attention du lecteur sur le pouvoir transformateur de l'art et plus spécifiquement de la littérature. Utilisant la relation entre l'art et l'identité culturelle comme point de départ, notre thèse montre que la fiction de Millhauser développe la nature métamorphique de l'expérience esthétique. Au cœur de la dynamique de la métamorphose littéraire se trouve la relation entre lecteur, texte et auteur, relation transformatrice que Millhauser met en scène à plusieurs reprises, afin d'explorer les possibilités et les limites du language. Si sa fiction illustre le potentiel destructeur de la métamorphose linguistique, et manifeste aussi une certaine angoisse concernant les limites du langage, son œuvre est néanmoins dominée par un sentiment d'émerveillement et d'espoir dans la valeur régénératrice de la fiction, et son pouvoir de faire resurgir la beauté d'un monde devenu ordinaire. / Steven Millhauser's fiction is characterized by perpetual movement: a transition from realism to the fantastic, with plots which resist denouement and characters, places and objects in constant transformation. Millhauser's work offers the reader a literary metamorphosis which is both stylistic and thematic. The millhauserien metamorphosis is typically American, the offspring of Emersonian philosophy, and it highlights the transformative power of art and, specifically, of literature. Using the mutually transformative relationship between art and cultural identity as a starting point, this thesis demonstrates the ways in which Millhauser's fiction develops the metamorphic nature of the esthetic experience. The relationship between the reader, the text and the author is at the heart of literary metamorphosis, and this transformative relationship, which often appears in Millhauser's work, sets the stage for an exploration of the possibilities and limits of language. If Millhauser's fiction illustrates the destructive potential of linguistic metamorphosis, and articulates a certain anxiety concerning the limits of language, his work is nonetheless dominated by the sentiment of wonder and hope in the regenerative value of fiction and its power to reveal the unusual beauty of a world which has become ordinary.

During a research process on financial speculation in relation to the home, Carl-Oskar Linné encounters statistics and reports that tell of rising unemployment among realtors. By investigating an alleged flight from the realtor profession and asking questions of prospective, current and former realtors, he attempts to understand the relationship of home sellers to their home, the housing list, the speculation mechanism and security. What are the living conditions and how is the relationship to housing policy? This essay tells about the state of the Swedish housing market and explains what has led to the work "Speculation"/"Mäklare", a work at its core questioning market ideology. The texts also describes work methods, sources of inspiration and some earlier work. / Under en researchprocess om finansiell spekulation i förhållande till hemmet stöter Carl-Oskar Linné på statistik och rapporter som berättar om en ökande arbetslöshet bland fastighetsmäklare. Genom att undersöka en påstådd flykt från mäklaryrket och ställa frågor till blivande, nuvarande och före detta fastighetsmäklare försöker han förstå bostadssäljarens förhållande sitt hem, bostadskön, spekulationsmekanismen och tryggheten. Vilka är livsvillkoren och hur är förhållandet till bostadspolitiken? Denna uppsats beskriver tillståndet på den svenska bostadsmarknaden och vad som har lett till arbetet "Mäklare", ett verk som i grunden ifrågasätter marknadsideologin. Texten beskriver även arbetsmetoder, inspirationskällor och tidigare arbete.

This essay investigates the prospect of Romantic Irony’s potential resurgence in contemporary poetics and discusses its relevance and likeness with metamodernism. The internet has by now not only seeped into, but fully permeated, the process of literary production and distribution. The effect of this has been the birth of a new kind of poetic discourse which can broadly be called metamodernism, The New Sincerity or Alt-lit. This movement is characterized by its self-reflexive metacommentary, fragmentary nature and an oscillation between of irony and sincerity. Vermeulen and Akker, among others, have hinted at metamodernism’s relation to Romanticism, but research into the specifics of its tendency towards Romantic Irony is scarce. By viewing the writings of Steve Roggenbuck (a central figure in the new poetic movement), alongside the philosophy of Friedrich Schlegel, I propose a comparative framework for discussion of sincerity, irony and the instrumentalization of contemporary metamodernist writing. I demonstrate that Roggenbuck’s writing displays narratological, tropological and thematic tendencies commonly associated with both Romantic Irony and metamodernism. Apart from broader structural comparison, I attempt a comparative analysis between Roggenbuck’s poetry (2010-2015) and Thomas Carlyle’s novel “Sartor Resartus” (1833-1834) in order to provide a visualisation of the rhetorical and narratological strategies of Romantic Irony. I aim to frame Romantic Irony as a sensibility, or mode of discourse - rather than a strict system of thought - which may still be at work today. In extension, the sensibilities of Romantic Irony may shed further light into the philosophical potential of the seemingly incomprehensible and contradictory tendencies of metamodernism. By ironicizing its poetic form, literary ambition and desire for sincerity in a post-postmodern era, Roggenbuck’s poetry celebrates ambiguity and literary failure, ultimately framing irony as a constructive and potentially democratic operation.

Abstract Rosa Liksom is one of the most internationally recognized contemporary Finnish authors and leading Finnish postmodernists. Indeed, the postmodernist aesthetics of her works have received most of the academic attention: features such as irony, dark humor, intertextuality, and parody have been convincingly studied. Liksom’s singular public image has been connected to these aesthetics, but although her cosmopolitanism is often mentioned, her postmodern nonconformity has usually been read in a local and a national context. Liksom’s engagement with modernity has been only implicitly and insufficiently explicated. This dissertation focuses on Liksom’s works and public image in the broader historical context of the modern project in its 20th century legacy. The study of Liksom’s engagement with the utopianism of the modern project is paramount to a deeper understanding of the politico-ethical underpinnings of Liksom’s works and image. To examine Liksom’s retrospection of the modern project, this dissertation makes use of a broad range of theoretical approaches, which can be collectively summarized as contextual close reading. The central theoretical framework is Fredric Jameson’s theory of postmodernism. Other important theories are Linda Hutcehon’s theories of postmodernism and irony, Svetlana Boym’s typology of nostalgia, as well as Krishan Kumar’s theory of utopia. This study elucidates the complexity of Liksom’s engagement with the modern project and bestows new importance on the positive, constructive elements of Liksom’s works that have hitherto gained less attention. Liksom’s works try to salvage something from the history of the modern project instead of merely lingering in the negative attempt to deconstruct historical truths and dismantle the very possibility of such truths. Below the irony and criticism of utopianism in Liksom’s artistic ethos runs a mournful undercurrent that broods over the lack of agency and political choices we seem to face in our present historical condition, and a nostalgia that reflects upon the lost utopian potentialities of the past. Liksom’s works suggest this process of mourning may result in a tentative prospect of communion between people and cultures based on an understanding of their shared situatedness in a postmodern, uncertain world. / Tiivistelmä Rosa Liksom on kansainvälisesti tunnetuimpia suomalaisia nykykirjailijoita ja keskeisiä postmodernisteja. Akateeminen kiinnostus onkin keskittynyt ensisijaisesti hänen teostensa postmoderniin estetiikkaan: teosten ironiaa, musta huumoria, intertekstuaalisuutta ja parodiaa on tutkittu ansiokkaasti. Liksomin ainutlaatuinen taiteilijakuva on kytketty tähän estetiikkaan, mutta vaikka hänen kosmopoliittisuutensa usein mainitaankin, hänen postmodernia epäsovinnaisuuttaan on yleensä tulkittu lokaalissa ja kansallisessa viitekehyksessä. Toistaiseksi Liksomin suhdetta modernin ajan ihanteisiin on pohdittu vain välillisesti ja riittämättömästi. Tässä väitöskirjassa Liksomin teoksia ja julkisuuskuvaa käsitellään laajemmassa viitekehyksessä, nimittäin modernin projektin ja sen 1900-luvun perinnön kontekstissa. Ymmärtääksemme Liksomin teosten ja julkisuuskuvan poliittis-eettisiä perustuksia syvällisemmin on välttämätöntä tarkastella hänen suhdettaan moderniin utooppisuuteen. Tässä väitöskirjassa selvitetään monipuolisen teoreettisen välineistön avulla, kuinka Liksom retrospektiivisesti tarkastelee modernin projektia. Teoreettista lähestymistapaa voidaan kutsua kontekstuaaliseksi lähiluvuksi. Keskeinen teoreettinen viitekehys on Fredric Jamesonin postmodernismin teoria. Muita keskeisiä teorioita ovat Linda Hutcheonin teoria postmodernismista ja ironiasta, Svetlana Boymin nostalgian typologia, sekä Krishan Kumarin ja utopia-teoria. Liksomin taiteellisen eetoksen ironisuuden ja utopiakritiikin alla kulkee surumielinen pohjavire, joka pohtii nykyisessä historiallisessa tilanteessa kohtamaamme toimijuuden ja poliittisten vaihtoehtojen puutetta, ja nostalginen pohjavire, joka mietiskelee menetettyjä utooppisia mahdollisuuksia. Liksomin teoksiset antavat ymmärtää, että tämän suruprosessin tuloksena voi olla mahdollisuus löytää ihmisten ja kulttuurien välinen yhteys, joka perustuu ymmärrykseen siitä, että me kaikki paikannumme postmoderniin, epävarmaan maailmaan.

Proposing the concept of mimetic uncertainty, this project aims to provide a critical inquiry into the correspondence of unreliable narration and realism. Building on Springett (2013) and Olsen (2003), a distinction between narratorial unreliability and uncertainty is proposed to denote whether a narrator explicitly signals an awareness of their fallible narration. I thereafter indicate how narratorial uncertainty, on the one hand, can serve to evoke a “reality effect” (Barthes 1989) on a receptive aesthetic level; and on the other hand, can provide a form of historicity (Jameson 1985) and discursive realism (Auerbach 2003) on an expressive historical axis. Through this tripartite framework, realism is contextualised within the discourse of unreliable narration, as well as the specific debate which surrounds uncertainty and fallibility. The textual analysis focuses on three separate works—Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague year (1722), Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925), and finally, Tao Lin’s Taipei (2013)—with the twofold aim of (1) providing a model for approaching uncertain narration and (2) applying a historically contingent realist reading. I argue that in all three novels, emphasis on how readers may respond to uncertain narration provides insight into socio-historical and discursive points of friction surrounding their authors. The overarching ambition of this study is to provide a more substantial and historicized understanding of the stylistic devices of contemporary authorship, while more broadly signifying the unexpected critical acuity of mimetic approaches as well as the challenges and demands which metamodernist literature approaches.

This dissertation on “Climate Change, the Ruined Island, and British Metamodernism” proceeds from the premise that a perspectival shift occurred in the early 2000s that altered the tenor of British climate fiction published in the decade that followed. The release of a third Assessment Report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), less than a month after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, prompted an acute awareness of the present as a post-apocalyptic condition bracketed by catastrophe and extinction. In response, British authors experimented with double-mapping techniques designed to concretize the supranational scope of advanced climate change. An increasing number of British authors projected the historical ruination of remote island communities onto speculative topographies extrapolated from IPCC Assessments to compel contemporary readers to conceive of a climate-changed planet aslant. Given the spate of ruined-island- as-future-Earth novels published at the turn of the millennium, this dissertation intervenes in extant criticism by identifying David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas (2004), Will Self’s The Book of Dave (2006), and Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Gods (2007) as noteworthy examples of a metamodernist subgenre that makes a distant future of a “futureless” past to position the reader in a state of imagined obsolescence. This project consequently draws on metamodernist theory as a useful heuristic for articulating the traits that distinguish metamodernist cli-fi from precursory texts, with the aim to connect British post-apocalyptic fiction, climate-fiction, and literary metamodernism in productive ways. As the body chapters of this dissertation demonstrate, metamodernist cli-fi primarily uses the double-mapped island to structurally discredit the present as singular in cataclysmic consequence and, therefore, deserving of an unprecedented technological fix. Ultimately, in attempting to refute the moment of completion that would mark history’s end, metamodernist cli-fi challenges the givenness of an anticipated future through which to anchor the advent of an irreversible tipping point. Given the relative dearth of literary scholarship devoted to metamodernist cli-fi, this project posits that this subgenre warrants greater critical attention because it offers potent means for short-circuiting the type of cynical optimism that insists on envisioning human survival in terms of divine, authoritarian, or techno-escapist interventions. / Graduate / 2021-08-08

The purpose of this thesis was to analyze four of the most commonly applied theories in jurisprudence by means of using the philosophical framework of in-tegral theory. Natural law, legal positivism, legal realism and critical legal theory were analyzed to find out how they relate to each other and to see what their strengths and weaknesses are in an integral perspective. The integral theory was created by the American philosopher Ken Wilber (1949-). Two of the main com-ponents of the theory are the four quadrants and the levels of development. The quadrants describe dimensions and perspectives of reality, and consists of the inner individual (subjective) quadrant, the outer individual (objective) quadrant, the inner collective (intersubjective) quadrant and the outer collective (interob-jective) quadrant. Individual values develop through different levels in a specific order, as is described in the second component of the integral theory. Different adult individuals can therefore be on different levels of development. This devel-opment is not only seen in individuals, but is also seen in historical and collective development. The levels that both individuals and societies develop through in-cludes (but are not limited to): the absolutistic (traditional) level, the rational (modern) level and the relativistic (postmodern) level.When using the integral theory to analyze the four theories in jurisprudence it became apparent that they can be mapped onto the integral framework. Natural law, which focuses on morality, can be placed in the intersubjective quadrant, and is mostly associated with the traditional level of development. Legal positiv-ism stems mostly from the interobjective quadrant where law is first and fore-most a system of rules that are enforced by different societal institutions. Legal positivism is typically associated with the modern level of development. Legal realism is also typically associated with the modern level of development and focuses a lot on the objective quadrant: on empiricism and on what judges actu-ally do. Critical legal theory is strongly associated with the postmodern level of development. It emphasizes different kinds of oppression in the intersubjective and in the interobjective quadrant. This thesis presents further examples of how the integral theory can be applied in legal theory and practice.

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Theorists and management in the South African non-profit sector agree that strong stakeholder relationships are essential in negotiating the challenges faced by the South African non-profit sector. Despite the acknowledgement from the non-profit sector that strong relationships are key to achieving organisational goals, there is an apparent lack of knowledge and strategic thinking amongst them pertaining to the concept of stakeholder relationship management. Against this background the purpose of this study was therefore to develop a metamodern model for stakeholder relationship management, aimed specifically at the South African non-profit sector, that could be implemented by NPO management in a practical manner. The blurring lines between the opposing views of modernism versus postmodernism motivated the choice of metamodernism as a relevant worldview for this study. Metamodernism does not imply a balance between these poles, but rather a constant swinging of the pendulum during which metamodernism negotiates between modernism and postmodernism. It is the construction of a workable, interrelated worldview, recognising the intimate relationship between modernism and postmodernism. It was therefore concluded that a metamodern worldview in which both modernism and postmodernism feature, would not only make it possible for nonprofit organisation managers to understand and join the discussion on stakeholder relationship management, but also to implement the proposed metamodern stakeholder relationship management model. The resultant metamodern stakeholder relationship management model for non-profit organisations is framed by so-called modernistic communication and stakeholder relationship management theories, but it was done in line with the metamodern worldview of the study, allowing for initiative and innovation. The flexible, organic and cyclic nature of the proposed model echoes this worldview. A qualitative, exploratory and interpretative research design was implemented to test a conceptual framework and face-to-face semi-structured interviews were conducted with senior management in the non-profit sector. The design of the framework and subsequent model was guided by a number of assumptions and propositions arising from a thorough literature review, all of which were supported and confirmed by the research results. The most significant contribution of the study is the application of a metamodern worldview emanating from a reluctance to choose between a modern or postmodern stance when discussing communication science and stakeholder relationship management practices. It is therefore foreseen that it would offer the field of communication science new and creative means of combining modernism and postmodernism approaches when studying communication phenomena. It will also expand the responsibility for communication and stakeholder relationship management beyond that of the communication specialists to senior management in the non-profit sector. / Communication Science / D. Litt. et Phil. (Communication)