Motherhood and maternity are common themes in Nicaraguan author Gioconda Belli’s (1948–) writings, but in Waslala (2006) her exploration of the mother figure dives further into what a relationship with such a figure provides. Through a development narrative, parallel to that of female Bildungsroman and quest-romance, the protagonist, Melisandra, grows in maternal history and culture in her search for mother. This thesis uses the theories of Carol Christ, Dana Heller, Joseph Campbell and others to see Melisandra’s odyssey through the lens of a quest narrative. Along this journey, two maternal figures play an important role in preparing her for her climactic reunion with her own biological mother. They both teach and give examples of female strength and authority that Melisandra then emulates. As Melisandra discovers and forms her own identity, she finds herself in a pivotal position that intertwines her quest with that of her community’s. Upon leaving the utopian Waslala where she meets her mother, it becomes apparent that the mother has become central for both Melisandra’s personal identity and that of her community. Ultimately, the trajectory of Melisandra’s journey shows the archetype and figure of the mother as paramount for growth, development, and self-actualization.

This research explores collaborative second language (L2) learning in gamified environments, and specifically examines affordances and limitations of mobile gamified language systems and augmented reality (AR) in supporting collaborative L2 learning. Therefore, this design-based research entailed the development and evaluation of two L2 AR gamified collaborative learning tools, Explorez and VdeUVic. At different locations on campus, players interact with characters that give them quests including clues or options to further the storyline. The gameplay interactions were designed to take place either in the form of written text or audio and video recordings, encouraging students to practice both oral and written language competencies. Three cohorts of FL2 university students playtested both gamified systems, and 58 students chose to participate in the study. The evaluation of the AR language tools was implemented by means of mixed-method case studies, collecting data of both a qualitative and quantitative nature, through pre- and post- play questionnaires, interviews, and video recordings of student gameplay interactions for analysis. This research examined the learners’ perceptions of their learning experience and in what ways students collaborated to complete the tasks. Additionally, the adaptation of Volet et al.’s (2009) collaborative learning framework permitted the examination of the learners content processing and social regulation during gameplay. The findings suggested the potential of AR gamified environments to facilitate high levels of interaction and collaboration. The analysis showed distinct patterns of collaborative learning across groups and sessions. Additionally, the findings identified patterns in the emergence of learners’ high-level co-regulation, as well as factors that assisted students in sustaining engagement of high-level co-regulation during gameplay. / Graduate

No description available.

I went into the wilderness and I found Alec Baldwin. This is not a lie. It is also a title for a video installation and this thesis. In it, I investigate three separate adventure-performances, providing a theoretical context for their existence, meaning, and relationship as a form of artistic practice. I call this practice ‘adventure-art’, using the term to describe a performance-based action in which the artist publically explores his or her reality through some type of physical adventure, search, quest, or challenge. It is an attempt to engage oneself and others at both at the physical and mediated levels, reconciling, confusing, and merging the real with the simulated. In this thesis, I explore the confluence of consumption, creativity, the real, and the simulated within American popular culture from the perspective of a middle-class, suburban, white-male, art student – me, Steve Snell.

Massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs) are one of the most popular genres in video games that combine massively multiplayer online genres with role-playing gameplay. MMORPGs’ featured social interaction and forms of level pro- gression through quest completion are the core for gaining players’ attention. Varied and challenging quests play an essential part in retaining that attention. However, well-crafted content takes much longer to develop with human efforts than it does to consume, and the dominant procedural content generation models for quests suffer from the drawback of being incompatible with dynamic world changes and the feeling of repetition over time. The proposed solution is to dynamically generate contextu- ally relevant quests with real-time information collected from the players. This thesis is to show that it is possible to generate contextually dynamic quests that could fit into the background story with only the information gathered from the players in real-time. To validate the proposed solution, a text-based MMO scenario is generated from the Panoptyk Engine, an information-driven game engine designed to run massively multiplayer online games (MMOs) without the distinction between NPCs and human players. The engine is intended to serve as a platform for simulating human/robot interaction. In this case, a quest simulation is built where quests are given by the NPC faction leaders utilizing the information gathered through ongoing events; players or robots belonging to certain factions will be taking and completing the quests. ivThe results of the 14-person survey showed some successes and some limitations. There was strong agreement in players understanding of what the quest was asking for, quests were related to other agents the player had seen in the world, quests involved agents that the player had interactions with, quests were related to things happening in the game world, quests were interesting. There was regular agreement on players understanding of quests that were designed entirely before the player started playing, quests were generated using a basic template with details filled in based on the player’s actions, and quests were dynamically generated. It was inconclusive with players understanding of quest motivation and previous quests the player had completed having an impact on the next quests.

No description available.

G. R. S. Mead is an important but neglected historical personality of the British fin-de-siècle occult, Theosophical, and post-Theosophical milieu. While previous scholars of Theosophy have portrayed the Theosophical movement as quite cohesive in nature, I argue that it might have been a lot more pluralistic, with ostensibly key Theosophical concepts being open for debate. By a careful study of Mead’s editorial activity, his debates with other Theosophists in leading occultist journal over the period 1890s through 1910s, I illustrate that Mead held alternative views of key Theosophical concepts. This gives us a clue as to how the movement of Theosophy can be characterized differently. I suggest that we speak of many different “Theosophies” rather than one singular “Theosophy” to better capture the seemingly diverse makeup of the Theosophical movement. I look at three areas wherein Mead’s views differed from those of other important Theosophists: the concept of “the Masters” as spiritual authority, which sources to turn to and how to interpret them, and the question of whether occultism should be understood primarily in theoretical or in practical terms. I propose that by seeing Theosophy as a debating ground where many different Theosophists competed over the definition of their particular kind of Theosophy, we might also better account for why so many post-Theosophical currents emerged. Lastly, Mead’s concept of “Gnosis” might have served as a bridge between his Theosophical and post-Theosophical periods, as the concept’s meaning, along with Mead’s spiritual outlook, does not appear to have changed over time. This gives some consequences to how we conceive of post-Theosophy, since he does not fit neatly within that category.

Au cours du vingtième siècle, le Québec a connu un bouleversement identitaire et religieux lorsqu’une majorité de Québécois a délaissé les prescriptions doctrinales catholiques, la religion identitaire du Québec, qui encadrait leur vie et s’imposait en tant que détentrice du « code exclusif du sens » (Hervieu-Léger 1993 : 155). Pour combler la perte de repères (Lemieux 2008) engendrée par les bouleversements décrits précédemment, plusieurs individus se tournèrent vers d’autres formes de spiritualité, soit en se convertissant à un nouveau système religieux ou en s’engageant dans une quête spirituelle. Certains Québécois, au cours de leur quête, ont alors découvert le druidisme, une spiritualité fondée sur le désir de retour à l’ancienne religion païenne des Celtes, et l’ont intégré en tant que composante principale ou secondaire de leur spiritualité. Le but de ce mémoire sera d’apporter quelques éléments d’explication à la présence du druidisme au Québec. Nous soulignerons l’importance du contexte moderne dans la quête de sens amorcée par l’adepte de paganisme celte, car ce contexte semble avoir servi de catalyseur dans le processus de découverte du druidisme pour ces Québécois. Puis, nous mettrons l’accent sur les raisons identitaires mises de l’avant par la CDQ pour justifier leur choix d’intégrer le druidisme à leur cheminement spirituel. Nous verrons que pour le druidisant, cette religion vient à la fois répondre à des besoins spirituels et combler un vide identitaire. / During the last century, Quebec society underwent a major transformation in identity and religion as a majority of Québécois abandoned the Catholic doctrinal prescriptions. Until then, Catholicism was fundamental to the identity the Québécois and guided their lives, imposing itself as the holder of « code exclusif du sens » (Hervieu-Léger 1993: 155). To make up for the loss of cultural markers (Lemieux, 2008) engendered by the upheaval of the Quiet Revolution, many individuals turned to other forms of spirituality, either in a process of conversion to a new religious system or as part of a spiritual quest. Some Québécois engaged in such a quest discovered Druidism, which presents itself as going back the ancient pagan religion of the Celts, and integrated it as the main or a secondary component of their spirituality. The goal of this thesis is to contribute to the explanation of the presence of Druidism in Quebec. I emphasise the importance of modern context for shaping the search of a sense of self that is undertaken by those involved in Celtic Paganism because that context seems to be a catalyst in the process of discovery of Druidism for these Québécois. I will also examine the justifications on the basis of ethnic identity that are put forward by the members of the group I studied to justify their choice to integrate Druidism to their spiritual path. We will see that for the neo-Druid, this religion answers identity as well as spiritual needs.

Jean Sénac, poète algérien du XXème siècle, est avant tout connu pour son engagement en faveur de l’indépendance algérienne. Ses poèmes dénoncent l’autoritarisme colonial comme ils révèlent la violence morale et sociale qui accompagne la mise en place du nouveau régime politique de Houari Boumedienne succédant à celui, plus en adéquation avec les attentes du poète, d’Ahmed Ben Bella. Mais ce serait amputer l’oeuvre poétique sénacquienne d’une grande richesse thématique et stylistique que de la résumer à quelques uns de ses plus grands recueils « politiques ». Car, derrière la voix d’un homme engagé dans le combat sociopolitique de son pays s’entend celle d’un artiste qui s’interroge, dès ses premiers écrits, sur les fondements de son existence, sur la réalisation du sujet en tant qu’homme, mais aussi en tant que poète, et sur les possibilités ontologiques et littéraires d’y parvenir. Une parole lyrique fonde et / ou transcrit alors la quête existentielle en même temps qu’elle interroge sa légitimité et l’espace de son déploiement. La problématique de l’interdépendance entre voeu d’unité ontologique et pluralité des modalités d’énonciation permet d’appréhender le polymorphisme stylistique et thématique de cette oeuvre singulière, polymorphisme au service d’un cheminement ontologique étroitement nourri des révélations générées par l’écriture poétique. La première partie de ce travail a donc pour vocation de mettre en lumière la corrélation réciproque entre l’expérience phénoménologique et sensitive du monde menée par le poète et celle de l’écriture, corrélation sur laquelle repose la prise de conscience réfrénée puis acceptée d’une diffraction du sujet. L’écriture poétique, espace de représentation et de construction de l’ego, renseigne le sujet lyrique sur la nature de sa disparité et devient le champ d’expérimentation d’un projet de réunification du corps et de l’esprit en lieu du poème ; ce que Jean Sénac nommera le « corpoème ». La seconde partie fait état d’un degré supérieur d’interrogation existentielle et analyse l’enjeu verbal et ontologique d’une substitution du poète à Dieu. Jean Sénac éprouve le besoin de se confronter à la divinité, référentiel d’un espace absolu, afin de mesurer la nécessité et les possibilités d’une incarnation définie selon ses propres concepts. L’écriture préfigure donc un « parcours de soi » inachevable en même temps qu’elle instaure les limites d’un espace de re-présentations où le poète appréhende la fragmentation du « moi » avant d’en faire un motif de justification d’un questionnement cyclique sur les conditions de son identité. Toutes les figures du sujet lyrique convergent alors dans cet espace d’agencement que représente l’oeuvre poétique, et leur rassemblement autorise le poète à profiler la voie /voix d’une réalisation singulière / The Algerian Twentieth Century poet Jean Senac is well known for his commitment for Independence of Algeria. His poems not only denounce colonial autoritarism but also reveal moral and social violences closely linked to Houari Boumedienne policy. Boumedienne follows Ahmed Ben Bella’s regime that Senac agrees with. But Senac’s work isn’t limited to a political poems collection. He is a true artist above all, who questions himself about the fondamental themes of literature. A lyrical word founds and transcribes existential quest and makes its legitimacy an interrogation. The main problem about interdependence between wish ontarienne unity and variety of terms allows the multiplicity of speech and themes in this singular work. The first part of the demonstration may put into relief a reciprocal relation between phenomenological and sensitive experience of world Senac follows. Poetic writing, scene of ego’s construction and representation, gives informations to lyrical subject about the reasons of its dissimilarities. It becomes as well the field of experimentation about a link between body and spirit, what Sénac calls the « corpoème ». The second part should reveal a higher step in existentiel questioning and should analyse the formal and ontological stake of Sénac’s substitution in God. Jean Senac needs a confrontation with divinity, the absolute place, in order to assess the necessity of a potential incarnation determined by his own concepts. The writing feels an unfinished « parcours de soi » (an unfinished self route) and establish the ends of representation space where the poet grasps the ego’s fragmentations. Every lyrical subjects figures converge in this field of layout what is poetic work. Their association allows the poet to open up the voice/the way of a singular realisation

Title: Images and Symbols in the Historical Novels of Nağīb Maḥfūẓ Author: Martina Hainová Departement: Ústav Blízkého východu a Afriky Supervidor: PhDr. František Ondráš, PhD. Keywords: Nağīb Maḥfūẓ, egyptian literature, history, symbol, image, egyptology, leader, nationalism, identity This thesis examines the role of the symbols in the three historical novels of Nağīb Maḥfūẓ that take place in the Ancient Egypt. In his return to the history of his nation, he shows people the way to their own identity and explains the contemporary situation in the country by using symbols. We try to prove that his novels renew the traditions and connect the modern Egypt with the legends. We demonstrate on the extracts the intentions of the author, confront his deviation from the historical facts and present reasons which led author to do that. For further comprehension, we give details about the historical novel, egyptology and show the impact of european authors on Nağīb Maḥfūẓ.