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In school bullying is a well-known problem and unfortunately it is not uncommon that adults do not see all the signs of a bullying situation. Bullying can be hard to detect and several factors are possible foundation pillars for a hierarchical subjugation of another individual. This essay analyses how the novel Lord of the Flies by William Golding conveys bullying, when it is explored through a reader-response lens together with Bakhtin’s theory of the carnivalesque. The carnival setting involves rituals and jokes, which the narrative in the novel uses regularly. Hierarchies should be omitted from the carnivalesque though, and this essay argues that the narrative in Lord of the Flies violates the non-hierarchical concept of the carnivalesque, in order to emphasise intentional malign bullying. The study concretise how this is shown in the novel, and concludes that Lord of the Flies can be helpful in school to raise awareness of the intricate problem of bullying. / <p>Slutgiltigt godkännandedatum: 2022-06-05</p>

This study explores aspects of the theoretical basis of Louise M. Rosenblatt's transactional theory of reading and its focus on the reader's efferent and aesthetic stances during transaction with nonfiction and fiction. The study explores the following questions: Does genre (nonfiction or fiction) influence the reader's response to a literarytext? Does a reader's process of reading change during a nonfictional reading compared to a fictional one? Are there certain factors that persuade a reader to view a nonfictional piece of writing differently than a fictional one? To examine these questions and to ensure the validity of the study, I wrote a story titled "The Exit" and presented the writing to three freshman English classes, first as nonfiction and then during the next class period as fiction. I chose to follow Rosenblatt's class procedure: an initial reading with free responses, an interchange of ideas, and then a rereading of the same text. For research purposes I needed bulk written and verbal responses to compare and contrast. This three-day immersion in nonfiction and fiction reflections produced sufficient data to analyze: (1) written free responses from the initial reading of the text as nonfiction; (2) recorded audio tapes of their small groups, responding to five inquiry questions regarding the nonfiction text; (3) written individual take-home responses to the same five inquiry questions; (4) written free responses from the second reading of the text as fiction; (5) recorded audio tapes of the small group discussions on their nonfiction and fiction responses; and (6) recorded audio tapes of the entire class reflections on the responses to reading the story as both nonfiction and fiction. During this expedition I kept a journal of each day's events so that as my students and I experienced this exploration together, I could capture what we all were feeling and thinking as it was actually happening. Although the students were unaware of genre influence until the third-day class reflection, there were distinct differences in student responses to nonfiction and fiction. These students predominately read nonfiction aesthetically and fiction efferently. In this study with these students, genre did influence the reader's response; the reader's process of reading did change during the nonfictional reading compared to a fictional one; and there were certain factors which persuaded the reader to view the nonfictional piece of writing differently than the fictional one. The contrast and comparison of the students' responses to nonfiction and fiction are shown in a detailed Venn diagram. In addition, I have included an extensive essay titled "The Transactional Dance: Louise Rosenblatt's Presence in the History of Literary Criticism." Her transactional theory of reading transcends time and continues to invite research. / Ed. D.

This reader-response study focuses on the influences that four readers relationships with families and friends have on their responses to several literary characters and the relationships among these characters as presented in six short stories. Four college students, two men and two women, read and responded to the stories in writing and in interviews with the researcher. The stories depict men and women confronting gender related family or individual crises concerning such topics as independence, autonomy, and the nature of the marriage commitment and male/female relationships. / Ed. D.

Previous research on the role that culture plays in reader response to literature generally has not been based on clear operational definitions of the term "culture." More often than not, researchers appear to be using the term synonymously with the reader's race, nationality, or social class, rather than including specific anthropological explanations. Moreover, there has been no research reported that isolates and then studies individual readers' cultural backgrounds as influences on their responses to American regional literature; and, while there have been some studies reported that use ethnographic methodology to examine how cultural context or setting affects response, there has been no reported ethnographic research that focuses on the influences of readers' cultural backgrounds and the cultures depicted in texts. / Ed. D.

How we approach a poem changes it. Recently, it has been suggested that one readerly approach - a bodily orientation characterised by distance, suspicion, and resistance - risks becoming reflexive, pre-conscious, and predominant. This use-oriented reading allows us to destabilise, denaturalise, dissect, defend, and define poetic texts through its manifestation in contemporary literary critique, yet it is coming to be regarded as the sole manner and mood of intelligent, intellectual engagement. In this thesis, I demonstrate the need to pluralise this attentive orientation, particularly when it comes to contemporary lyric poetry. I suggest how an overlooked mode of response might foster a more receptive mode of approach: the 'co-creative' response. Lyric poems mean to move us, and they come to mean by moving us. Recent 'simulation theories of language comprehension', from the field of cognitive neuroscience, provide empirical evidence that language processing is not a product of a-modal symbol manipulation but rather involves 'simulations' by certain classes of neurons in areas used for real-world action and perception. As habituation and abstraction increase, however, these embodied simulations 'streamline', becoming narrow schematic 'shadows' of once broad, qualitatively rich simulations. Poems, I suggest, seek to reverse this process by situationally novel variations of language, coming to mean in the broadly embodied sense in which real-world experiences 'mean'. Readers are asked to 'enact' the poem, to 'co-create' its meaning. Where critique traditionally requires that readers resist enactive participation in the aim of objective analysis, the co-creative response - a response 'in kind' by imitation, versioning, or hommage - asks readers to receive and carry forward the enactive unfolding of a poem with a composition of their own. I assert that, by thus responding with - rather than to - poems, we might foster an attentive stance of active receptivity, thereby coming to understand poems as the enactive phenomena they are.

Gotthold Ephraim Lessings Fabelbuch von 1759 verfolgt in seiner Programmatik das Ziel der Befähigung der Leserin/des Lesers zum eigenständigen Denken. Es geht nicht mehr, wie in früheren Fabelsammlungen, um die Belehrung durch moralische Lehrsätze, sondern um das kritische Selbstdenken. Dieser leserorientierte Ansatz, der individuelle Interpretationen und lerseitige geistige Aktivität fordert, findet sich auch in Wolfgang Isers Untersuchungen. Iser geht davon aus, dass der Sinn eines Textes in jedem Rezeptionsvorgang neu hergestellt werden muss. Charakteristischer Untersuchungsgegenstand seiner Theorie sind die so genannten Leerstellen, die durch die/den Leser*in gefüllt werden müssen. In dieser Arbeit werden verschiedene Typen von Leerstellen in Lessings Fabelbuch identifiziert und einzelne Fabeln exemplarisch interpretiert.

Gotthold Ephraim Lessings Fabelbuch von 1759 verfolgt in seiner Programmatik das Ziel der Befähigung der Leserin/des Lesers zum eigenständigen Denken. Es geht nicht mehr, wie in früheren Fabelsammlungen, um die Belehrung durch moralische Lehrsätze, sondern um das kritische Selbstdenken. Dieser leserorientierte Ansatz, der individuelle Interpretationen und lerseitige geistige Aktivität fordert, findet sich auch in Wolfgang Isers Untersuchungen. Iser geht davon aus, dass der Sinn eines Textes in jedem Rezeptionsvorgang neu hergestellt werden muss. Charakteristischer Untersuchungsgegenstand seiner Theorie sind die so genannten Leerstellen, die durch die/den Leser*in gefüllt werden müssen. In dieser Arbeit werden verschiedene Typen von Leerstellen in Lessings Fabelbuch identifiziert und einzelne Fabeln exemplarisch interpretiert.