myth (n.) A traditional story which embodies a belief regarding some fact or phenomenon of experience, and in which often the forces of nature and of the soul are personified; a sacred narrative regarding a god, a hero, the origin of the world or of a people.2 A parable; An allegory. From the French word mythe (1818) and directly from Modern Latin mythus, which originated from ancient Greek mŷthos : "speech, thought, discourse, word, humour, conversation, story, saga, tale, anything delivered by word of mouth". Attested in English since 1830. Ever since I was a child, I have been fascinated with the fictional world of stories and the act of of storytelling. Always wide-eyed and excited, I remember the countless times that I have lost myself in the mythical worlds in stories. It is moments of sadness or of anxiety, but also of wonder, of ecstasy even, the experience of the beautiful under one or the other of its innumerable forms, the joy of love, of discovery, of happiness in that sense, that are most likely to remind us of our humanity. Hence, when I started my thesis about wanting to explore the design of a built space through the context of storytelling, I was confused. There were these three questions that hounded me at every turn : 1. What is a "place for storytelling"? Does the act of storytelling really exist within the confines of a particular "place"? 2. And if yes, do stories emerge from places? Or do places emerge from stories? What is the nature of the relationship between both? 3. And if places truly are born out of stories, is it possible to craft a journey through a built space akin to our journey through the mythical worlds of a storyteller? / Master of Architecture / What is a "place for storytelling"? Do stories emerge out of built spaces? Or do built spaces emerge out of stories? I had questions on the relevance of architecture in something as raw and primal as the act of storytelling. But what I did not anticipate was that, of all the many different things that I was exploring, the path that I was to actually take would lie in a children's book that I had never heard about before. It was pure serendipity that I chanced upon it, and later it changed my whole thesis in ways that I could not imagine. I realized that I needed not to find "answers" to questions; but rather enjoy this beautiful journey that I was on. The magic of storytelling cannot be shut within walls, but needs to grow outwards. Storytelling is as much about excitement as it is about contemplation. It is about remembering the child within us, and about taking a moment to stop and watch sunsets. It is about rituals and thresholds and gazing at stars. It is about shattering the layers and layers of "grown-up" ideas that we tightly wrap ourselves with. It was when I stopped looking for answers, that I could truly understand what is the nature of the built space that I was dreaming of. Rather than being a single elusive construct - it was an eclectic mix of many different experiences tied together into a journey, guided by a little boy with golden hair.

All of the stories in The Center of the Known World are subtly linked by their connection to the Appalachian Mountains — more specifically the Allegheny Mountains — although not all of the stories take place physically in the mountains. They also are linked in that they explore the small changes and shifts that take place in the emotional landscape as we live our daily lives. There are no life or death situations that change characters' lives in the beat of a heart or the shot of a gun. Rather, these are people who deal with gradual shifts in power and understanding. They are people in search of connection and community. Some of them come to seemingly small realizations that change everything. Others battle flaws or demons that keep them from having the things they want most. The first five stories are free-standing pieces. The next two stories — Grand Opening Special at the West End U-Store and A Fine Addiction — are connected by location and characters. I hope eventually there will be other stories in that series. The final part of my thesis — Skin Writing — is the first section of a novel in progress. / Master of Fine Arts

In the theoretical part of dissertation main ideas and concepts of narrative psychology are reviewed. The notion of both narrative and paradigmatic knowing coined by Jerome Bruner is explained. The importance of story and narrative for organizing and understanding human experience is discussed. Other psychological functions of both story and narrative metaphor are mentioned. In the empirical part selected stories that could be considered as a part of European cultural heritage (cultural meta-narratives) are analysed. The methods used for story analysis are TAT (ThematicApperception Test) and CCRT (Core Conflictual Relationship Theme, Luborsky et al.). The aim of the empirical part is to verify the construct of "a latent story". Another goal is to identify repeating motives in the selected stories, that could be used as a form of projective method. Keywords Story, narrative, latent story, narrative psychology, myth.

Cette étude consiste à embrasser dans un même mouvement les différents récits courts stendhaliens. Elle s'articule en cinq temps. Les trois premiers moments consistent à analyser, séparément, les anecdotes, nouvelles et récits inachevés stendhaliens. Une fois ces différentes typologies établies, l'étude se focalise sur la notion d'énergie, dénominateur commun de l'ensemble des récits courts composés par Stendhal. Enfin, le dernier chapitre cherche à montrer aussi bien la portée que la place de ces textes hétérogènes dans le vaste ensemble de la création stendhalienne. L'un des principaux intérêts de ce travail est de réhabiliter des textes qui, pour des raisons aussi bien génériques qu'éditoriales, n'ont pas encore été l'objet d'une étude exhaustive. Notre réflexion vise également à montrer tout à la fois la permanence et l'unité du genre bref dans l'œuvre de Stendhal, malgré l'existence d'indéniables différences entre les textes. Notre étude établit également une continuité entre récits courts et récits longs, ce qui permet de mieux comprendre des phénomènes stendhaliens aussi essentiels que l'inachèvement, la réécriture ou encore l'intertextualité. / This study is to embrace in the same movement the various short stories Stendhal. It is divided into five times. The first three stages are to analyze separately the anecdotes, news stories and unfinished Stendhal. After these established typologies, the study focuses on the concept of energy, the common denominator of all short stories composed by Stendhal. The last chapter seeks to show both the extent that instead of these heterogeneous texts in the broad set of Stendhal's creation. One of the main interests of this work is to rehabilitate texts that, for reasons both generic editorial, have not yet been subject to a comprehensive study. Our thinking is also intended to show the permanence and unity of the short kind in Stendhal's work, despite the undeniable existence of differences between the texts. Our study also establishes continuity between short stories and long stories, allowing a better understanding of phenomena as essential as Stendhal incompleteness, rewriting or intertextuality.

This study examines the process and procedures employed by storytellers to craft an oral historical narrative. Contemporary storytellers are working toward a transferable methodology and this work is an effort toward that end. Using the various procedures described by nearly 20 storytellers, a single process is assembled. The methodology is then tested, checking for transferability. The case study used to test the methodology is based on the life of Emmeline B. Wells, the fifth Relief Society President of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. Wells was born in Massachusetts and emigrated to the west in 1848. She edited a leading suffrage paper of her time, The Woman's Exponent. Wells also worked, unsuccessfully, to repeal anti-polygamy laws. Engaging the methodology, through the means of this case study, the paper outlines both the contemporary storytellers' crafting processes as well as her own experiences. As gaps in the descriptive model are noted, techniques are discovered to strengthen the procedure. Through replication of this process, insight will be provided into a transferable methodology.

This project is a creative production that combines image, sound, and narrative. It uses these elements to employ a twist as a device for a paradigm and genre shift in a short film text. My short film introduces a plot that is seemingly linear. Yet, the twist presents a piece of information that reveals the actual non-linear nature of the story, which in turn necessitates the re-interpretation of the plot. The aim of this project is to explore how a twist in a narrative-based short film can alter the cues and perceptions the audience receive from the plot. The project is predominantly practice-based (80%).

This story cycle focuses on the members of the Ordoñez family of Castroville, California from the time of the first generation’s migration from Mexico in the 1950s to the most recent generation who moves out of the town in the 2000s. “The Ordoñez Pride” shows the entire family as they experience a miracle. Cecilia, the matriarch, receives a belated wedding ring that bursts into flame that doesn’t burn her, but everything else it comes into contact with. The flame also magically sparks hers and her husband’s sex life into overdrive and, late in life, they produce three more children, for a total of nine. Following this framing story, we see snapshots of all the other family members at life-changing moments. In “After the Revolution” we see Ray Ordoñez , the family patriarch, grow from a boy into a man, as he defends his sister from what he perceives to be the American ranch owner practicing the right to first night—a custom that was still practiced in rural Mexico in the twentieth century. Eventually, Ray migrates to California and begins his family, becomes assimilated into American culture, and reluctantly welcomes an American boy—his oldest daughter’s boyfriend—into his household.

Narrative Intelligence is the ability to craft, tell, understand, and respond appropriately to narratives. It has been proposed as a vital component of machines aiming to understand human activities or to communicate effectively with humans. However, most existing systems purported to demonstrate Narrative Intelligence rely on manually authored knowledge structures that require extensive expert labor. These systems are constrained to operate in a few domains where knowledge has been provided. This dissertation investigates the learning of knowledge structures to support Narrative Intelligence in any domain. I propose and build a system that, from an corpus of simple exemplar stories, learns complex knowledge structures that subsequently enable the creation, telling, and understanding of narratives. The knowledge representation balances the complexity of learning and the richness of narrative applications, so that we can (1) learn the knowledge robustly in the presence of noise, (2) generate a large variety of highly coherent stories, (3) tell them in recognizably different narration styles and (4) understand stories efficiently. The accuracy and effectiveness of the system have been verified by a series of user studies and computational experiments. As a result, the system is able to demonstrate Narrative Intelligence in any domain where we can collect a small number of exemplar stories. This dissertation is the first step toward scaling computational narrative intelligence to meet the challenges of the real world.

In translation studies, the short story cycle has been largely overlooked as an object of study in prose translation. This thesis serves as a case study on the practice of translating the short story cycle, using my translation of Suzanne Myre’s 2007 short story collection Mises à mort as a paradigm. The thesis comprises four sections: the first is devoted to a discussion of the short story cycle, a modernist form of the short story collection. It is a hybrid subgenre, balancing elements of both the traditional short story collection, characterized by heterogeneity, and the novel, characterized by homogeneity. In this first section, I examine a few definitions of the cycle, then I discuss the subgenre according to a four-part criteria established by Gerald Lynch: ‘character,’ ‘place,’ ‘theme’ and ‘style or tone.’ In the second section, I provide an analysis of Mises à mort within the framework of short story cycle criteria; an examination of the characters, setting, overarching themes and stylistic parallels serves to demonstrate how and why I ultimately interpreted the collection as a short story cycle. The third section is my complete translation of the work. In the fourth and final section, I discuss what implications my interpretation of Mises à mort as a cycle had for my translation thereof, and what unique challenges it presented. I compare my first draft, produced in the mindset that I was translating a traditional collection, to my final draft, revised to accommodate the cohesiveness of the work. This thesis serves to demonstrate how a translator can accommodate for the dual nature of the short story cycle, simultaneously maintaining the discreteness and interconnectedness of the stories.

I dagens mångkulturella samhälle är det många barn som talar två eller flera språk. Det är viktigt att kunna bemöta flerspråkiga barn och ge dem rätt språkligt stöd vid behov. Denna studie baseras på MAINs testmaterial som är utformat inom ramarna för COST projekt IS0804 för bedömning av barns narrativa förmåga och använder berättelser till bildserier som ett sätt att samla in barns narrativer. Syftet med studien är att beskriva narrativ förmåga hos tvåspråkiga rysk-svensktalande barn och bidra med referensdata till ovannämnda projekt. Deltagarna var tio simultant tvåspråkiga rysk-svensktalade barn mellan 6:8 och 7:10 samt tre successivt tvåspråkiga barn. Barnen fick berätta på ryska och svenska kring två makrostrukturellt lika bildserier samt svara på en rad förståelsefrågor utifrån bildernas innehåll. Insamlade ryska och svenska narrativer analyserades på makro- och mikrostrukturell nivå. Resultaten visade att det fanns tydliga skillnader mellan barnens prestationer i berättandet och förståelsen. Narrativernas övergripande struktur vad gäller story grammar och komplexitet stämde väl överens mellan språken oavsett barnets språkbehärskningsnivå. Däremot fanns det stora skillnader i förekomsten av Internal State Terms tokens mellan ryska och svenska narrativer som bara kunde förklaras med rent kulturella skillnader mellan språken. Detta resultat ifrågasätter värdet av jämförelse av IST tokens mellan språk. De små skillnader som påvisades vid en kvantitativ analys av narrativernas mikrostrukturer vad gäller yttrandelängd och lexikal variation kan förklaras med språkspecifika morfo-syntaktiska distinktioner mellan ryska och svenska. En kvalitativ analys av barnens narrativer påvisade att fel ordval, utelämningar och kodväxlingar var mer typiska för barnens svagaste språk. Kongruenssvårigheter påträffades i båda språken hos simultant tvåspråkiga barn men inte i ryska narrativer hos barn vars modersmål var ryska. Det behövs mer forskning inom ramarna för COST Action IS0804 som handlar om berättandeförmåga hos tvåspråkiga barn med språkstörning. Detta kan i sin tur leda till att testmaterialet blir standardiserat och kan användas inom logopedisk verksamhet. / In today's multicultural society there are many children who speak two or more languages. It is important to be aware of possible problems and provide them with adequate language assistance if needed. This study is based on the MAIN test material designed within COST project IS0804 for the assessment of children's narrative skills, which uses a number of picture sequences to elicit children’s narratives. The study aims to investigate the storytelling abilities of a group of bilingual Russian-Swedish speaking children and provide reference data for the above-mentioned project. The participants were ten simultaneously bilingual Russian-Swedish speaking children between the age of 6 years and 8 months and 7 years and 10 months, as well as three age-matched children with Russian as their native language and Swedish as a second language. Children were asked to tell a story in Russian and Swedish using two picture sequences with parallel macrostructure and then answer comprehension questions based on the content of the pictures. The Russian and Swedish narratives were analyzed on both macro- and microstructural levels. The results showed that there were clear differences between the children’s storytelling and their understanding. Overall narrative structure in terms of story grammar and complexity was quite similar in both languages, irrespective of language exposure pattern. However, there were significant differences between the prevalence of Internal State Terms tokens in Russian and Swedish narratives that could only be explained by purely cultural differences between the languages. This result questions the feasibility of straightforward of IST tokens between languages. The minor differences revealed by quantitative analysis of the stories’ microstructures in terms of utterance length and lexical diversity could be explained by language-specific morphosyntactic differences between Russian and Swedish. A qualitative analysis of the narratives showed that wrong choice of words, omissions and code-switching were more typical of the child's weakest language. Difficulties with inflections were found in both languages for simultaneous bilingual children but not in Russian stories told by children with Russian as their first language. More research is needed within the framework of COST Action IS0804 on the storytelling abilities of bilingual children with language impairment. This may in its turn lead to the test material being standardized and put into common use in speech-language therapy.