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This thesis sets out a case for a mode of reading I term first-person participation in relation to Dante’s 'Commedia', a narrative poem I propose to function as an exceptionally participatory text. That Dante’s poem invites active engagement on the part of its readers is widely accepted in scholarship. My objective is to extend this debate by identifying certain of Dante’s innovations in relation to the mechanisms of narrative transmission through which such active engagement is invited. In so doing, I seek to establish that these mechanisms together constitute a narratological strategy of invitations to the reader to engage with the poem, intermittently and electively, in a mode of first-person participation, mentally simulating on her own account the journey to the desire for the divine. My research transfers and adapts for textual literary theory new notions of embodied simulation from cognitive neuroscience and emerging ideas in videogame critical theory relating to the mechanics of player presence and the function of the avatar, suggesting and evidencing parallels with the deeply personal and embodied modes of interaction with devotional texts associated with medieval practices of affective piety. I identify in the 'Commedia' a comprehensive and systematic programme of invitations to participate facilitating three types of presence in the responsive reader, and underpinning the invitation to first-person participation. Spatial presence (the perceptual illusion of ‘being there’) is invited through a multi-layered strategy I describe as narration through situated body states. Social presence (the illusion of being physically in relation with others) is invited by narration through kinaesthetic empathy. Self-presence (the experience that ‘something is happening to me’) is constituted, I suggest, through a combination of five mechanisms: a model of narrating instances that identifies the existence of four “faces” of the Dantean ‘io’; a strategy I borrow from film theory of narration through mobile camera view; a new reading of the functioning of the direct addresses to the reader; a strategy of narrative training; and a comprehensive strategy of narration through the manifold gaps in the text.

This thesis is based primarily on work published in academic refereed journals between 1994 and 2003. Taken as a whole, the thesis explores and enacts an evolving methodology for curriculum inquiry which foregrounds the generativity of fiction in reading, writing and representing curriculum problems and issues. This methodology is informed by the narrative and textual 'turns' in the humanities and social sciences - especially poststructuralist and deconstructive approaches to literary and cultural criticism - and is performed as a series of narrative experiments and 'intertextual turns'. Narrative theory suggests that we can think of all discourse as taking the form of a story, and poststructuralist theorising invites us to think of all discourse as taking the form of a text; this thesis argues that intertextual and deconstructive readings of the stories and texts that constitute curriculum work can produce new meanings and understandings. The thesis places particular emphasis on the uses of fiction and fictional modes of representation in curriculum inquiry and suggests that our purposes might sometimes be better served by (re)presenting the texts we produce as deliberate fictions rather than as 'factual' stories. The thesis also demonstrates that some modes and genres of fiction can help us to move our research efforts beyond 'reflection' (an optical metaphor for displacing an image) by producing texts that 'diffract' the normative storylines of curriculum inquiry (diffraction is an optical metaphor for transformation). The thesis begins with an introduction that situates (autobiographically and historically) the narrative experiments and intertextual turns performed in the thesis as both advancements in, and transgressions of, deliberative and critical reconceptualist curriculum theorising. Several of the chapters that follow examine textual continuities and discontinuities between the various objects and methods of curriculum inquiry and particular fictional genres (such as crime stories and science fiction) and/or particular fictional works (including Bram Stoker's Dracula, J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace, and Ursula Le Guin's The Telling). Other chapters demonstrate how intertextual and deconstructive reading strategies can inform inquiries focused on specific subject matters (with particular reference to environmental education) and illuminate contemporary issues and debates in curriculum (especially the internationalisation and globalisation of curriculum work). The thesis concludes with suggestions for further refinement of methodologies that privilege narrative and fiction in curriculum inquiry.

As the fifth most visited website on the internet today, the user-generated encyclopaedia Wikipedia has attracted significant attention from researchers based across the academic disciplines. However, this previous work has generally neglected the multilingual aspects of the encyclopaedia, and downplayed the significance of translation within the collaborative processes of content creation that take place within the platform. Consequently, this doctoral thesis has set out to investigate the people and practices involved in the co-production and dissemination of knowledge across linguistic and cultural borders in the context of Wikipedia. By developing an analytical approach that combines narrative theory (Baker 2006) with insights drawn from the work of Henri Lefebvre (1974/1991) and Michel Foucault (1967/1986), I have examined the construction of 27 city-related articles published within the English- and French-language editions of the platform. This analysis has shown that Wikipedia volunteers make abundant use of source materials published in a diversity of languages other than that in which they are writing, and that the creation of these encyclopaedic articles involves a wide range of partly overlapping multilingual activities, a complex combination of translating, re-contextualising, summarising and synthesising. My study has also brought to light the multi-faceted negotiations that occur between the different participants involved in these processes of intersubjective knowledge production. This has drawn attention to Wikipedia as a space of discordant juxtaposition and creative simultaneity, and foregrounded the cacophony of opposing narrative positionings present within each article-focused community of multilingual produsers.

This thesis aims to explore the image of women in Bai Juyi’s (772-846) poetry with a narratological approach. It selects 108 of Bai’s poems about women as the research objects and divides them into two main categories: the poems written in a male voice and those written in a female voice. A total of 24 poems are examined as examples. Chapter one serves as a general introduction to the research background, providing information about the poet and the tradition of Chinese poetry. Chapter two outlines two narrative concepts, “narrator” and “focalization”. Also, it explores the image of women in the 14 example poems written in a male voice. Chapter three includes 10 example poems written in a female voice, investigating the differences between the image of women created in the male and female voices. This study finds that the use of the female voice presents the female characters’ thoughts and feelings to the reader and allows the reader to empathize with them easily. / Graduate

This thesis is an examination of the subsection of T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land that is aptly named "The Fire Sermon." The hybrid nature of this famous poem makes it open to a variety of readings, and these readings are often conflicting. Thus, the work, in spite of being a seminal text in literature, can be difficult to teach due to the complexity of the piece itself. This fact makes choosing a pedagogical approach to teaching The Waste Land a challenge. With the goal of making Eliot's poem more explorable, this thesis will undertake the task of an examination of "The Fire Sermon" using two distinctive theories. The theories in question are the theory of the lyric, exemplified by Jonathan Culler's writing, and the theory of heteroglossia established by Mikhail Bakhtin. However, that analysis will be merely a stepping stone for a more strictly pedagogical question that this project seeks to answer. That question is, namely, the query of which branch of contemporary theory, narrative or lyric, is more apt to present the issues inherent in "The Fire Sermon" in an effective and teachable manner. Both positions have a number of positive attributes and elements that make them uniquely suited to the examination of Eliot's writing. / Master of Arts / Teaching poetry can be a difficult task. The basic question of “Why should I study poetry?” is one that many a professor has had to answer. While the scholarly community has done a decent job of articulating the value of the liberal arts, the specifics of how to teach difficult poetry is more of a gray area in scholarship. Certainly, a number of articles, opinions, and theories on how to best teach poetry exist, but creating a clear blueprint with examples of how to apply complex theories to a poem is essential to guiding new instructors into the field of teaching poetic works before an audience. This thesis is a work that shows several of the methods of studying poetry via an examination of several important poetic and narrative theories and the theorists that created said methods, and then the thesis undertakes a practical examination of a poem, a section of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. The purpose of this thesis is to make critical theories and abstract ideas more applicable and valuable as usable tools in the classroom, rather than having them exist as ideas without a practical application. Knowledge is, after all, something made to be shared.

Within the text of The Human Condition, Hannah Arendt circumscribes the concept of natality in ways that tend to conflate its biological, historical, institutional and phenomenological dimensions. This dissertation seeks to clarify this concept and the conceptual territory that surrounds it. Specifically, it is argued that Arendt’s construction of the concept of natality is inherently dual. Each person is delivered into a worldly environment through her primary, biological birth. As soon as she is born, she begins to be conditioned to the accepted normative standards of her community. A gap necessarily exists, however, between the person she is socio-culturally conditioned to be, and who she is explicitly, uniquely and authentically. When deeds and words are employed in service of revealing someone’s individual identity or essence, and thereby showing her to be more than simply a mirror of her cultural conditioning, it heralds a second birth, one which is existential instead of biological. According to Arendt, this existential natality must take place in the presence of other existential agents, and also may be witnessed by a spectator who then seeks to express the significance of what has occurred to those removed from the original event either by space and/or time. This expression takes the form of artifactual objects, including works of art, architectural monuments and various forms of narratives. Arendt’s theory concerning the creation of these objects contains two major problems that are critically addressed within this project. The first problem concerns the spectator’s capacity for making judgments. Works written after The Human Condition are shown to demonstrate Arendt’s attempts to address this issue. The second problem concerns the way in which Arendt portrays the issue of embodiment. This issue must be reconciled both by appealing to work from within her canon, as well as through the introduction of recent scholarship from the field of social cognition. The project concludes with the presentation of a concrete, historical example intended to be illustrative of the preceding theoretical material.

The story of Parsifal is presented in two manners: through action and through narrative. Using the formalist theories of Vladimir Propp, the overall narrative is articulated in three narrative episodes. This thesis interprets the structure of narrative episodes in Parsifal on the basis of expectation. Propp's theory of functions provides labels for an interpretive analysis. Levi-Strauss' reconstruction of Propp's functions into paired structures identifies key points in the drama as moments of "functional" saturation. This "functional" saturation coincides with Wagner's practice of Leitmotivic saturation. The semiotic theories of Charles Sanders Peirce, specifically his notion of sign, clarify the dense accumulation of meanings accrued by the Leitmotifs. Finally, Parsifal, as a "quest" for the unobtainable object, fits into the matrix of desire as formulated in the theories of Jacques Lacan.

One of the major themes in environmental philosophy in the twenty-first century has broadly focused on how we experience and value the natural world. Along those lines, the driving question I take up in this project is if our ordinary experiences are seen as interpretations, what is the significance of this for our moral claims about the environment? Drawing on the hermeneutic philosophies of Hans Georg-Gadamer and Paul Ricoeur, I examine environmental interpretation as it relates particularly to identity, meaningful action, and the mediating function of the imagination. These three interconnected aspects show both our capability for new understandings related to the natural world, as well as problem of conflicting, yet equally valid, views on environmental value. To explore this tension further I consider the relevance of hermeneutic conceptions of truth and translation for environmental ethics. A hermeneutic notion of truth highlights the difficulties in making strong normative claims about the environment, while a hermeneutic view of translation is helpful in thinking about the otherness of nature and what this means for ecological values. In this project I am particularly interested in the conflict of environmental interpretation and the implications that a hermeneutic frame has for the limits of environmental understanding and value. I argue that hermeneutics and narrative theory shows that we can argue for direct moral consideration of ecological others or the natural world only as merely possible interpretations among others.

Resilience is the process by which protective factors enable a child to achieve desirable outcomes despite the presence of adversity in their lives. It develops through the child's interaction with their ecosystem; their family, school and wider community. A resilient child has internal resources, external supports and the interpersonal skills required facilitate this interdependency. Narrative theory suggests that when a child's prevalent narratives focus on protective factors rather than risk factors this will form a resilient self-identity. This thesis combines resilience literature and narrative theory by exploring the process of developing children's resilience through enhancing and creating protective focussed stories through narrative therapy. The narrative methodology Narrative Oriented Inquiry (NOI), (Hiles and Cermak, 2008) is used to gather and then explore the stories told by three children, their parents and their teachers. The children who had been identified by their teachers as needing to become more resilient were engaged in a short series of narrative therapy sessions with the aim of changing the nature of the stories they held about themselves from stories based on risk factors to those based on protective factors. The process was further supported through inviting the child's parent and teacher into the therapeutic sessions. This thesis makes a unique contribution by exploring how children's resilience can be promoted through use of narrative therapy in professional practice. The implications for educational psychology practice and resilience research are discussed. A number of limitations to the research design and so the conclusions made are discussed, these primarily focus on the unknown impact of the narrative therapy on the children's behaviour beyond the sessions and the complex nature of the dual researcher/practitioner role. The thesis explores the efficacy of NOI for research of this type. The processes NOI offers allow 'the told', 'the teller' and 'the telling' to inform a deep understanding of the stories shared. Interpreting the stories through the six interpretative lenses offered by NOI enabled the researcher to compare the stories told by each participant and to compare the stories told by different participants before and after the narrative therapy. The thesis offers suggestions for further development of the advice around its use and discusses the contribution NOI could make to educational psychology practice.