Automatic story generation has a long-standing tradition in the field of Artificial Intelligence. The ability to create stories on demand holds great potential for entertainment and education. For example, modern computer games are becoming more immersive, containing multiple story lines and hundreds of characters. This has substantially increased the amount of work required to produce each game. However, by allowing the game to write its own story line, it can remain engaging to the player whilst shifting the burden of writing away from the game’s developers. In education, intelligent tutoring systems can potentially provide students with instant feedback and suggestions of how to write their own stories. Although several approaches have been introduced in the past (e.g., story grammars, story schema and autonomous agents), they all rely heavily on handwritten resources. Which places severe limitations on its scalability and usage. In this thesis we will motivate a new approach to story generation which takes its inspiration from recent research in Natural Language Generation. Whose result is an interactive data-driven system for the generation of children’s stories. One of the key features of this system is that it is end-to-end, realising the various components of the generation pipeline stochastically. Knowledge relating to the generation and planning of stories is leveraged automatically from corpora and reformulated into new stories to be presented to the user. We will also show that story generation can be viewed as a search task, operating over a large number of stories that can be generated from knowledge inherent in a corpus. Using trainable scoring functions, our system can search the story space using different document level criteria. In this thesis we focus on two of these, namely, coherence and interest. We will also present two major paradigms for generation through search, (a) generate and rank, and (b) genetic algorithms. We show the effects on perceived story interest, fluency and coherence that result from these approaches. In addition, we show how the explicit use of plots induced from the corpus can be used to guide the generation process, providing a heuristically motivated starting point for story search. We motivate extensions to the system and show that additional modules can be used to improve the quality of the generated stories and overall scalability. Finally we highlight the current strengths and limitations of our approach and discuss possible future approaches to this field of research.

The four stories in this collection follow different, yet strikingly similar, protagonists who are facing crossroads in life. These stories include memories and specific scenes from the past that combine with scenes from the present to trace the development of the characters.

A sense of place and time has been the unconscious focus of my adult life. While living in Hawaii I often searched for ancient rock carving sites. These art forms have the ability to convey the mystery, magic and history of previous times. I use human figures, beads and various textiles with similarities to these petroglyphs as a powerful metaphor for my search to find a place that is home

This thesis is an interpretation of the ritualistic and storied behaviour of two Christian congregations of the Charismatic ‘house-church’ or ‘New Church’ genre, established within the last thirty years in Glasgow, West of Scotland. The exercise is framed by the field of research and commentary on the global rise and impact of the Neo-Pentecostal or Charismatic Movement in the latter part of the twentieth century, from which the ‘house-churches’ derive motivation and ritual, and by the growing field of Congregational Studies pioneered by James F. Hopewell (1988) in Congregation: Stories and Structures. The congregations which form the locus for the fieldwork are Bishopbriggs Charismatic Church (BCC – a pseudonym) in the northern suburbs of Glasgow and Bridgeton Charismatic Fellowship (BCF - a pseudonym), an inner-city congregation in the East End of Glasgow. PART ONE: Charismatic Renewal, Congregational Studies & Two Churches provides the background in terms of general history, methodology, and interpretation of the two congregations. Chapter One charts the history of the Charismatic Movement and the rise of the ‘house-churches’, with particular focus on its history in Scotland. Chapter Two explores the literature relating to the ethnographic axis of ritual and narrative as used in this thesis. Chapter Three explains the rationale for the ethnographic methodology practiced, and its relationship to the theological interpretative schema in which it is framed. Chapter Four is a description of the fieldwork sites and a full picture of the two congregations. Chapter Five is a primary parabolic interpretation of the two congregations. PART TWO: Rituals that Live is a series of themed essays that explore and interpret the essential habitus of the two congregations. Chapter Six argues that music acts to catalyse the Divine-human encounter, turning ‘secular’ space into ‘sacred’ space. In Chapter Seven I observe and interpret the somatic nature of the ritual field. Chapter Eight explores an imaginal process which weaves its revelatory efficacy. Chapter Nine explores the symbiotic relationship of ritual to narrative and Chapter Ten turns ethnographic observation from the central ritual matrix of Sunday morning to the missional activity of the congregations. Chapter Eleven argues for a particular missiology based on motifs and themes arising from the previous six chapters. PART THREE: Beyond the Written Word concludes the thesis by arguing that the Charismatic habitus of the house-churches indicates a surprising turn of Protestant congregations to semiotics and orality. Following Catherine Pickstock (1998) and Walter J. Ong (1969) I contend that this turn is a pursuit of presence against the distancing effects of the written and propositional dogmas of Protestant ancestry.

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A collection of stories submitted by Heather Fowler for receipt of an MFA degree in Summer 2015.

Neste trabalho, apresentamos os resultados de uma pesquisa que aproxima a teoria semiótica e a literatura. Tal estudo consistiu na análise de um texto literário: o conto Menina a caminho, de autoria do escritor brasileiro contemporâneo Raduan Nassar. Para compreendermos o processo de construção de sentidos engendrado no referido texto, ancoramo-nos na teoria semiótica de linha francesa, ou greimasiana. Por meio do instrumental oferecido por essa teoria, pudemos compreender os mecanismos e efeitos de sentido articulados pelo enunciador do conto que, dentre outros fatores, são os responsáveis pela elevada qualidade estético-literária de seu texto. / In this dissertation, we present the results of a research that approaches the semiotic theory and literature. The study chooses as its subject the short-story Menina a caminho, from the Brazilian contemporary author Raduan Nassar. In order to make explicit the building of the text meaning, we have as approach the French semiotic theory. Through the tools offered by this theory, we can understand the means and meaning effects produced by the short-story enunciator that are responsible for the high aesthetic and literary quality of his text.

Le récit d'enfance émerge dans la seconde moitié du XIXe siècle. C'est au XXe siècle qu'il s'affirme et s’impose comme genre littéraire autonome. Cette consécration est le résultat de nombreux récits publiés dans différentes maisons d’édition et pays. S’il ne fait pas de doute qu’il se soit imposé dans les pays d’Europe, on est en droit de s’interroger sur sa présence et sa spécificité dans les espaces francophones. Notre choix d’étude s’est porté sur la littérature antillaise francophone (Martinique-Gaudeloupe) dans le plus vaste espace caribéen. Les récits d’enfance publiés permettent aux écrivains de revenir sur leur passé d’enfance mais aussi d'aborder des questions inhérentes à leur société. Est-il, pour eux, prétexte ou nécessité ? Patrick Chamoiseau illustre dans son récit, Antan d’enfance (1990), premier volet d’une trilogie, les racines mêmes de l'oralité antillaise mise en crise par le développement de la ville. Maryse Condé donne à lire avec Le cœur à rire et à pleurer(1999), la société coloniale de son enfance dans la bourgeoisie antillaise marquée au sceau de l'assimilation de ses parents. Daniel Maximin, lui, dans Tu c’est l’enfance (2004), donne à lire une société antillaise riche d’une histoire et d’une géographie dévastée par les catastrophes naturelles et qui, néanmoins, se relève et vit. Il montre une population qui résiste dans un univers où la vie et l'espérance sont possibles malgré tous ces cataclysmes. Il semble que le récit d'enfance, plus qu’un autre genre, est un miroir que les écrivains tendent aux lecteurs pour comprendre leur société dans son évolution historique, en constituant un reflet parmi d’autres de la société antillaise. Il permet d'aborder les questions de colonisation, d'esclavage, d'identité, de langue. Dans une société comme la société antillaise où la question d'identité est centrale à cause d’une histoire marquée par un lourd passé, le récit d'enfance, en privilégiant le regard naïf de l’enfant permet de dire plus qu’un autre genre littéraire et de faire accepter des interrogations dérangeantes.Mots-clefs : Autobiographie - récit - enfance – esclavage - créole. / Childhood as a theme in literature emerges in the second half of the 19th century and asserts itself as an autonomous literary genre in the following century. This achievement is the fruit of numerous stories having been published by various publishers around the world. If there is no doubt in the fact that the latter is now one of the major genres in European countries, one might wonder about its place and its specificity in French-speaking communities. The aim of our study is to focus on Caribbean Literature in particular from the Antilles (Martinique-Guadeloupe). Childhood stories enable writers to reflect on their past and furthermore to approach and tackle issues of their society. Is it for them a pretext or a need? Patrick Chamoiseau points out, in Antan d’enfance (1990), the first part of a trilogy, the origins of West-Indian’s (Caribbean-Antilles) orality which is in a state of crisis due to the development of the city. In Le coeur à rire ou à pleurer, Maryse Condé describes her childhood in the Caribbean bourgeoisie, marked with the assimilation of her parents, rooted in a colonial society. For his part, Daniel Maximin, in Tu c’est l’enfance (2004), deals with a Caribbean society with a rich historical background, which in spite of having been geographically devastated by natural calamities, recover and forge ahead. We get to see a society which resist in a world where life is possible and hope is still alive despite of all these calamities. It seems that childhood stories, more than other genres, act like a mirror that the writers tend towards the readers for them to understand the society of the former, and its historical evolution, thus reflecting one among other images of the Caribbean’s (Antilles) society. Furthermore, this enables questions relative to colonization, slavery, the identity, the language. In a society like the Caribbean one, where the question of identity is a key one due to its historical baggage, childhood stories, by adopting the naïve point of view of a child, allow to say much more than other literary genres can, and thus tackle and secure acceptance of usually upsetting questions and subject matters.Key words : Autobiographie - story - childhood – slavery - creole

Neste trabalho, apresentamos os resultados de uma pesquisa que aproxima a teoria semiótica e a literatura. Tal estudo consistiu na análise de um texto literário: o conto Menina a caminho, de autoria do escritor brasileiro contemporâneo Raduan Nassar. Para compreendermos o processo de construção de sentidos engendrado no referido texto, ancoramo-nos na teoria semiótica de linha francesa, ou greimasiana. Por meio do instrumental oferecido por essa teoria, pudemos compreender os mecanismos e efeitos de sentido articulados pelo enunciador do conto que, dentre outros fatores, são os responsáveis pela elevada qualidade estético-literária de seu texto. / In this dissertation, we present the results of a research that approaches the semiotic theory and literature. The study chooses as its subject the short-story Menina a caminho, from the Brazilian contemporary author Raduan Nassar. In order to make explicit the building of the text meaning, we have as approach the French semiotic theory. Through the tools offered by this theory, we can understand the means and meaning effects produced by the short-story enunciator that are responsible for the high aesthetic and literary quality of his text.