This thesis examines the reception of material developed by Soul City: Institute for Health and Development in South Africa and distributed in four Sub-Saharan countries: Botswana, Lesotho, Swaziland and Namibia. Soul City is the focus of considerable resource, research and media attention in South Africa. The study thus critically assesses Soul City's efficacy in neighbouring states, such as Lesotho. The focus of the study is on Choose Life; a booklet intended for 12-16 year olds and assesses its reception by the target group in Lesotho. The study investigates how message-decoding practices of the target audience in Lesotho will bear on a product originally designed for a South African audience. The sample's interpretation of the Choose Life booklet is therefore assessed to determine the extent to which their reception produced 'preferred', negotiated or aberrant meanings. Therefore Stuart Hall's encoding/decoding model (1980) offers the theoretical framework upon which the reception of Choose Life is analysed. Development communication models are also used to explain the role of Soul City as the agent and Youth in Lesotho as beneficiaries in the implementation of the project. Results established by this study indicate that there is need to conduct extensive formative research of target audiences and also involve beneficiaries in projects intended for them. Different readings of the booklet were observed which were attributed to age, gender, place of residence (Urban or rural), cultural and communication barriers . This means these factors were supposed to have been considered by Soul City prior to the Choose Life intervention. / Thesis (M.A.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, 2005.

This thesis investigates the two major conflicting modes of interpretation applied to Mo Yan’s literary texts diachronically and synchronically in order to reveal both the aesthetic imperative and the liberating force of the British and North American literary centers in receiving literature from the periphery. After an introduction to the centers’ disparate responses to the paradigmatic shift of the local Chinese literary trend in the 1980s, the thesis continues with a theoretical discussion on reader-response theory and the uneven power relations between the literary center and the periphery. Jauss’s concept of horizon of expectation and Fish’s interpretive community are adopted to stress openness in interpretation while Casanova’s conceptualization of the world republic of letters provides the framework to study the competition among interpretive communities for the legitimacy of their respective interpretation. The study of the press reception of Mo Yan focuses on the ongoing shift of horizon of expectation from the dominating political and representational mode of interpretation to one that stresses the literary and fictional nature of literature. The study shows that the imperative in the reception of Mo Yan is the extension of the Western cultural hegemony sustained by an Orientalist dichotomy. The academic promotion in the public sphere, however, shows critics’ effort to subvert such domination by suggesting an alternative mode that brings the Chinese literary context to bear on the interpretation. In addition to this, Mo Yan’s strategic negotiation with the dominating mode of reception is analysed in my close reading of POW!. At the end of the thesis, I call for general readers to raise the awareness of the hegemonic tendency of any prevailing mode of interpretation. By asserting a certain distance, readers enable the openness in interpretation and hence possible communication among different communities.

The purpose of this case study was to examine the effectiveness of a technique known as re-creation on student writing abilities in ENG 104 section 95 during the spring semester of 1992. Re-creation, already used almost exclusively in England and Australia, invites a writer to divulge his or her personal interpretation of a literary text by rewriting given aspects of it. In section 95, the instructor devoted the entire range of assignments to re-creative writing tasks, using four dramatic scripts and the motion pictures that had been adapted from them as literary texts. The instructor carefully developed re-creative writing assignments and a reasonable criteria with which to grade them. He closely monitored how the students adapted to re-creative writing, and discovered that four students exemplified the main different styles of writing that emerged from re-creation. The case study does indicate that all of the twenty-one students coulddo the work that re-creation involves; some experienced only minor successes with it, but other students, including some top achievers who would probably have done well in any writing class, found broad new avenues for creative expression of their personal responses to literature. / Department of English

Literature for young adults, which has undergone significant changes in the last few decades and continues to evolve rapidly, is increasingly accompanied by Internet materials which attempt to fulfill a variety of purposes. The overall purpose of this qualitative study was to develop an understanding of middle years teachers’ and students’ responses to these printed and online texts. This research explored the nature of the online content being created and the usefulness of Genette’s (1997) concepts of paratexts in understanding these materials, as well as the responses of middle years teachers and students to a selected set of novels and the online content related to those novels. A collective case study approach was used to probe the responses of four teachers and six students from four mid-sized western Canadian cities. Data were collected through in-person and Skype interviews and through written response journals. Within-case and cross-case analysis occurred using thematic coding methods. Themes were identified in both the students’ and teachers’ responses, and these themes were observed to align in six significant ways. Both teachers and students agreed that audio and visual materials online may evoke a strong response and that the opinions and ideas of other readers are interesting and influential. The teachers predicted and the students confirmed that their response to the websites was largely determined by their response to the printed texts. The two participant groups both indicated that they viewed the printed texts as of primary importance and that the content of the websites had the power to change their thinking about those texts. Finally, both teachers and students described a tendency to make quick decisions about their interest in the content of a website. Implications for pedagogy include the need for educators to investigate these online materials and to consider students’ out-of-school literacy skills and preferences in order to make intentional, informed decisions about their use in the curriculum. Recommendations for future research include the exploration of a wider range of printed and online texts, examination of the responses of students from different age groups to these texts, and investigation of the impact of participation in the book-related websites on adolescents’ identity development. / Graduate / 0727

The aim of this essay is to learn how I as a teacher can work with reading in different ways to promote learning for students in upper secondary school. This is discussed with examples from Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time and Randa Abdel-Fattah's Does My Head Look Big In This?. In this study, I found out that there are many factors that contribute to students' attitude towards reading and that affect their experience of a text. These factors consist of five emotions that affect reader response: assimilation, accommodation, sympathy, memories and identification, as well as four categorizing factors: age, gender, ethnicity and class.  Knowing these factors, we teachers have the tools to turn students' resistance to reading into something positive, and by doing this, we open up a myriad of learning opportunities through reading.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Michigan State University. English, 2008. / Title from PDF t.p. (viewed on July 10, 2009) Includes bibliographical references (p. 194-203). Also issued in print.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Ohio State University, 2004. / Title from first page of PDF file. Document formatted into pages; contains vi, 214 p. Includes bibliographical references (p. 205-214). Available online via OhioLINK's ETD Center

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 2002. / Typescript. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 352-362). Also available on the Internet.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 2002. / Typescript. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 352-362). Also available on the Internet.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 1998. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 335-406). Available also in a digital version from Dissertation Abstracts.