This thesis considers how Mori Ōgai’s “Maihime” (1890) and Su Manshu’s “Suizanji” (1916) conform and differ from Edgar Allen Poe’s theory of the short story. It then considers Ōgai’s and Su’s reading of the short stories and East Asian short fiction as well as Ōgai’s definition of the short story to consider why these works of short fiction differ from Poe’s definition, concluding that they are hybrid works, which seek to combine the short story and East Asian short fiction.

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Chapter 1 outlines the aim of the study, research methodology, delimitation of scope and the definition of some terms. This is followed by a list of Zulu short stories which Ntuli has already contributed. His other contributions in circles outside the writing of fiction are also acknowledged. Finally, tribute is paid to some contributions made by Ntuli as an endeavour to uplift the standard of Zulu writing. In Chapter 2 plot structure is discussed. This is followed by an in-depth semiotic analysis of some short stories. Chapter 3 deals with the different narration techniques employed by the author in his short stories. Chapter 4 differentiates between actors and characters. Different methods of character portrayal are investigated. Chapter 5 concludes this dissertation by summarising the main finding of this study. It also brings forth some conclusions with regard to literary merit of Ntuli's short stories and his contribution to Zulu literature. / African Languages / M.A. (African Languages)

År 2009 startades det europeiska forskningsprojektet COST Action IS0804 med syfte att få mer kunskap om flerspråkiga barns språkutveckling och utveckla bedömningsmaterial anpassade för flerspråkiga barn. Inom COST Action fokuserar arbetsgruppen Narrative and discourse på berättelser (narrativer) som ett sätt att bedöma språk hos barn. Berättande liknar naturlig språkanvändning och anses ge en mer rättvisande bild av flerspråkiga barns förmåga än andra logopediska test. Av narrativgruppen utvecklades bedömningsmaterialet MAIN (Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives). Med MAIN kan barns produktion och förståelse av berättelser undersökas på makrostrukturell nivå. Berättelsernas makrostruktur (dvs. övergripande struktur) analyseras med story grammar (SG). En hypotes är att makrostruktur inte är språkspecifik och därför kan jämföras mellan olika språk. I föreliggande studie undersöktes berättande hos 16 simultant svensk-engelskspråkiga barn (4:11- 5:8 år, medel 5:4 år) med MAIN. Resultaten jämfördes med flerspråkiga 6-7-åringar med samma språkkombination (Härdelin & Naylor, 2012). Inga signifikanta skillnader noterades mellan femåringarnas berättelser på svenska och engelska, vare sig i produktion (p= 0,084) eller förståelse (p= 0,21). Däremot fanns en signifikant skillnad mellan de äldre och de yngre barnen, både avseende produktion (p= 0,00099) och förståelse av berättelser (p= 0,0072). I barnens berättelser fanns avvikande konstruktioner med tvärspråkliga drag, såsom transfer och kodväxling. Tvärspråkliga drag bör därför inte tolkas som markörer för språkstörning, utan är en del av typisk flerspråkig utveckling. Sammanfattningsvis tycks makrostrukturella skillnader i berättande vara kopplade till ålder snarare än till språk. Studiens resultat ger en bild av femåringars prestation på MAIN, vilket inte har undersökts tidigare i en svensk kontext. Genom att jämföra resultatet med äldre barn studerades berättandeutvecklingen hos svensk-engelskspråkiga barn. / Since 2009, the EU research network COST Action IS0804 has been working towards gaining more knowledge about bilingual language acquisition in typically and atypically developing children, and towards creating assessment tools which are specifically adapted to bilingual children. Within COST Action, one working group, Narrative and discourse, focuses on narratives as a way to assess children’s language. Narratives provide more naturalistic language samples than item-based tests and are less biased against bilingual children compared to other language assessments. The Narrative and discourse group developed the assessment tool MAIN (Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives). MAIN examines children’s production and comprehension of narratives on a macrostructural level (i.e. overall story structure) within the framework of story grammar (SG). One current hypothesis is that macrostructure is language independent and can therefore be compared across languages. In the current study, 16 simultaneous bilingual children (ages 4:11- 5:8, mean 5:4 years) with the language combination Swedish-English were assessed with MAIN. Their results were compared with the results of bilingual 6-7 year olds with the same language combination (Härdelin & Naylor, 2012). Results showed no significant difference regarding macrostructure between the children’s two languages, neither in production(p= 0,084) nor in comprehension (p= 0,21). However, there was a significant difference between the younger and the older children, both in production (p= 0,00099) and comprehension (p= 0,0072). Non-targetlike structures due to cross-linguistic influence,e.g. transfer and code-mixing, were noticed for both age groups. Cross-linguistic influence should thus not be mistaken for language impairment, but rather be treated as a natural part of bilingual language acquisition. In conclusion, differences in macrostructure seemed to be related to age rather than to language. The results of the current study provide insight into the performance of five-year-olds on MAIN, which has not previously been studied in a Swedish context. By comparing the results with older children, the study documents the narrative development of Swedish-English bilinguals from age 5 to 7.

Stories, themes, concepts and references are organized structurally and purposefully in most books. A person reading a book needs to understand themes and concepts within the context. Schank’s Dynamic Memory theory suggested that building on existing memory structures is essential to cognition and learning. Pirolli and Card emphasized the need to provide people with an independent and improved ability to access and understand information in their information seeking activities. Through a review of users’ reading behaviours and of existing e-Book user interfaces, we found that current e-Book browsers provide minimal support for comprehending the content of large and complex books. Readers of an e-Book need user interfaces that present and relate the organizational and narrative structures, and moreover, reveal the thematic structures. This thesis addresses the problem of providing readers with effective scaffolding of multiple structures of an e-Book in the user interface to support reading for comprehension. Recognising a story or topic as the basic unit in a book, we developed novel story segmentation techniques for discovering narrative segments, and adapted story linking techniques for linking narrative threads in semi-structured linear texts of an e-Book. We then designed an e-Book user interface to present the complex structures of the e-Book, as well as to assist the reader to discover these structures. We designed and developed evaluation methodologies to investigate reading and comprehension in e-Books, in order to assess the effectiveness of this user interface. We designed semi-directed reading tasks using a Story-Theme Map, and a set of corresponding measurements for the answers. We conducted user evaluations with book readers. Participants were asked to read stories, to browse and link related stories, and to identify major themes of stories in an e-Book. This thesis reports the experimental design and results in detail. The results confirmed that the e-Book interface helped readers perform reading tasks more effectively. The most important and interesting finding is that the interface proved to be more helpful to novice readers who had little background knowledge of the book. In addition, each component that supported the user interface was evaluated separately in a laboratory setting and, these results too are reported in the thesis.

Fourteen short stories, with five interspersed vignettes, describe the lives of gay people in the southwestern United States, centered around a fictional gay country-and-western bar in Dallas and a small town in Oklahoma. Various characters, themes, and trajectories recur in the manner of a short story cycle, as explained in the prefatory Critical Analysis, which focuses on exemplary works of James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Shirley Jackson, Italo Calvino, Yevgeny Kharitonov, and Louise Erdrich.

My thesis is in its theoretical level about development, meaning, function and option how to use a story in today's educational reality. The thesis concentrates on the story in progress of time and it defines the place of the story in postmodern society. My work studies the story in a point of view of several psychological orientations and especially trough the point of view of modern psychology. I would like to propose possible aspects of the effects of the story and uncover options how to work with the story as a didactical method. This is therefore the reason for detailed option of the story from lots of sides. In the theoretical part, there I deal with the story from historical, religious, philosophical and psychological points of view, because I think these starting points can be just the coveted inspiration for psycho - didactical thinking. In the special - theoretical part, there I write about theoretical pedagogical definition and principles for using of the story in education. I also examine using of the story as a tool how to enrich and make the educational process more effective.

O trabalho pretende analisar o amadurecimento do conto no Brasil a partir da leitura das produções de Machado de Assis, Raul Pompeia e Lúcio de Mendonça publicadas na década de 1880, período que corresponde ao aparecimento de Papéis avulsos (1882) e Histórias sem data (1884), de Machado, do total dos contos de Pompeia em periódicos e da coletânea Esboços e perfis (1889), de Mendonça. Para tanto, far-se-á uma linha evolutiva do conto brasileiro a partir de seu surgimento ainda no período romântico de modo a compreender de que maneira a forma do conto atingiu uma maturidade expressiva e artística na década de 80, considerando-se o que de fundamental se conquistou ali como fontes para o conto moderno. / The work intends to analyze the maturation of the short story in Brazil from the reading of the productions of Machado de Assis, Raul Pompeia and Lúcio de Mendonça published in the years 1880, period that corresponds to the appearance of Papéis avulsos (1882) and Histórias sem data (1884), of Machado, of the total short stories of Pompeia in periodicals and the compilation Esboços e perfis (1889), de Mendonça. To do so, an evolutionary line of the Brazilian short story will be carried out from its emergence still in the Romantic period in order to understand how the form of the short story reached an expressive and artistic maturity in the 80´s, considering what of fundamental was conquered there as fountains for the modern short story.

O trabalho pretende analisar o amadurecimento do conto no Brasil a partir da leitura das produções de Machado de Assis, Raul Pompeia e Lúcio de Mendonça publicadas na década de 1880, período que corresponde ao aparecimento de Papéis avulsos (1882) e Histórias sem data (1884), de Machado, do total dos contos de Pompeia em periódicos e da coletânea Esboços e perfis (1889), de Mendonça. Para tanto, far-se-á uma linha evolutiva do conto brasileiro a partir de seu surgimento ainda no período romântico de modo a compreender de que maneira a forma do conto atingiu uma maturidade expressiva e artística na década de 80, considerando-se o que de fundamental se conquistou ali como fontes para o conto moderno. / The work intends to analyze the maturation of the short story in Brazil from the reading of the productions of Machado de Assis, Raul Pompeia and Lúcio de Mendonça published in the years 1880, period that corresponds to the appearance of Papéis avulsos (1882) and Histórias sem data (1884), of Machado, of the total short stories of Pompeia in periodicals and the compilation Esboços e perfis (1889), de Mendonça. To do so, an evolutionary line of the Brazilian short story will be carried out from its emergence still in the Romantic period in order to understand how the form of the short story reached an expressive and artistic maturity in the 80´s, considering what of fundamental was conquered there as fountains for the modern short story.

In this study 538 children composed 1 oral and 1 written fictional story in both 2nd and 4th grades. Each child represented 1 of 4 diagnostic groups: typical language (TL), specific language impairment (SLI), nonspecific language impairment (NLI), or low nonverbal IQ (LNIQ). The stories of the TL group had more different words, more grammatical complexity, fewer errors, and more overall quality than either language-impaired group at either grade. Stories of the SLI and LNIQ groups were consistently stronger than were those of the NLI group. Kindergarten children with language impairment (LI) whose standardized test performance suggested normalization by 2nd grade also appeared to have recovered in storytelling abilities at that point. By 4th grade, however, these children's stories were less like the children with TL and more like those of children with persistent LI than they had been in 2nd grade. Oral stories were better than written stories in both grades, although the greatest gains from 2nd to 4th grade were generally made on written stories. Girls told stronger stories than did boys at both grades, regardless of group placement. It is concluded that story composition tasks are educationally relevant and should play a significant role in the evaluation of children with developmental LI.