The stories in this collection explore the fantastical, the power of memory, and the human capacity to love. Moving between the surreal, the absurd, the allegorical, and the metafictional, they elaborate on life's ordinary madness and the mysteries of the spirit. By challenging the either/or boundaries of the binary of realism and fantasy, the stories provoke the reader to engage actively with the text. Influenced by experimental US author Stacey Levine, the mid‐century British novelist Barbara Comyns, and the adventurous Chinese writer Can Xue, in most cases, they create a playful, experimental world that exists at a slight angle to the world as we know it.

This dissertation, which examines the literary representation of childhood trauma, is held together by three threads of inquiry. Firstly, I examine the stylistic devices through which three contemporary African writers – NoViolet Bulawayo, Uwem Akpan, and Mia Couto – engage with the subject of childhood trauma in five of their short stories: “Hitting Budapest”; “My Parents’ Bedroom” and “Fattening for Gabon”; and “The Day Mabata-bata Exploded” and “The Bird-Dreaming Baobab,” respectively. In each of these narratives, the use of ingén(u)s in the form of child narrators and/or focalisers instantiates a degree of structural irony, premised on the cognitive discrepancy between the protagonists’ perceptions and those of the implied reader. This structural irony then serves to underscore the reality that, though in a general sense the precise nature of traumatic experience cannot be directly communicated in language, this is exacerbated in the case of children, because children’s physical and psychological frameworks are underdeveloped. Consequently, children’s exposure to trauma and atrocity results in disruptions of both personal and communal notions of safety and security which are even more severe than those experienced by adults. Secondly, I analyse the political, cultural and economic factors which give rise to the traumatic incidents depicted in the stories, and the child characters’ interpretations and responses to these exigencies. Notions of subjectivity and intersubjectivity, identity and community, victimhood and survival, agency and disempowerment are discussed here in relation to the context of postcolonial Africa and the contemporary realities of chronic poverty, genocide, child-trafficking, the aftermath of civil war, and the legacies of colonialism and racism. Thirdly, this dissertation inspects the areas of congruence and divergence between trauma theory, literary scholarship on trauma narratives, and literary attempts to represent atrocity and trauma despite what is widely held to be the inadequacy of language – and therefore representation – to this task. There are certain differences between the three authors’ depictions of children’s experiences of trauma, despite the fact that the texts all grapple with the aporetic nature of trauma and the paradox of representing the unrepresentable. To this end, they utilise various strategies – temporal disjunctions and fragmentations, silences and lacunae, elements of the fantastical and surreal, magical realism, and instances of abjection and dissociation – to gesture towards the inexpressible, or that which is incommensurable with language. I argue that, ultimately, it is the endings of these stories which suggest the unrepresentable nature of trauma. Traumatic experience poses a challenge to representational conventions and, in its resistance, encourages a realisation that new ways of writing and speaking about trauma in the African continent, particularly with regards to children, are needed. / Adobe Acrobat 9.54 Paper Capture Plug-in

L’objet de cette thèse est d’étudier la morale des histoires tragiques, du milieu du XVIe siècle au début du XVIIe siècle, à partir de la notion d’exemplarité. Cette notion nous permet de dépasser l’opposition entre l’histoire tragique conçue comme « histoire de loi » ou comme une littérature à sensation et de trouver une voie médiane entre le moralisme de l’une et immoralité de l’autre. La morale des histoires tragiques est avant tout une morale de l’exemple. Nous montrons que l’idée que l’exemplarité traverse une crise à la Renaissance doit être largement relativisée et que le mode d’énonciation de la nouvelle favorise son fonctionnement exemplaire. Nous analysons ensuite comment l’exemplarité morale permet de comprendre le positionnement générique des histoires tragiques et explique en grande partie son rapprochement avec l’histoire et la tragédie, conçues comme des genres moraux. Enfin, nous étudions la nature et les problèmes de cette exemplarité qui repose sur la force des mauvais exemples et sur des cas extraordinaires qui semblent aller à contre-courant des prescriptions morales. Les histoires tragiques tentent de mettre sur pied un nouveau type d’exemplarité qui s’appuie sur le cas singulier et non plus sur la répétition d’exemples semblables. / This thesis aims to show how exemplarity allows for a fresh analysis of the morality of tragic short stories, known as “histoires tragiques”, between the second half of the 16th century and the beginning of the 17th. The ”histoires tragiques” are neither just “histoires de loi” nor sensationalistic stories, and exemplarity helps us find a middle way between the former’s moralism and the later’s immorality. The morality of the “histoires tragiques” essentially works through examples: on this basis, we first put into perspective the crisis that exemplarity is thought to be going through during the Early modern period. We then argue that, through moral exemplarity, we can understand how the “histoires tragiques” take after the two moral “genres” of history and tragedy. Lastly, we study the limits of this exemplarity, which mainly proceeds from the seduction of bad examples and extraordinary cases that seem to be in contrast with commun moral. As the “histoires tragiques” don’t rely anymore on the repetition of similar exemples, this singularity of cases can be seen as a mean to renew exemplarity.

This thesis is a collection of nine short stories about real people dealing with unreal problems. In one story, a small-town man answers a knock at his door, only to find three wisemen, who have followed a star and proclaimed him as their new messiah. In another, a reporter travels across the snowy length of Canada looking to interview people who have witnessed the Virgin Mary materialize above Toronto. Deranged Egyptologists, vampires with diseased blood, wacky witches, and unhappy mediums all inhabit tales whose landscapes span the distance between Chattanooga, Tennessee and the afterlife.

This collection of nine short stories follows Adelia Villalobos and Isidoro Belmonte, two Cuban Americans solving crimes in present-day South Florida. The former best friends have grown apart during college, but when Adelia is drawn into a murder case, the outcome leads Isidoro to return home and the pair to found the unlicensed detective agency, Calle Panadero (Spanish for Baker Street). Their cases explore the underside of many facets of the community, including bigamy, fraud, and criminal organizations. Along the way, they deal with love, death, and family obligations, and arrive at a new understanding of how their destinies are linked. Influenced by Agatha Christie and Jennine Capó Crucet, CALLE PANADERO revolves around protagonists living in a predominantly Hispanic community and the ties that bind them to it and each other. Although each story is a separate narrative, together they depict Adelia and Isidoro’s changing relationship and their individual growth.

This thesis is a study of the treatment of mental disability in Canadian literature. Literature reflects the perceptions and practises of the culture of which it is a part. Radical changes have been made in recent years in the thinking about persons with mental handicaps. The issue of whether the changes are reflected in literature prompted the writing of this thesis. Little is known about characters labelled as mentally disabled in non-didactic, Canadian Literature. They are not commonly discussed in the academic journals of Canadian Literature and Education. The purpose of this thesis was to get to know ten of the above characters. The following questions were drawn from issues in the academic literature regarding mental disability. All seven questions were applied to each character in turn. (1) Label? (2) Personal relationships? (3) Thoughts and feelings? (4) Choices? (5) Daily activity? (6) Relationship with service providers? (7) Personal assets and abilities? Short story characters: Benny Parry, "The Time of Death," Munro, 1968; Dolores Boyle, "Dance of the Happy Shades," Munro, 1968; Kelvin, "Circle of Prayer," Munro, 1986; Neddy Baker, "Hello Cheeverland, Goodbye," Findley, 1984; Stella Bragg, "Bragg and Minna," Findley, 1988. Characters from novels: Francis Cornish, "What's Bred in the Bone," Davies, 1985; John-Gustav Skandl, "What the Crow Said," Kroetsch, 1978; Lotte, "Not Wanted on the Voyage," Findley, 1984; Rowena Ross, "The Wars," Findley, 1977; Tehmul Lungraa, "Such a Long Journey," Mistry, 1991. Findings indicated that Canadian literature is not yet reflecting the new movement to develop full personhood. Most characters were limited in the choices they made. A variety of labels were used. Little was said about what the characters think or feel. No characters were married, had children, or a job. Most of the characters had a personal relationship with another character. / Education, Faculty of / Educational and Counselling Psychology, and Special Education (ECPS), Department of / Graduate

Orientador: Iumna Maria Simon / Dissertação (mestrado) - Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Instituto de Estudos da Linguagem / Made available in DSpace on 2018-08-04T02:02:39Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 MajorNeto_JoseEmilio_M.pdf: 13295117 bytes, checksum: 143fc344889fab7f366aaa3ad94c29c7 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2001 / Resumo: Este trabalho se propõe a analisar Contos Novos de Mário de Andrade, demonstrando a elaboração particular que autor desenvolve no processo moderno de representação literária, que consiste basicamente em dois aspectos: o emprego de elementos musicais como princípio de construção e a releitura, em tom paródico, da tradição literária tanto brasileira quanto européia, em especial pela assimilação dos elementos constitutivos do bildungsroman / Abstract: This dissertation intends to analyse Contos Novos, by Mário de Andrade, in order to point out two fundamental aspects which particularize the author's diction in the context of modem Jiterary representation: the use of musicaJ elements as a principie of composition and also the use of parody as a manner of reading both the brazilian and european literary tradition, specially that concerned with the bildungsroman / Mestrado / Literatura Brasileira / Mestre em Teoria e História Literária

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Reading English literature can help learners of English as a foreign language (EFL) to develop their reading ability as well as other language skills. Reading can also have other benefits for EFL students such as learning about the target language’s culture or learn about an English variety in written form. This present study investigates what types of literature are used in Swedish upper secondary school, the EFL teachers’ attitudes towards short stories compared to simplified novels/graded readers and their preferred assessment methods associated with literature teaching. The majority of the teachers that took part in this survey have a positive attitude towards short stories and use them in their EFL classes. The results also show that after the students have completed reading a short story, most of the teachers that participated in this survey preferred to combine examination methods such as a group discussion with a written test. The title of this paper comes from one of the informants’ comments when asked if she would rather use a short story or a graded reader in her English class. This informant had used graded readers in her English language classroom, but she and everyone that took part in this survey chose short stories over graded readers.

Elizabeth Stoddard (1823-1902) has been overlooked by most modern literary critics and scholars. She needs to be incorporated into the canon of the American novel in order to establish a deserved critical visibility and to retain it for many years to come. Her groundbreaking fiction, unconventional by any nineteenth-century standard, especially as evidenced by The Morsesons and by some of her short stories, is characterized by penetrating psychology, individuality, and enduring literary qualities.