| 1. |
- Axelsson, Marcus, 1979-
(författare)
-
”Kalla mig inte mamsell!” : En jämförelse av tre skandinaviska översättares behandling av kulturspecifika element i fransk- och engelskspråkig skönlitteratur
- 2016
-
Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The present study deals with the work and practice of three Scandinavian translators, namely Kjell Olaf Jensen (Norwegian), Marianne Öjerskog (Swedish) and Agnete Dorph Stjernfelt (Danish). The main question of the thesis is what strategies the translators use when translating culture-specific elements from French and English. Theoretically the thesis positions itself within the framework of Descriptive Translation Studies and draws upon system theories as well as Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology of culture. The method consists of a source text – target text analysis, using a somewhat modified version of Pedersen’s (2007) method identifying seven translation strategies, namely (1) retention, (2) specification, (3) direct translation, (4) generalization, (5) substitution, (6) omission and (7) official equivalent. In this thesis the three former and the official equivalent are categorized as “adequate”, whereas generalization, substitution and omission are categorized as “acceptable” using Toury’s (2012) terminology. Six different types of culture-specific elements are investigated, namely (1) titles, address and professional titles, (2) currencies, (3) weights and measures, (4) literature and music, (5) education, and (6) names. In addition to this analysis, interviews with the three translators were carried out. Results show that there are both similarities and dissimilarities in the translators’ choices of translation strategies. It also turns out that the strategies used to a great extent depend on the culture-specific element in question and hardly ever on the source language. Results also suggest that the higher the translators’ amount of accumulated total capital, the more likely it is that they adopt a heterodoxic translation strategy. Jensen and Stjernfelt are more often positioned at one of the two extremes of the adequacy–acceptability axis than is the case for Öjerskog. Moreover, results from the interviews and the text analyses show that there are a number of norms that govern the translators’ practices. The translatorial practice is to manoeuver in a field governed by norms in order to produce the best possible target texts – target texts that are true to the original and conform to domestic literary standards.
|
|
| 2. |
- Pasquini, Mirko, 1991
(författare)
-
The Negotiation of Urgency: Economies of Attention in an Italian Emergency Room
- 2021
-
Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Urgency in a hospital Emergency Room (ER) is not a self-evident state. Urgency is made, by establishing priorities, distributing attention and material resources, and deciding who and what needs to be attended to first – and, simultaneously, who and what has to wait. The process of determining urgency is known as “triage” (from the French verb, trier, “to choose”). This thesis is about the vicissitudes of triage in an Italian ER. Based on one year of ethnographic fieldwork, the thesis explores what happens when urgency is at stake; when it is contested and caught up between different, and frequently conflicting, perspectives. It explores how urgency is determined in practice, and shows how triage always is a vulnerable process of negotiation guided by economies of attention. How is urgency actually shaped in interactions between patients, their families and friends, and the ER staff? The different chapters explore how time in the ER is created through shifting registers of attention, and how attention in the ER is affected by widespread economic and social precarity, and neoliberal national policies of governance. It discusses how triage increasingly is structured by attitudes of mistrust; and also by potential or real outbreaks of violence. Addressing the particular positioning of the ER as a thick space of conjunction between neoliberal state politics and people's increasing need for care and recognition, the thesis aims to contribute to medical anthropology literature by analyzing triage not as a neutral medical way of sorting, but as a practice that actively creates difference. It explores both the limits of triage, and how those limits can spark improvisation and creative reinvention.
|
|
| 3. |
- Rodéhn, Cecilia, 1977-
(författare)
-
Lost in Transformation : A critical study of two South African museums
- 2008
-
Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- In this dissertation Transformation, as understood in South Africa, is investigated in the ‘Natal Museum’ and the ‘Msunduzi Museum Incorporating the Voortrekker Complex’ in terms of socio-political structures, the museum as a place, its collections and displays. I have emphasised the ethnographical perspective and analysed it by using key concepts such as new museology, time, space and place. My research focuses on the perception and mediation by museum staff-members of Transformation which is compared and positioned against South African and international museological theoretical discourses. I further explore the political backdrop to Transformation of South African museums and discuss related problems and aspects such as reconciliation, nation-building and the African Renaissance. Socio-political structures, acts, reports and policy documents are analysed over a long temporal sequence, but focus on the period 1980-2007. The long temporal sequence is a tool to capture the development connected to the museums in space and time and aims to compare and present previous developments in order to investigate how Transformation positioned itself as against the past. I hold that Transformation should be treated as an ongoing process connected to other transformation processes across time. I also propose that Transformation started earlier than previously suggested and that it is not a question of one Transformation but of many transformation processes. The urban landscape and the concept of place and name are explored. My research examines the urban landscape from the establishment of Pietermaritzburg to study how the museums were positioned in the landscape and how this has contributed to associated meanings. The museums are treated as demarcated places in the urban landscape which are named and infused with meaning and ownership. The museums are constituted and acted out within specific socio-political structures. The dissertation suggests that the objectives of Transformation reveal themselves through negotiation and alteration of place and name. My research explores the history of the museum collections – how objects were acquired, classified and used to materialise the museums´ institutionalisation of time and what this brought about for heritage production. I investigate what did and did not change when the museums transformed and I deconstruct the new and old objectives and socio-political ideas of collections. I analyse displays as socio-political spaces, the agent’s appropriation, and the discrepancies within dominant socio-political structures. When Transformation materialises in displays it becomes visible for the public to see. The negotiated displays show how the museum tries to visualise Transformation to the public. The discussion analyses the discussed concepts of Transformation, the structures, place, name, display and collection, and relates these to the concept of time, and to how agents create time and make it visual. I also discuss how museological writing and political speeches shape and negotiate Transformation through their articulation and how they sometimes constrain and form discrepancies to actual reality.
|
|
| 4. |
- Buhre, Frida, 1984-
(författare)
-
Speaking Other Times : Hannah Arendt and the Temporality of Politics
- 2019
-
Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Political rhetoric frequently utilizes imaginaries of time. Ideas of an eternally sanctioned principle, a historical tradition, a future to come, or a radical change in the present are all part of the temporal toolkit of political rhetoric. The role of these imaginaries has provoked growing interest in rhetorical and political theory, and this thesis contributes to this line of scholarship by offering the first comprehensive examination of political temporalities in the works of Hannah Arendt. In Arendt’s political thought, the temporal imaginaries differ depending on forms of government, and each chapter of the thesis addresses, in turn: tyranny as depending on an eternal principle introduced into contingent worldly time; authority as legitimized by reiterations of tradition; totalitarianism as justified by a trans-historical and ever-changing future; and finally, politics as empowered by the present’s antagonistic negotiations with past memories and future anticipations. Important observations are that the temporal imaginaries of tyranny, authority, and totalitarianism facilitate rhetorical practices that utilize force, violence, hierarchy, and domination. And, in contrast, that the temporalities of politics enable antagonistic speech, action, and formation of public opinion through judgment. The thesis thus provides a systematic account of the political imaginary of eternity, past, future, and present in the thought of Arendt, and contributes to conceptual development in the field of Arendtian scholarship, rhetorical theory, and political temporalities.The study concludes that each examined temporal imaginary is comprised of plural and intersecting temporal logics where, for example, eternal principles can utilize the futurity of threat, memories of the past can spark revolutions, and anticipations of the future can stabilize the present. By mobilizing the concept of anachronism, the thesis argues that these conflicting temporal intersections carry persuasive and performative potential. In Arendt’s discussions of temporality, power, and modes of rhetorical expression, certain anachronistic imaginaries take form that carry freedom-enabling potential: by speaking other times, politics can mobilize the power to realize freedom.
|
|
| 5. |
- Jonsson, Ewa
(författare)
-
Conversational Writing : A Multidimensional Study of Synchronous and Supersynchronous Computer-Mediated Communication
- 2013
-
Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This study is a linguistic investigation of two genres of computer-mediated communication (CMC), namely two modes of conversational writing: ‘Internet relay chat’ (synchronous CMC) and ‘split-window ICQ chat’ (supersynchronous CMC). The study employs Douglas Biber’s multifeature multidimensional methodology, taking into account the six dimensions of textual variation in English identified in his 1988 book Variation across speech and writing (i.e. Informational vs. Involved Production, Narrative vs. Non-Narrative Concerns, Explicit/Elaborated vs. Situation-Dependent Reference, etc.).The procedure of positioning the two CMC genres on Biber’s (1988) dimensions enables the systematic lexico-grammatical description of the genres relative to other genres of writing and speech. Out of Biber’s 67 linguistic features, the study identifies first and second person pronouns, direct WH-questions, analytic negation, demonstrative and indefinite pronouns, present tense verbs, predicative adjectives, contractions and prepositional phrases as the most salient features in the chats (prepositional phrases are conspicuous by their relative rarity).Although none of Biber’s (1988) dimensions constitutes a dichotomous distinction between writing and speech, they all differentiate among literate and oral genres in various respects. Among the genres studied by Biber are face-to-face and telephone conversations. By relating the CMC genres to the oral conversational genres on the dimensions, it is possible to assess the degree of orality in computer-mediated conversational writing, another undertaking of the study. The results support previous assumptions that synchronously mediated texts display more speech-like properties than asynchronous texts, but lend little support to an initial hypothesis that supersynchronously mediated conversational writing texts should be more speech-like than synchronously mediated ones.The study further employs M. A. K. Halliday’s model of semiotics, among other things to explain differences in the outcome of subtly divergent communicative settings, and argues for the inclusion of Halliday’s measure of lexical density in studies of linguistic variation involving conversational writing.Finally, two features not included in Biber’s (1988) methodology are found to be particularly indicative of conversational writing texts: inserts, specified in Biber et al.’s (1999) Longman grammar of spoken and written English, and emotives, a feature introduced in the study. Emotives comprise emoticons and sentiment initialisms.
|
|
| 6. |
- Schou Therkildsen, Louise, 1983-
(författare)
-
A European State of Mind : Rhetorical Formations of European Identity within the EU 1973–2014
- 2022
-
Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- European identity has become a central issue in the EU’s political imaginary. In recent years, European identity—and related notions of a European destiny, European culture, and a European narrative—has been deployed as a weapon against the rise of the political far-right across Europe. Epideictic rhetoric is thus at the heart of the EU’s political debate.The purpose of this study is to investigate how the EU works rhetorically with collective identity formation and to examine the implications of such formations for both the EU and its citizens. Through rhetorical and topological close readings, the study explores these practices of identity formation from a thematic as well as a diachronic perspective (1973–2014). It does so with the theory of constitutive rhetoric as its framework even as it proposes to extend the theory’s subject field in terms of constitutive means, temporal imaginaries, and projected practices.Each analytical chapter addresses a different aspect of the EU’s constitutive rhetoric: The transition from the formation of an institutional identity to the formation of collective identity and how the means of identity formation have both altered and accumulated; the EU’s historiographical construction of a new narrative that reaches beyond the lifetime of the union in search of a more authentic past to use as a foundation in present and future mythology. This narrative hinges on the founding narrative of peace that enables the EU to act as a normative exemplum in Europe and beyond; and, finally, the visionary rhetoric of eternity and omnipresence that incorporates the whole world into its own imaginary, while simultaneously projecting a specific set of norms that constrains the agency of the model EU citizen: the Eurostar. The study concludes that throughout its practices of collective identity formation, the EU is positioned as an ambivalent rhetorical agent. On the one hand, the EU wishes to become recognised and mythologised as the Subject—the heart of Europe, a state of mind, a symbol of transcendence, peace, and tolerance. On the other, to be viewed as the silent benefactor and facilitator of peace and deliberation, the arbiter of soft, nonideological power. The Eurostar fills the important function of confirming the self-interpellation of the EU’s ambivalent position and embodying the culture of nonideological deliberation in the face of the ideology of others.
|
|
| 7. |
- Andersson, Jakob, 1974-
(författare)
-
Kingship in the Early Mesopotamian Onomasticon 2800–2200 BCE
- 2012
-
Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Thousands of Sumerian and Old Akkadian personal names from 3rd millennium BCE Meso-potamia are known and documented. The present study inspects names containing the royal appellatives, Sumerian lugal and Akkadian śarrum. The study aims at uncovering the rela-tionships between personal names and the development of early historical kingship and reli-gious thought in the area.An overview of Sumerian and Old Akkadian names and name-giving serves as a starting point for semantic investigations of lugal- and śarrum-names. Sumerian and Old Akkadian names are to a large extent meaningful, and the literal meaning can be used to arrive at an understanding of the symbolic value, which led to the coining of the name. Discussions rely on comparable passages of contemporary and later written traditions.To facilitate discussion and comparisons between the languages, names are divided into semantic groups based on characteristic traits found in contemporary royal inscriptions and religious texts. Parallel constructions are noted whenever such constructions are known. Names are assigned human or divine referents when possible. A look at political and religious developments puts the distribution of certain name types over time and space into perspective. Local and regional traditions and types are displayed and related either to royal ideological traits or to theological speculation. Besides locally significant gods, a few other deities can be identified as referents in names. A brief statistical overview of different archives shows that names featuring the figure of the lugal experience an increase in popularity at the expense of other types.A system of annotation gives approximate numbers for bearers of names belonging to the types investigated. Lists of attestations, which document date and archival context, form the basis for discussions and conclusions and make the material available for inspection and further exploration.
|
|
| 8. |
- Aydin, Sami, 1979-
(författare)
-
Sergius of Reshaina, Introduction to Aristotle and his Categories, Addressed to Philotheos : Syriac Text, with Introduction, Translation, and Commentary
- 2015
-
Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- There are two related texts extant in Syriac written by the physician and commentator Sergius of Reshaina (d. 536) about the philosophy of Aristotle. This book provides a critical edition and a facing English translation of the shorter of these texts. The edition is based on the single preserved manuscript of the text (Berlin, Petermann I 9). An introduction to Sergius’ life and works, and an analysis of the text in its intellectual context, is also provided. His writing is one of the earliest analyses on Aristotelian philosophy in the Syriac language and presents concepts that were taught at the Neoplatonist school of Ammonius Hermeiou (d. 517-526) in Alexandria.Sergius received his philosophical and medical education in Alexandria and was active in the city of Reshaina as one of the first translators of profane Greek material into Syriac. He translated chiefly medical works by Galen, especially those that were studied in the Alexandrian school, but also the theological corpus of Pseudo-Dionysius. Sergius composed some original works on Aristotle’s philosophy as well. Through his translation work and literary activity, he paved the way for the later engagement in medicine and Aristotelian philosophy among Syriac writers. His importance and influence is acknowledged by the historical testimonies to him, as well as by the numerous ways in which his works were read and used.The text of Sergius, edited here, treats themes that are primarily found in Aristotle’s Categories. After a preface, in which the author refutes potential criticism and justifies his writing, he begins his work with a traditional division of the philosophy into theory and practice with their respective subdivisions. He also presents the Platonist notion of universals, before introducing the ten categories of reality into which, according to him, Aristotle had arranged all existing things. However, Sergius discusses the categories of substance, quantity, quality, and relatives more extensively, since these four were considered to be the main categories. Many problems related to these categories are presented together with proposed solutions. Other topics described by Sergius are such as what is a distinctive property, the natural philosophers’ view of the four elements, the modes of opposition and its difference from contrariety, and the five kinds of priority. Moreover, Sergius provides a relatively lengthy discussion of the nature of space and whether it belongs to the category of quantity. This discussion is based on the Alexandrian commentators’ interpretations of Aristotle’s Physics rather than the Categories. In the commentary section of this edition, Sergius’ line of thought is clarified and compared to some Greek commentaries from the same tradition.
|
|
| 9. |
- Heffermehl, Fabian
(författare)
-
Bildet sett fra innsiden : Ikonoklastiske og matematiske konsepter i Florenskijs omvendte perspektiv
- 2015
-
Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- For the Armenian-Russian mathematician, theologian and art-theoretician Pavel Florensky (1882–1937), the so-called reverse perspective of the Byzantine cult-image (in Greek: eikon) functioned not only as a phenomenon within painting, but also as an expression of a world-view that should ultimately define a cultural distinction between Russia and Europe. Florensky argued in various ways that the Russian-Orthodox reverse perspective represents ethical and aesthetical values that are superior to the Western linear perspective. He saw the lack of an exact definition of depth in the icon as an expression of true religious orientation towards a spiritual realm, which cannot be described within frames of our earthly – or Euclidean – categories of space and time. In other words, the reverse perspective became regarded as a real reversal of Western painting, requesting a different space, a different observer, and a different concept of reality.This dissertation is an “archeological excavation” in the 20th century Russian-Orthodox icon theology. By analyzing theories of Florensky in the first line, and also a number of his contemporaries and predecessors, I identify a complex of different layers similar to a palimpsest. In this palimpsest, archaism, paganism, patristic theology, and romanticism interact with a modern re-conceptualization of the medieval Orthodox icon. However, in a usual palimpsest the old letters shine through the new ones; Florensky, on the contrary, seems to project paradigms of his contemporary culture and science into his description of the medieval icon. In this case, would the reverse perspective not instead be a reverse palimpsest, where new texts become visible in the old texts? With this question, my dissertation introduces an approach to Florensky and the icon that is more complex than what has been the case in earlier research. A usual explanation of the formal aesthetics of the icon is that the icon painter directs his/her spirit towards Heaven and, consequently – and in contrast to the Renaissance painter – does not try to make a mimesis of the earthly things. However, I argue that this dichotomy between a profane and spiritual mentality should be regarded both as a condition for Florensky’s world view and, at the same time, as a construction produced by his thinking.
|
|
| 10. |
- Hållen, Nicklas, 1983-
(författare)
-
Travelling objects : modernity and materiality in British Colonial travel literature about Africa
- 2011
-
Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This study examines the functions of objects in a selection of British colonial travel accounts about Africa. The works discussed were published between 1863 and 1908 and include travelogues by John Hanning Speke, Verney Lovett Cameron, Henry Morton Stanley, Mary Henrietta Kingsley, Ewart Scott Grogan, Mary Hall and Constance Larymore. The author argues that objects are deeply involved in the construction of pre-modern and modern spheres that the travelling subject moves between. The objects in the travel accounts are studied in relation to a contextual background of Victorian commodity and object culture, epitomised by the 1851 Great Exhibition and the birth of the modern anthropological museum. The four analysis chapters investigate the roles of objects in ethnographical and geographical writing, in ideological discussions about the transformative powers of colonial trade, and in narratives about the arrival of the book in the colonial periphery. As the analysis shows, however, objects tend not to behave as they are expected to do. Instead of marking temporal differences, descriptions of objects are typically unstable and riddled with contradictions and foreground the ambivalence that characterises colonial literature.
|
|
