This dissertation, All Things Commune: The Communal Imaginary in Twenty-First-Century French Fiction & Poetry, is animated by two fundamental questions: How can life be led differently, together? And, what is French literature’s radical political potential? Over the course of this project, I argue that twenty-first-century French literature is a site of radical political imagination, and, in certain cases, a veritable form of radical political practice. Through close readings of works by a diverse set of authors – including Jean Rouaud, Yannick Haenel, Virginie Despentes, and Jean-Marie Gleize – I reveal a countercurrent of twenty-first-century French literature bound up in a radical politics that is invested in imagining alternative forms of community that are autonomous from the French state, capitalism, governance, and traditional political structures. I read these literary works in light of theories of community developed by collectives such as Tiqqun and Le Comité invisible and critical theorists like Giorgio Agamben, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Jacques Rancière. All Things Commune demonstrates how reading these authors and theorists together reveals a shared imaginary of alternative communal life and radical Leftist politics, which I place under the rubric of destituent power. All Things Commune insists on the profound continuities between contemporary French literature, history, and politics. Overall, this project questions the narrow political frameworks through which twenty-first-century French literature continues to be read and demonstrates how radical politics appear in unexpected ways in a period of literature sometimes reduced to the reactionary or the apolitical.

This thesis publicly displays the veracity of witchcraft and superstitious fables, which, many people believe to be irrational in nature. In this analysis, semiotics has been paraded in various versions from chapter to chapter-in order to illustrate the miscellaneous interpretations. The backbone of the investigation focuses on the philosophy and psychology of evil, a theoretical belief that is laid down by practical paradigms at the edge of each chapter. The point of departure of this investigation emanates from the Shakespearean literary work, Macbeth, which is popularly known for its inclusion of the witches in its illustration of the Scottish kingship. Therefore this thesis has adopted the practices of the witches and from there came out with what is commonly practiced by the Vatsonga people. Scotland, England, Germany and France of the 15th and 16th centuries were the countries best known as the most uncouthed centres for witchcraft and superstitions. Therefore leading stories from these European countries have made this project feasible. The study has leaked many of the unfounded stories about witchcraft and superstitions that were thought of as extraordinarily great but made real in this work. It has gone as far as windswept the kingship rites, coronation, the powers of the divine bones upon the anointed king, ritual ceremonies, causes of prosperity and failure, tales about stars, ghosts, reptiles, zombies and those hideous deeds that are not socially acceptable such as digging up of children's graves, convulsions, calling for rain, punishment meted out for a witch, prevention of adultery, changing oneself to a crocodile, rat, snake and many more stories. / African Languages / D. Litt. et Phil. (African Languages)

Es'kia Mphahlele's concept of African humanism was a seminal influence on Black Consciouness thought and provided the philosophical basis for a landmark body of South African criticism and aesthetics wilh roots in Africa. African humanism as a black ethos, combined with rich metaphoric speech, symbols, values and myths resurrected from the deep African past, afforded the author a powerful cultural weapon with which to criticize centuries of colonialism, racism, and state apartheid, related western industrial forces of economic exploitation and alienation. Moreover, the counterweights of African humanism and alienation in the dialogue of two selves -- one that is Western-educated and colonized and the other African -- contribute key elements of realism, vitality, humour, insight, cultural identity, and characterization to Mphahlele's most effective protest writing which, in turn, has helped to shape a black nationalist vision which has surprising relevance to South Africa in the 1990s. / English Studies / M.A. (English)

This thesis considers a selection of modern landscape poetry from an ecocritical perspective, arguing that this poetry demonstrates how the term landscape might be re-imagined in relation to contemporary environmental concerns. Each chapter discusses poetic responses to a different kind of landscape: gardens, forests, rivers and islands. Chapter One explores how, in the poetry of Ian Hamilton Finlay, Douglas Dunn, Louise Glück and David Harsent, gardens are culturally constructed landscapes in which ideas of self, society and environment are contemplated; I ask whether gardening provides a positive example of how people might interact with the natural world. My second chapter demonstrates that for Sorley MacLean, W.S. Merwin, Susan Stewart and Kathleen Jamie, forests are sites of memory and sustainable ‘dwelling', but that deforestation threatens both the ecology and the culture of these landscapes. Chapter Three compares river poems by Ted Hughes and Alice Oswald, considering their differing approaches to river sources, mystical immersion in nature, water pollution and poetic experimentation; I discuss how in W.S. Graham's poetry the sea provides a complex image of the phenomenal world similar to Oswald's river. The final chapter examines the extent to which islands in poetry are pastoral landscapes and environmental utopias, looking in particular at poems by Dunn, Robin Robertson, Iain Crichton Smith and Jen Hadfield. I reflect upon the potential for island poetry to embrace narratives of globalisation as well as localism, and situate the work of George Mackay Brown and Robert Alan Jamieson within this context. I engage with a range of ecocritical positions in my readings of these poets and argue that the linguistic creativity, formal inventiveness and self-reflexivity of poetry constitute a distinctive contribution to contemporary understandings of landscape and the environment.

This diploma thesis deals with literary work for children and youth of Norwegian writer Jostein Gaarder and its use in leisure time education as a means of intentional ethical, personality and social education. The thesis contains a theoretical and practical part. The theoretical part deals with the introduction of the life and creation of contemporary Norwegian author and the analysis of key themes of selected works for children and youth. The practical part includes work with selected examples, on which suitable methods and activities are applied with respect to the studied subject. The diplomat uses activation methods for the development of critical thinking leading not only to the development of reading literacy, but also to the development of so-called functional literacy. The set of materials is verified in practice; work also includes reflection and (auto) evaluation.

This thesis examines the genesis, maintenance, and failure of rigid and exclusionary societal models present in William Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County. Yi- Fu Tuan's analysis of the concepts space and place serves as the foundational theoretical framework by which human spatiality may be interpreted. Combining Tuan's observations and architectural analysis with Edouard Glissant's concepts of atavistic and composite societal models allows for a much broader consideration of various political ideologies present in the South. Following this, it becomes necessary to apply a postcolonial lens to areas of Faulkner's literature to examine how these societal models are upheld and the effects they have on characters in both Reconstruction and post- Reconstruction eras. Within Absalom, Absalom! and The Sound and the Fury, Faulkner showcases an aspect of southern history that allowed this societal model to flourish, how this model affected those trapped within it, and its ultimate failure for future generations. / Includes bibliography. / Thesis (M.A.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2017. / FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection

This thesis clarifies recent debates on the problems of territorialized freedom in the Atlantic world by examining several extradition cases involving runaway slaves in Canada, where southern slaveholders attempted to retrieve their lost property by relabeling fugitive slaves as fugitive criminals. In order to combat these efforts and receive the full protections of British subjecthood, self-emancipated people realized that they needed to prove themselves worthy of this status. To achieve this, black refugees formulated their own language of subjecthood predicated upon economic productivity, social respectability, and political loyalty. By actively working to incorporate themselves into the British Empire, Afro-Canadians redefined subjecthood from a status largely seen as a passively received birthright to a deliberate choice. Therefore, this thesis demonstrates that ways in which formerly enslaved people laid out their own terms for imperial inclusion and defined the contours of black social and legal belonging in a partially free Atlantic world. / Includes bibliography. / Thesis (M.A.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2017. / FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection

In my earlier work, ‘First steps towards a rhetorical hermeneutics of literary interpretation’ (2006), I argued that academic reading takes the form of an argument between readers. Four serious weaknesses in that account are its elision of the distinction between reading and discourse on reading, its inattention to non-academic reading, its exclusive focus on ‘interpretation’ as if this constituted the whole of reading or of discourse on reading, and its failure to theorise the object of literary reading, ie. the work of literature. The current work aims to address all of these problems, together with those created by certain other approaches to literary reading, with the overall objective of clearing the ground for more empirical studies. It exemplifies its points with examples drawn primarily from non-academic public discourse on literature (newspapers, magazines, and the internet), though also from other sources (such as reading groups and undergraduate literature seminars). It takes a particular (though not an exclusive) interest in two specific instances of non-academic reception: the widespread reception of Salman Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses as an attack on Islam, and the minority reception of Peter Jackson’s film trilogy The Lord of the Rings as a narrative of homosexual desire. The first chapter of this dissertation critically surveys the fields of reception study and discourse analysis, and in particular the crossover between them. It finds more productive engagement with the textuality of response in media reception study than in literary reception study. It argues that the application of discourse analysis to reception data serves to problematise, rather than to facilitate, reception study, but it also emphasises the problematic nature of discourse analysis itself. Each of the three subsequent chapters considers a different complex of problems. The first is the literary work, and its relation to its producers and its consumers: Chapter 2 takes the form of a discourse upon the notions of ‘speech act’ and ‘authorial intention’ in relation to literature, carries out an analysis of early public responses to The Satanic Verses, and puts in a word for non-readers by way of a conclusion. The second is the private experience of reading, and its paradoxical status as an object of public representation: Chapter 3 analyses representations of private responses to The Lord of The Rings film trilogy, and concludes with the argument that, though these representations cannot be identical with private responses, they are cannot be extricated from them, either. The third is the impossibility of distinguishing rhetoric from cognition in the telling of stories about reading: Chapter 4 argues that, though anecdotal or autobiographical accounts of reading cannot be taken at face value, they can be taken both as attempts to persuade and as attempts to understand; it concludes with an analysis of a magazine article that tells a number of stories about reading The Satanic Verses – amongst other things. Each of these chapters focuses on non-academic reading as represented in written text, but broadens this focus through consideration of examples drawn from spoken discourse on reading (including in the liminal academic space of the undergraduate classroom). The last chapter mulls over the relationship between reading and discourse of reading, and hesitates over whether to wrap or tear this dissertation’s arguments up.

This thesis publicly displays the veracity of witchcraft and superstitious fables, which, many people believe to be irrational in nature. In this analysis, semiotics has been paraded in various versions from chapter to chapter-in order to illustrate the miscellaneous interpretations. The backbone of the investigation focuses on the philosophy and psychology of evil, a theoretical belief that is laid down by practical paradigms at the edge of each chapter. The point of departure of this investigation emanates from the Shakespearean literary work, Macbeth, which is popularly known for its inclusion of the witches in its illustration of the Scottish kingship. Therefore this thesis has adopted the practices of the witches and from there came out with what is commonly practiced by the Vatsonga people. Scotland, England, Germany and France of the 15th and 16th centuries were the countries best known as the most uncouthed centres for witchcraft and superstitions. Therefore leading stories from these European countries have made this project feasible. The study has leaked many of the unfounded stories about witchcraft and superstitions that were thought of as extraordinarily great but made real in this work. It has gone as far as windswept the kingship rites, coronation, the powers of the divine bones upon the anointed king, ritual ceremonies, causes of prosperity and failure, tales about stars, ghosts, reptiles, zombies and those hideous deeds that are not socially acceptable such as digging up of children's graves, convulsions, calling for rain, punishment meted out for a witch, prevention of adultery, changing oneself to a crocodile, rat, snake and many more stories. / African Languages / D. Litt. et Phil. (African Languages)

Es'kia Mphahlele's concept of African humanism was a seminal influence on Black Consciouness thought and provided the philosophical basis for a landmark body of South African criticism and aesthetics wilh roots in Africa. African humanism as a black ethos, combined with rich metaphoric speech, symbols, values and myths resurrected from the deep African past, afforded the author a powerful cultural weapon with which to criticize centuries of colonialism, racism, and state apartheid, related western industrial forces of economic exploitation and alienation. Moreover, the counterweights of African humanism and alienation in the dialogue of two selves -- one that is Western-educated and colonized and the other African -- contribute key elements of realism, vitality, humour, insight, cultural identity, and characterization to Mphahlele's most effective protest writing which, in turn, has helped to shape a black nationalist vision which has surprising relevance to South Africa in the 1990s. / English Studies / M.A. (English)