This thesis examines three novels written by the Jewish-American author Philip Roth, collectively known as the Kepesh novels: The Breast (1972), The Professor of Desire (1977) and The Dying Animal (2001). Based on a desire to re-evaluate the critical position of these works within Roth’s oeuvre, this thesis offers an analysis of each novel based upon a critical methodology supplied by an examination of the role of fetishism in psychoanalytic theory. Fetishism, an ambiguous theory within psychoanalysis, has been adapted and deployed by a range of post-Freudian theorists for a number of purposes. Utilising fetishism as both a theme found in these novels and a methodology for their interpretation, this thesis attempts to form a new means of analysing these novels that pays heed to the different ways that they combine themes within the trilogy. With this diversity in mind, this thesis explores the reception of the Kepesh novels in periodicals and academic research, as well as using a range of theoretical strategies and comparative readings with other literary works. This supports and influences close readings of each text in turn. This thesis argues that these novels are dependent upon Roth’s subversive attitude towards the protagonists that narrate them. This is enabled by the variety of themes used by Roth in each text, but is most telling in his approach to describing debate and communication within each novel. This thesis incorporates and advocates for the playfulness that these novels demonstrate; they can thus be re-examined as works whose perspectives on sexuality are more nuanced than has previously been acknowledged.

No description available.

‘Violent Southern Spaces’ examines the narratives, archetypes and metaphors of memory, myth and the body that writers from South Africa and the American South have used to contest histories of racial oppression and segregation. In so doing, it seeks to identify significant transnational interactions and connections between the aesthetic forms, politics and histories of literary texts from South Africa and the United States. By analysing texts and situations that are both analogous and singular, this thesis utilizes Jean-Luc Nancy’s Inoperative Community as well as Sam Durrant’s Postcolonial Narrative and the Work of Mourning to depict how works of literature interrupt Southern and South African forms of community as well as the myths upon which they are founded. Chapter One examines the tension between the narrative and anti-narrative dimensions of trauma in William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! and Zoë Wicomb’s David’s Story and considers the conditions under which cultural trauma not only exposes the subject as a singularity, but also serves to create community via a collective identification with a mythic past. In their focus on the interruption of community as well as the disruption of the trauma narrative, these texts help us to better understand how certain myths have come to define the nation or region. Chapter Two considers the manner in which community is enacted through departure in Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Achmat Dangor’s Bitter Fruit. Depicted as either a movement towards a more traditional notion of community and communion, or an exposure of the limits of community, there is a certain type of freedom evidenced in such departures—a freedom intimately connected to the being-in-common of community. Finally, in Chapter Three Dorothy Allison’s Bastard Out of Carolina and Marlene van Niekerk’s Triomf are compared in order to demonstrate how both writers interrogate the excessive accessibility that has come to define the poor white community whilst also writing communities akin to Nancy’s ‘community without unity’. This chapter further examines how both texts depict community as an active, interruptive idea, a continual unworking of totalising and exclusionary myths of collectivity upon which community (and the nation) is formed.

This thesis argues that case variation in English conjunction is best analysed as being the result of underspecifcation in the morphosyntactic features of lexical items(LIs). This supports the argument made by Adger and Smith (2005, 2010), Adger(2006), Biberauer and Richards (2006), Biberauer and Roberts (2005) inter alia: namely, that morphosyntactic variation does not require any variation-specific mechanisms and can be explained within a Minimalist framework by recourse to either morphosyntactic features or PF-based operations. An examination of the existing studies of case variation in conjunction shows that there is little consensus regarding which case forms are grammatical and the precise nature of the attested variation: whilst some assume that only acc+acc combinations are grammatical, others claim that all combinations are possible regardless of their syntactic position; and the proposals based on the possibility of intra-speaker variation are contradicted by those which assume that only inter-peaker variation exists. A new data set is collected in order to resolve this empirical uncertainty. It shows that nom+nom, nom+acc and acc+acc combinations are grammatical in subject position, but that only acc+acc combinations can be generated in object position. Furthermore, both inter- and intra-speaker variation is attested, with some speakers accepting all three subject-position variants and others accepting only one or two. Having shown that none of the existing analyses can satisfactorily account for both how all variants are generated and for the presence of inter- and intra-speaker variation, I develop an alternative using optional feature underspecification (Adger 2006) to show that all variants can be generated within a single grammar (thereby accounting for the intra-speaker variation) and that this grammar can be restricted to account for the attested inter-speaker variation. The contribution made by this thesis to our overall linguistic knowledge is three-fold. Firstly, it robustly establishes the pattern of attested case forms in English conjunction and demonstrates that both inter- and intra-speaker variation can be observed. Secondly, I identify the mechanisms of Case and feature assignment/agreement within conjoined phrases, and finally, I show how the Minimalist Program can accommodate both inter- and intra-speaker variation within the existing constraints of the programme.

No description available.

No description available.

This thesis focuses on teaching English via corpus concordancing in a Greek university and is motivated by a need to find an improved approach to teaching and learning English for Specific/Academic Purposes so that university students improve their English language skills and motivation. I assemble a corpus of thirty million words containing texts from the domains of Special Education, General Academic, and General English. I compare and contrast a corpus teaching method (CTM) to a traditional teaching method (TTM) in terms of student performance in linguistic tasks and student motivation. I particularly explore (1) the extent to which CTM is more effective than TTM with regard to student performance as measured by the overall percentage of correct responses in student performance tasks, (2) the extent to which the effectiveness of CTM with regard to student performance on performance tasks is moderated by the ability level of the student (beginner, intermediate, advanced), (3) the extent to which the effect of method on student performance is mediated by student motivation after controlling for student level, and (4) what it is that motivates university students in Greece when involved in corpus concordancing compared and contrasted with existing traditional practice in learning English. Apart from performance measurement by percentage in four linguistic tasks assigned to students in the quantitative portion of this thesis, further data collection procedures to estimate motivation were item analyses of two motivational questionnaires, one about the contrast between CTM and TTM and one about the corpus concordancing software used in this study. The qualitative portion employs the use of an open-ended survey with five questions about CTM and TTM and a corpus style analysis of the survey. The objective of the qualitative part is to determine to what extent student motivation informs students’ preferred teaching style when asked to compare CTM and TTM, and to identify motivational and demotivational factors when using the one learning method or the other. The quantitative and qualitative findings are triangulated in order to validate interpretations. Key points of convergence between the quantitative and qualitative results are identified, which allowed a description of key student benefits and difficulties when CTM is used. An analysis of benefits and difficulties constituted the basis for the development of a suggested teaching unit to be utilized by teachers of English at university level. I demonstrate that CTM is more effective than TTM in the student performance tasks and that CTM is effective across all student ability levels with the advanced students performing better than the intermediate and beginner students. I also demonstrate that the sample of students was more motivated to learn English via CTM than via TTM and that student general motivation is a mediator in terms of the relationship between the teaching method and student performance. Finally, I demonstrate important features that motivate or demotivate students when following CTM or TTM. Based on the overall findings, I recommend a CTM exemplary teaching unit to be used by teachers who teach English at tertiary level. This thesis also offers useful guidance and practice to teachers of English and students on how to make use of a corpus concordancing software program to fulfil their teaching and learning purposes, respectively.

The first part of this thesis, Between The Wars, is a novel based on the life and work of pacifist and social reformer Muriel Lester. It is an interrogation of the beliefs that inspired her, the christian pacifist movement she was a part of, and the challenge of living out the values of peace through two world wars. The novel is also an exploration of the relationship between activism and fiction, and the possibility of representing Lester's ideas in fictional form. The second part of the thesis discusses the process of writing an activist novel that seeks change and yet allows, indeed encourages, the reader to question its beliefs. Idealistic, complex, unflinching, and yet ultimately likeable, Muriel Lester is a challenge to the familiar narratives of 20th century history. Yet the closer to her activism the novel gets, the less certain it becomes, the more it casts itself into question.

Word Pairs in Late Middle English Prose investigates the use of word pairs (WPs) occurring in various English prose texts in the late Middle English period, i.e. in the fourteenth- and fifteenth-centuries. The research question addressed is a stylistic one: is there a relationship between the use of WPs and the genres of these texts? Characteristics of WPs investigated in the study include (1) the normalized frequency of WPs, (2) the etymological makeup of WPs and (3) repetition of WPs. First, the analysis of WPs in all Chaucer’s prose texts is conducted in comparison with two controls as a preliminary study to examine the different uses of WPs in each prose text and the relationship between these texts in terms of the use of WPs, and to check the validity of the methodology used in the analysis of late medieval English prose. After having ascertained the validity of the methodology, the analyses of WPs follow in a range of other texts with a wider circulation: the Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ, Trevisa’s On the Properties of Things, the Brut or the Chronicles of England, English Wycliffite Sermons, the History of Reynard the Fox, Paris and Vienne, the Works of Sir Thomas Malory, Fortescue’s the Governance of England. Next, the analyses of WPs follow in texts with a more limited audience in mind such as An Anthology of Chancery English, and Paston Letters and Papers of the Fifteenth Century. Through the analysis of the WPs in these texts, the characteristics of WPs in each text are identified. Then characteristics in what are thought to be similar texts are compared. Statistical methods such as principal component analysis and cluster analysis are then applied to the WP data to investigate and demonstrate generic and stylistic relationships. The results of the study point to a contrast between curial style and traditional native style based on speech, the difference between which can be characterized as the abundance or dearth of WPs and the different ratio of Old French (OF)+OF vs. Old English (OE)+OE types of WPs, respectively. Certain characteristics peculiar to individual prose texts are also revealed. Lastly, the reasons for the use of WPs in different texts are considered. This study reveals the complex use of WPs in different texts, and offers a study of the subject which is more nuanced and delicate than has been previously achieved.

Made available in DSpace on 2016-08-29T11:13:25Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 tese_5939_DISSERTAÇÃO ANDRÉ PDF.pdf: 407189 bytes, checksum: e580bbf58204551d793e1ff9c700bf9e (MD5) Previous issue date: 2013-03-22 / Esta pesquisa teve como objetivo investigar a influência do PE/VC sobre a informatividade dos lucros contábeis das empresas listadas na BM&FBovespa. Considerou-se informatividade a intensidade da relação entre o lucro contábil e o retorno das ações, apurada pelo coeficiente angular da reta estimada entre as variáveis PEVC e Lucro Líquido Ajustado (LLA). Adicionalmente, a pesquisa abordou a Influência do efeito conjunto PE/VC e governança sobre a informatividade dos lucros contábeis. Espera-se com esta pesquisa contribuir com a ampliação do conhecimento sobre o papel da contabilidade no mercado de capitais. A amostra foi composta por 1.177 observações de empresas não-financeiras listadas na BM&FBovespa no período de 2004 a 2011. O resultado apurado confirma hipótese de que a informatividade dos lucros contábeis é positivamente relacionada com a existência de PE/VC.