Title from PDF of title page (University of Missouri--Columbia, viewed on March 10, 2010). The entire thesis text is included in the research.pdf file; the official abstract appears in the short.pdf file; a non-technical public abstract appears in the public.pdf file. Thesis advisor: Dr. Kevin Wise. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Th. M.)--Regent College, Vancouver, BC, 2002. / Abstract and vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 120-125).

The purpose of this bachelor thesis is to examine posts on bookblogs about the book, Cirkeln by Mats Strandberg and Sara Bergmark Elfgren and see how it has distributed amongst readers through social media and reader response. We want through this examine whether bookblogs have a place in the literary society, and in such cases, how this may take place. The Swedish Online bookshops Adlibris and Bokus is being used to find the blogposts to be examined in this thesis. The analysis is being implemented using content analysis and constructed encoding schemes. Interdisciplinary topics, like LIS and sociology of literature may have similar points of contact, which we want to highlight with this thesis. It is also possible to extract understanding of their own research topic by taking advantage of each other's knowledge. This is done in our paper by using Lars Furuland´s model, den litterära processen, as a starting point. The interlocking of posts on bookblogs, reader response and Online book shops, we believe demonstrates that bookblogs have a place in the Swedish literary society.

This study was aimed to examine what happened when a municipality in Sweden invested in ICT. The purpose of this study was also to find out how the change of process with ICT investment was expressed the need for more knowledge. This was called “one-to-one” with the goal that all students would have their own computer during their years in school.Teachers have been interviewed and observed about how they work with ipads during reading and writing lessons. The teachers in this study said that they need more knowledge to improve their everyday work with ipads. They see many positive developments in students’ acquisition of knowledge. The intention was also to study how the teachers work with writing and reading for students at risk of future disabilities. Research that was presented in this study said that efforts and work to help students with reading and writing difficulties should start early and be done in a structured way to help students connect phoneme and grapheme to create alinguistic awareness.

Researchers have learned much about how sighted individuals seek information on Web sites - for example, users follow "information scent" as they move from page to page, and individual differences may impact successful information seeking on the Web. While it is possible that individuals with disabilities, especially those with severe visual impairments, perform information-seeking activities in a similar manner, little is known about how individuals who use screen readers to navigate actually seek information on the Web. In this study, we used both qualitative and quantitative measures to investigate the Web navigation techniques of four screen-reader users and how a user’s experience affects these navigation techniques and his or her ability to successfully complete an information-finding task. We compared metrics for between-page and within-page navigation to studies of sighted users. We also considered how a Web site’s compliance with Section 508 guidelines affects the overall information-finding experience of a visually-impaired individual. We discovered that among the four individuals in this study, user experience was not necessarily indicative of a successful information-finding experience. As individuals, the participants' navigation techniques varied widely; as a group, they generally searched more frequently and used the back button less frequently than has been reported for sighted individuals. Screen-reader users in this study followed a more flimsy, linear navigation style and generally used scrolling actions rather than searching actions. When using a Web site that has a Section 508 compliant home page, we found that the screen-reader users in this study completed information-finding tasks significantly more quickly, used significantly fewer actions, and reported a more satisfying information-finding experience. They were also more successful at finding the information goal and encountered fewer impasses. Using both quantitative and qualitative measures was critical in this study. The quantitative metrics allowed us to compare values and the qualitative data provided additional insight into individual differences as well as allowing a deeper understanding of the quantitative data. The information from this study contributes to the growing body of research knowledge about screen-reader users. It also contributes a new understanding of screen-reader users that can be used by the worldwide community of Web developers, designers, and users. / text

This thesis is about a problem of interest to reading theorists, psychological anthropologists and cultural studies researchers alike: why we find some narratives, plots, and images compelling and what this phenomenon can tell us about the cultural bases of human motivation. Gesturing to the interdependence of emotion, cognition, and motivation, the notion of the '(dis)positioned self' is proposed as a conceptual tool by which to address how motivation is both acquired and expressed in the way the self as 'feeling-mind' reads, that is, negotiates an interpretation of the signifying systems of a text to render it personally meaningful. (Dis)position allows us to overcome the sociocultural determinism of French structuralist and some poststructuralist reductions of the self to a precipitate of cultural constructs by reconceptualizing the interpreting self as an embodied, affective agent who employs unconscious knowledge that itself draws on another form of sociality. On this account, reading performance is culturally informed action and interpretations are motivated. Emotion is introduced as symptomatic of the intrapsychic investments which mediate how readers internalize cultural knowledge. The thesis looks at three soundings from social discourse--Janice Radway's Reading the Romance; The Singing Detective, a contemporary metafictional text; and the literature and group therapy practices associated with the codependency movement--in order to examine how presuppositions about emotion and the psychical reality of fantasy appear in cultural representations of the 'ill self as reader' while being fundamental to psychological notions of the self upon which healing practices themselves depend for their efficacy.

In recent years there has been a body of studies relating nostalgia and fiction in political, sociological, feminist, or historical ways. This thesis, instead, sets out to perform an unusual textual study of nostalgia in modern fiction in order to work towards a poetics of nostalgia. Although the experience of emotion is private, the object of analytical discourse must be to approach this experience with objective tools. The thesis therefore develops a method for analyzing the experience of nostalgia in literary texts and then uses this method to study how nostalgia can be evoked in readers. The method works through close textual readings, developed through reader-response and narratological theories and validated through a thorough investigation of modern nostalgia in general. The result is a taxonomy of nostalgic strategies that possibly create nostalgic reactions in readers.

This dissertation demonstrates how poetry about Appalachia expanded American considerations of democracy, ethnicity, and cultural values. I argue that poetry is profoundly communal in its construction and investigate how the value of poetry changes based upon its transfer through varying networks of production, circulation, and reception. Informed by theories of cultural capital and rhetoric, the chapters trace three books of poetry from their composition and publication to their reception and influence, noting how central political and social institutions and individuals shaped that process. The dissertation establishes how the poets crafted their writing to sway specific interpretive communities attitudes on pluralism. In Hounds on the Mountain (Viking, 1937), James Still sang about the erosion of the quiet earth for the liberal, middleclass readers of The Atlantic. In U. S. 1 (CoviciFriede, 1938), Muriel Rukeyser wrote about the deaths of migrant and African-American miners, the Spanish Civil War, and the threat of fascism for popular-front readers of The New Republic, Poetry, and the New Masses. In Clods of Southern Earth (Boni and Gaer, 1946), Don West catalyzed resistance in an interracial readership of southern (and mountain) sharecroppers and factory workers. In each case, the complex interrelations between history, authors, and readers show their mutually transformative effects on pluralism. Within American pluralism from1900 to 1948, my work reveals the vital relations between established ethnicitiesAfrican-American, Jewish, Anglo, American Indian, and Southernand Appalachia. My account follows the concrete connections of pluralism from Plessy vs. Fergusons judicial theory of racial purity, through a cultural pluralism based on national origins during WWI, to the Harlem Renaissance, and ends with an examination of regional pluralism in the 1930s. Appalachia was then often understood as preserving remnants of a premodern America, and the authors about whom I write used it to authenticate the values of community, which they felt to be endangered by the threats of modern dissociation, industrial exploitation, and fascist culture. Through close readings of poems in the three books, I establish Appalachias role in the discourse of modern American pluralismthe poetics of region and race.

The exegesis accompanies a thesis, the latter being the portfolio of work consisting of two parts, each being a completed first draft of a novel written during the Masters of Creative Writing course: Part 1: ‘Sandcastles’ - a 'closed' text novel Part 2: ‘The Postmodern Rules For Family Living’ - an 'open' text novel These two works are separately bound with a thesis cover sheet and numbered. They are embargoed until 30 June 2011. The exegesis covers the writer’s motivation for writing these works, reflections on the course of development and changes in thinking that occurred during research and the act of writing. It shows the changing perspectives of the writer’s two thesis works in context and in contra-distinction to each other. It includes the writer’s academic and creative goals as they developed and the result achieved in terms of those goals. It highlights the writer’s developing interest in literary theory including suggesting an ephemeral adjunct to Reader-Response theory which is described as 'Collapse'. It shows the development of the writer’s deep interest in reality in fiction versus the lie in fiction and in the differences between writing and reading a creative work produced primarily for entertainment versus work of a literary nature, identifying some of the differences in features the writer has perceived.

The exegesis accompanies a thesis, the latter being the portfolio of work consisting of two parts, each being a completed first draft of a novel written during the Masters of Creative Writing course: Part 1: ‘Sandcastles’ - a 'closed' text novel Part 2: ‘The Postmodern Rules For Family Living’ - an 'open' text novel These two works are separately bound with a thesis cover sheet and numbered. They are embargoed until 30 June 2011. The exegesis covers the writer’s motivation for writing these works, reflections on the course of development and changes in thinking that occurred during research and the act of writing. It shows the changing perspectives of the writer’s two thesis works in context and in contra-distinction to each other. It includes the writer’s academic and creative goals as they developed and the result achieved in terms of those goals. It highlights the writer’s developing interest in literary theory including suggesting an ephemeral adjunct to Reader-Response theory which is described as 'Collapse'. It shows the development of the writer’s deep interest in reality in fiction versus the lie in fiction and in the differences between writing and reading a creative work produced primarily for entertainment versus work of a literary nature, identifying some of the differences in features the writer has perceived.