Cinq auteurs nous permettent d’avoir une vision plurilatérale du conflit israélo-palestinien, aussi notre travail porte-t-il sur l’étude comparative de textes de Mahmoud Darwich, d’Edward Saïd, David Grossman, Jean Genet, et Philip Roth. Pour chacun, nous avons choisi un texte qui traduit leur rapport avec ce conflit, et au-delà leur lien avec un territoire et un peuple. C’est de ce lien dont il est question : soit l’écriture reflète, chez certains auteurs, les liens familiaux, ancestraux, originaires qui lient l’écrivain à sa communauté. Soit l’écriture étend ses marges vers d’autres nouages pour trouver des « branchements » en dehors du même. Entre les deux attitudes se jouent deux conceptions du politique, deux acceptations différentes du « démos » de la démocratie ; l’acceptation ou non de l’étrangeté. Ce sont alors également deux approches différentes de la littérature. Celle-ci n’a pas forcément à perpétuer nos « représentations » mais à les questionner pour que s’ouvre un autre rapport à l’autre et à nous-même. Les représentations dominantes chez les uns et les autres, chez les Israéliens comme chez les Palestiniens, sont marqués par un fantasme de plénitude qui exclut toute approche de l'autre. Le texte littéraire, inspiré de ces jeux de miroir avec le politique, devrait défaire ce fantasme afin que l'accès à l'autre et à sa reconnaissance soit libre. / Five authors provide give us a vision of plurilateral Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Our work also focuses on the comparative study of texts of Mahmoud Darwish, Edward Saïd, David Grossman, Jean Genet, and Philip Roth. For each of them, we chose a text that reflects their relationship to this conflict, and beyond their relationship with a territory and a people. This link is in question: is the writing reflects some authors, family ties, ancestral origin that binds the writer to his community. Either writing extends its margins to other knotting to find "connections" outside the same. Between the two attitudes are two conceptions of politics, two different meanings of "demos" of democracy and acceptance or not of strangeness. It then also two different approaches to literature, it did not necessarily perpetuate our "representations" but question them in order to open another relative to each other and ourselves that is no longer conditioned by them. Against the cult of the full and full of fantasy players raging on both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the literary text and the political will revise each other, so we can perhaps due recognition of otherness.

This master thesis presents the character of Job and his reception in German-speaking literature on the basis of three works of the twentieth century, written by Joseph Roth, Oskar Kokoschka and Günter Kunert. The starting point for the literary reception is the biblical Old Testament book Job, whose story, form and circumstances of origin are mentioned in the first part of the work. Following are the performances of individual authors and the interpretation of their works. The core of the work is a comparison of literary reception of the figure of Job in the texts with a biblical original. The subject of the study was, in particular, the question of how the selected authors deal with the biblical substance, how they use Job for their works and which meaning have the comic elements in their texts.

The background to this essay is that I wanted to analyze the factions in Veronica Roth´s novel Divergent and class from a Marxist perspective. I used a Marxist perspective on social class to find details that matched or looked similar to the novel and did an analysis and comparison between them. I found that a lot of details in how the different factions are described and represented can be compared with classism due to significant similarities, such as social behavior and prioritization among different groups. / Bakgrunden till denna uppsats är att jag ville analysera falangerna i Veronica Roths bok Divergent samt klass från ett marxistiskt perspektiv. Jag använde ett marxistiskt persspektiv på social klass för att finna detaljer som matchade eller liknade novellen och gjorde en analys och jämförelse mellan dem. Jag fann att en hel del detaljer gällande hur de olika falangerna är beskrivna och representerade kan jämföras med klassism tack vare signifikanta liknelser, såsom socialt beteende och prioriteringar inom olika grupper.

This work explores the capabilities of KB-BERT on the downstream task of Question Classification. The TREC data set for Question Classification with the Li and Roth taxonomy was translated to Swedish, by manually correcting the output of Google’s Neural Machine Translation. 500 new data points were added. The fine-tuned model was compared with a similarly trained model based on Multilingual BERT, a human evaluation, and a simple rule-based baseline. Out of the four methods of this work, the Swedish BERT model (SwEAT- BERT) performed the best, achieving 91.2% accuracy on TREC-50 and 96.2% accuracy on TREC-6. The performance of the human evaluation was worse than both BERT models, but doubt is cast on how fair this comparison is. SwEAT-BERTs results are competitive even when compared to similar models based on English BERT. This furthers the notion that the only roadblock in training language models for smaller languages is the amount of readily available training data. / Detta arbete utforskar hur bra den svenska BERT-modellen, KB-BERT, är på frågeklassificering. BERT är en transformermodell som skapar kontextuella, bidirektionella ordinbäddningar. Det engelska datasetet för frågeklassificering, TREC, översattes till svenska och utökades med 500 nya datapunkter. Två BERT-modeller finjusterades på detta nya TREC-dataset, en baserad på KB-BERT och en baserad på Multilingual BERT, en flerspråkig variant av BERT tränad på data från 104 språk (däribland svenska). En regel-baserad modell byggdes som en nedre gräns på problemet, och en mänsklig klassificeringsstudie utfördes som jämförelse. BERT-modellen baserad på KB-BERT (SwEAT-BERT) uppnådde 96.2% korrekthet på TREC med 6 kategorier, och 91.2% korrekthet på TREC med 50 kategorier. Den mänskliga klassificeringen uppnådde sämre resultat än båda BERT-modellerna, men det är tvivelaktigt hur rättvis denna jämförelse är. SwEAT-BERT presterade bäst av metoderna som testades i denna studie, och konkurrenskraftigt i jämförelse med engelska BERT-modeller finjusterade på det engelska TREC-datasetet. Detta resultat stärker uppfattningen att tillgänglighet till träningsdata är det enda som står i vägen för starkare språkmodeller för mindre språk.

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Belly Laughs: Body Humor in Contemporary American Literature and Film Scholars are more than happy to laugh at but seem somewhat reluctant to discuss body humor, which is perhaps the most neglected form of comedy in recent criticism. In this dissertation, I examine the ways in which contemporary American writers and filmmakers use body humor in their works, not only in moments of so-called "comic relief" but also as a valid way of exploring many of the same issues that postmodern artists typically interrogate in their more somber moments. The writers discussed in this project-Philip Roth, Thomas Pynchon, Charles Johnson, and Woody Allen-were chosen for the divergent ways in which they present the body's comic predicament in psychological, metaphysical, and historical situations. The introduction explains the diverse traditions that these artists draw upon and considers how various theoretical approaches can affect our understanding of body humor. The first chapter examines Jewish-American novelist Philip Roth's use of absurd and grotesque body imagery as manifestations of his characters' moral dilemmas. The second chapter looks at how slapstick comedy informs a worldview dominated by paranioa and chaos in Thomas Pynchon's novels. Chapter Three looks at Woody Allen's early films, in which he parodies and revises the slapstick cinematic tradition of artists like Charlie Chaplin and The Marx Brothers. Chapter Four considers African-American writer and cartoonist Charles Johnson's depiction of the ways in which the body's desires and pitfalls complicate the quest for spiritual enlightenment.

This thesis examines five books by the American author Philip Roth commonly referred to as the “Roth Books,” which are The Facts: A Novelist’s Autobiography(1988), Deception (1990), Patrimony: A True Story (1991), Operation Shylock: A Confession (1993), and The Plot Against America (2004). These books, held together by the author’s proper name, are often viewed as texts that conflate fiction and nonfiction or demonstrate the “fictionality” of all factual narrative accounts in compliance with well-known postmodernist and poststructuralist theories. Contrary to this view, I argue that a valid understanding of the Roth Books demands that we acknowledge that these works represent a series of quite different ways for the author to transform his own life into written form, a creative act which is manifested in both fictional and nonfictional writing. In the attempt to argue this view, I turn to a field of study where the question about criteria for distinguishing fictional from nonfictional narrative literature has occupied a prominent place: narrative theory. However, my theoretical and methodological point of departure does not align itself with the “standard” paradigm in narrative theory with its origin in classical, structuralist narratology. Rather, the thesis promotes a pragmatic and rhetorical perspective which is argued to better account for how we read and make sense of different narrative texts. In opposition to standard narrative theory, where all narratives are considered to adhere to the same model of communication, I argue in favour of a view where narrative fiction and narrative nonfiction are conceived as distinct communicative practices. I open the thesis by showing that Roth’s books contribute to the discussion on how to distinguish fictional from nonfictional narrative texts (Chapter 1). I then continue by approaching the distinction between fiction and nonfiction in general theoretical terms (Chapter 2). And in what follows (Chapters 3-5), I present a reading where the Roth Books are juxtaposed against each other. This reading demonstrates how these texts, although in some sense related, because of their divergent qualities and differing intentions still communicate differently with their readers, inviting a readerly attention that is dissimilar from one work to the other.

La présente étude traite d'À la merci d'un courant violent de Henry Roth. Cette tétralogie de près de 2000 pages, publiée entre 1994 et 1998, venait rompre le silence de plus d'un demi-siècle qui avait suivi la publication du seul roman de Roth, Call it Sleep (L'or de la terre promise). Elle s'inscrit de manière originale dans le sillon d'œuvres au statut générique indécidable, sinon problématique. Discours référentiel et fictionnel y cohabitent, s'y intriquent et s'y contredisent. Si la matière est en grande partie autobiographique, les procédés formels sont issus sans conteste de la tradition des romans réalistes, modernes et contemporains (de Dickens à la métafiction de Gass en passant par Joyce, Proust et Dos Passos). Devant beaucoup à la théorie des genres littéraires de Jean-Marie Schaeffer et plus particulièrement à la définition théorique et historique du roman autobiographique comme genre littéraire de Philippe Gasparini, cette étude cherche à approfondir le problème du genre contradictoire et hétérodoxe de l'œuvre tardive de Roth, le roman autobiographique. Le mémoire, en trois chapitres, traite du pacte de lecture contradictoire, scellé par le double affichage générique délibérément orchestré par l'auteur et par l'éditeur, et de ce que Vincent Colonna a appelé la lecture duelle, à la fois référentielle-autobiographique et fictionnelle. Par là, il touche au problème de la vérité dans sa relation à la fiction et tente, finalement, de proposer des pistes d'analyse inusitées sur la question épineuse de l'auteur (comme notion, comme figure et comme personne) en études littéraires. ______________________________________________________________________________ MOTS-CLÉS DE L’AUTEUR : Henry Roth, À la merci d'un courant violent, roman autobiographique, roman juif américain, auteur.

The decades following two world wars, the European Holocaust and the threat of nuclear annihilation presented American authors with an occupational dilemma: catastrophic histories call out for recognition, but any representation of them risks adding violence to violence by falsifying the account or conflating historical acts of violence with their artificial doubles. This project reimagines the political aesthetics of postmodern American fiction through two major interventions. First, I identify an aesthetic structure of apposition--a parallel relationship between abstract works of art and the everyday world that I take from William Carlos Williams--that allows me to productively resolve a tension in the aesthetics of Hannah Arendt: because representation takes mimesis as a particular end, Arendt disqualifies representational art from politics, which she defines as open-ended action between human beings and not as end-centered state-craft. At the same time, Arendt claims that art is a product of thought, the cognitive activity she associates with political action over and against fabrication. My heterodox reading of Arendt shows that appositional narratives, like political actors, perform their own self-disclosure, beginning the open-ended chain of actions and reactions that Arendt identifies as the substantial form of politics and ethics. Second, I use my revision of Arendt to demonstrate that appositional narratives act politically through the very same metafictional tropes that critics often label as escapist or solipsistic. Rather than copy historical experience, appositional narratives reject illusionary representation and present themselves as actors, inciting their readers to respond with pluralistic, provisional judgment. Taking Vladimir Nabokov, Philip Roth and Toni Morrison--three central but rarely-juxtaposed postmodern novelists--as case studies, I show that we cannot properly assess the political implications of postmodern fiction without understanding the specific mechanisms of narrative apposition. Appositional works stand temporarily and self-consciously in the place of the world, displacing it in the experience of their readers. This narrative strategy provides a political alternative for novelists facing the ethical crises of postmodernity. Appositional narratives displace their readers' settled beliefs and press them to exercise their human capacity for judgment. They embrace their responsibility for the world by refusing to represent it. / text

This essay explores how anti-normativity is achieved in Veronica Roth's novel Carve the Mark and uses Lois Lowry's The Giver and Ursula K Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness as points of comparison. It examines if Roth, Lowry, and Le Guin follow through with creating characters that are more than superficially queer by destabilizing gender and traditional attitudes towards identity markers. Using queer theory and gender performativity theory, this essay examines if the queerness of the characters and their relationships hold up when juxtaposed to normativity. When exploring the novels, it can be seen that these authors fail to create characters and relationships that are anything but superficially queer.