Magister Artium - MA / The thesis offers insight into English literature studies as taught at high school level to Grade 12 learners, employing Louise Rosenblatt’s reader response theory to explore and understand their encounter and engagement with prescribed poetry by enquiring as to whether social conditions in their lives allow an identification with these poems. The thesis argues for the validity and implementation of reader response theory in the South African curriculum because when learners engage with their memories, experiences and opinions; identification with the poem is possible. If learners identify with the poems that are being taught, there may be a sense of harmony as they realise that their problems or experiences are not in isolation. The sample population comprises of learners attending two high schools located in Mitchells Plain, Cape Town: a community that presents a myriad of societal challenges. Proper ethical considerations were followed in order to gain access to the research sites and anonymity was promised to all research participants. The research entails the usage of openended questionnaires to elicit data which has been processed qualitatively by means of content analysis whereby various central social environment themes were identified. A background of Mitchells Plain’s social ills is provided in order to understand the challenges facing the research participants. The thesis offers an extensive discussion on the history and current state of education in South Africa, as well as a delineation of the study of the discipline of poetry by highlighting its proposed benefits from humanities and scientific perspectives. Additionally, the thesis provides a background on different reader response theories and published reader response studies with a focus on the social environment of the individual for further elucidation of the theoretical framework. Results of the study reveal that the selected poems by William Blake, W.H. Auden, Gerard Manley Hopkins and Chinua Achebe yield fascinating responses as most research participants can socially identify with the contextual themes and characters. The thesis sheds light on a few shortcomings or limitations which may have impacted the data collection process and provides recommendations on how to improve any future related studies and possibilities of best teaching practice of English literature in South African high schools.

The exegesis accompanies a thesis, the latter being the portfolio of work consisting of two parts, each being a completed first draft of a novel written during the Masters of Creative Writing course: Part 1: ‘Sandcastles’ - a 'closed' text novel Part 2: ‘The Postmodern Rules For Family Living’ - an 'open' text novel These two works are separately bound with a thesis cover sheet and numbered. They are embargoed until 30 June 2011. The exegesis covers the writer’s motivation for writing these works, reflections on the course of development and changes in thinking that occurred during research and the act of writing. It shows the changing perspectives of the writer’s two thesis works in context and in contra-distinction to each other. It includes the writer’s academic and creative goals as they developed and the result achieved in terms of those goals. It highlights the writer’s developing interest in literary theory including suggesting an ephemeral adjunct to Reader-Response theory which is described as 'Collapse'. It shows the development of the writer’s deep interest in reality in fiction versus the lie in fiction and in the differences between writing and reading a creative work produced primarily for entertainment versus work of a literary nature, identifying some of the differences in features the writer has perceived.

<p>I en enkätundersökning har jag undersökt om det finns något samband mellan upplevelsen av kön hos den okönade autodiegetiska berättaren och författarens kön i två dikter av David Uppgren och Mariam Naraghi. Jag kom fram till att så inte var fallet utan att det fanns större bevis för att läsarna i huvudsak projicerade sitt eget kön på berättarrösten. Sedan analyserade jag även enkätsvaren för att undersöka vad i dikterna som avgjorde om berättarrösten upplevdes som man eller kvinna. Det framkom att stereotypa uppfattningar om kön låg till grunden för majoriteten av läsarnas upplevelse. Efter detta applicerade jag stereotyperna på dikten för att se om diktens innehåll påverkades av om berättarrösten upplevdes som man eller kvinna. Utfallet tydde på att så var fallet och att det i synnerhet är märkbart i berättarröstens förhållningssätt till den fiktiva världen.</p>

I en enkätundersökning har jag undersökt om det finns något samband mellan upplevelsen av kön hos den okönade autodiegetiska berättaren och författarens kön i två dikter av David Uppgren och Mariam Naraghi. Jag kom fram till att så inte var fallet utan att det fanns större bevis för att läsarna i huvudsak projicerade sitt eget kön på berättarrösten. Sedan analyserade jag även enkätsvaren för att undersöka vad i dikterna som avgjorde om berättarrösten upplevdes som man eller kvinna. Det framkom att stereotypa uppfattningar om kön låg till grunden för majoriteten av läsarnas upplevelse. Efter detta applicerade jag stereotyperna på dikten för att se om diktens innehåll påverkades av om berättarrösten upplevdes som man eller kvinna. Utfallet tydde på att så var fallet och att det i synnerhet är märkbart i berättarröstens förhållningssätt till den fiktiva världen.

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Title from PDF of title page (University of Missouri--Columbia, viewed on March 10, 2010). The entire thesis text is included in the research.pdf file; the official abstract appears in the short.pdf file; a non-technical public abstract appears in the public.pdf file. Thesis advisor: Dr. Kevin Wise. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Th. M.)--Regent College, Vancouver, BC, 2002. / Abstract and vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 120-125).

The purpose of this bachelor thesis is to examine posts on bookblogs about the book, Cirkeln by Mats Strandberg and Sara Bergmark Elfgren and see how it has distributed amongst readers through social media and reader response. We want through this examine whether bookblogs have a place in the literary society, and in such cases, how this may take place. The Swedish Online bookshops Adlibris and Bokus is being used to find the blogposts to be examined in this thesis. The analysis is being implemented using content analysis and constructed encoding schemes. Interdisciplinary topics, like LIS and sociology of literature may have similar points of contact, which we want to highlight with this thesis. It is also possible to extract understanding of their own research topic by taking advantage of each other's knowledge. This is done in our paper by using Lars Furuland´s model, den litterära processen, as a starting point. The interlocking of posts on bookblogs, reader response and Online book shops, we believe demonstrates that bookblogs have a place in the Swedish literary society.

This thesis is about a problem of interest to reading theorists, psychological anthropologists and cultural studies researchers alike: why we find some narratives, plots, and images compelling and what this phenomenon can tell us about the cultural bases of human motivation. Gesturing to the interdependence of emotion, cognition, and motivation, the notion of the '(dis)positioned self' is proposed as a conceptual tool by which to address how motivation is both acquired and expressed in the way the self as 'feeling-mind' reads, that is, negotiates an interpretation of the signifying systems of a text to render it personally meaningful. (Dis)position allows us to overcome the sociocultural determinism of French structuralist and some poststructuralist reductions of the self to a precipitate of cultural constructs by reconceptualizing the interpreting self as an embodied, affective agent who employs unconscious knowledge that itself draws on another form of sociality. On this account, reading performance is culturally informed action and interpretations are motivated. Emotion is introduced as symptomatic of the intrapsychic investments which mediate how readers internalize cultural knowledge. The thesis looks at three soundings from social discourse--Janice Radway's Reading the Romance; The Singing Detective, a contemporary metafictional text; and the literature and group therapy practices associated with the codependency movement--in order to examine how presuppositions about emotion and the psychical reality of fantasy appear in cultural representations of the 'ill self as reader' while being fundamental to psychological notions of the self upon which healing practices themselves depend for their efficacy.

In recent years there has been a body of studies relating nostalgia and fiction in political, sociological, feminist, or historical ways. This thesis, instead, sets out to perform an unusual textual study of nostalgia in modern fiction in order to work towards a poetics of nostalgia. Although the experience of emotion is private, the object of analytical discourse must be to approach this experience with objective tools. The thesis therefore develops a method for analyzing the experience of nostalgia in literary texts and then uses this method to study how nostalgia can be evoked in readers. The method works through close textual readings, developed through reader-response and narratological theories and validated through a thorough investigation of modern nostalgia in general. The result is a taxonomy of nostalgic strategies that possibly create nostalgic reactions in readers.