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| 2. |
- Larsson, Tove, et al.
(författare)
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Syntactic complexity across registers : Investigating (in)formality in second-language writing
- 2020
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Ingår i: Journal of English for Academic Purposes. - : Elsevier BV. - 1475-1585 .- 1878-1497. ; 45
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Syntactic complexity (i.e. the grammatical sophistication exhibited in language production) has been found to be positively correlated with formality. In viewing formality as a cline rather than as a dichotomy, the present study revisits previous claims about (in)formality in learner writing in relation to syntactic complexity. The use of commonly utilized measures of syntactic complexity is explored in learner writing and across four registers from the British National Corpus (academic prose, popular science, news and fiction). The results show that while the learners generally exhibited appropriate register awareness, there were some differences noted between their writing and that of the published writers, in particular with regard to the measure of complex nominals. A detailed analysis of this measure in the academic register showed that the learners make less frequent use of adjectival and prepositional modifiers than the expert writers. Our results thus confirm previous claims about the importance of phrase-level complexity measures as a predictor of formality. It would seem that learners would benefit from some targeted instruction of such structures for increased register awareness.
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| 3. |
- Farstad, Britt Johanne, 1961-
(författare)
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Glaspärlespelaren : Nya världar, etik och androcentrism i Peter Nilsons science fiction-romaner
- 2013
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This thesis focuses on Peter Nilson’s (1937-1998) science fiction texts, and particularly on how narrative themes and structures in these texts are related to science as well as to the literary tradition of science fiction (SF). The primary texts are the novels Arken (The Ark, 1982), Äventyret (The Adventure, 1989), Rymdväktaren (The Space Guard, 1995), Nyaga (1996) as well as the short story “Kvinnan som ville ha barn med döden” (The Woman Who Wanted a Child With Death, 1987). Nilson was an established astronomer before publishing fiction, and in both novels and essays he joins “the two worlds” of the natural sciences and the humanities. My study of the reception of his work shows that his symbolic capital, his authority as a scientist, was transferred from one field of knowledge to another, thus increasing the value of his SF texts in critics’ eyes. Central to my analyses are the authorial strategies Nilson used when building bridges between natural science and the humanities, in a move evoking the Glass Bead Players in Herman Hesse’s novel The Glass Bead Game. My study shows that, unlike Hesse’s protagonists, the Glass Bead Players in Nilson’s texts accept, or even welcome, extreme consequences of scientific developments, such as the extinction of life as we know it.SF texts are traditionally categorized as either dystopic or utopic depending on the level of pessimism or optimism in their depictions of technology. I suggest instead that dystopic or utopic outcomes in modern SF novels depend on whether the texts build on an aleatoric or a teleological worldview. In aleatoric narratives, humankind is depicted as alone in the universe and thereby responsible for its own destiny. Teleological narratives feature superior, god-like forces from other worlds, which interfere with life on Earth and may elevate humans to higher levels of consciousness. The latter perspective, which is favoured in Nilson’s SF texts, entails that responsibility is removed from humankind since what happens is presented as meant to be. The tropes of the void and of creatio ex nihilo are recurrent in the examined texts, for instance through the use of myths and archetypes containing images of emptiness such as the “creation out of nothing”. Further, Nilson’s characters are often situated in a mental or physical “void” where their knowledge is of no use to them. My readings show that these voids are not empty but contain mythical and archetypal elements which activate obsolete religious ideas and gender models, such as the Logos vision: the creative power of words. This conservative tendency seems all the more surprising and problematic considering that the SF-genre is based on explorations of possible new worlds and beings.
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| 5. |
- Sandberg, Linn, 1983-, et al.
(författare)
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Bouncing off Ove : Old men's readings of the novel A Man Called Ove as a cultural representation of ageing masculinity
- 2022
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Ingår i: Journal of Aging Studies. - : Elsevier. - 0890-4065 .- 1879-193X. ; 63
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- In recent years, there has been a rise in portrayals of greying protagonists in popular fiction, often featuring older people in humorous and heart-warming stories. An emerging genre within this literature is the “geezer and grump lit”, a genre where older people are active protagonists, and while often portrayed as grumpy “’usually turn out to have a heart of gold’” (Swinnen, 2019). A notable example of a book in this genre is the internationally bestselling novel A Man Called Ove (2012) by the Swedish author Fredrik Backman. Telling the story of the 59-year-old Ove who sets out to take his own life, the novel can be understood not only as a cultural representation of ageing, but more specifically a cultural representation of ageing masculinity. But how is this popular novel read and responded to by old men themselves? This article builds on a focus group study with Swedish men aged 65–92 who read and discussed A Man Called Ove. The aim of this article is thus to explore how men read the novel and how these readings function as ways of constructing, negotiating and challenging ageing masculinity and the old man as a gendered and aged position. Findings of the study show how discussion of the novel generated a variety of “imaginary positions” through which the participants made sense of what it means to be an old man in contemporary Sweden, including positions such as the active aspiring ageing man, the passive lonely old man, the embodied and vulnerable old man, and the dutiful old man. Future research should explore how other literary genres may provide ways of understanding how old men's gendered and aged subjectivities are constructed.
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| 6. |
- Cananau, Iulian
(författare)
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Constituting Americanness : A History of the Concept and Its Representations in Antebellum American Literature
- 2015
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Bok (refereegranskat)abstract
- This book is based on my PhD dissertation, entitled Representations of the Concept of “Americanness” in the Canon of Antebellum American Literature. It is a work in cultural history and literary theory that suggests a fresh and potentially fruitful approach to the old notion of Americanness, an idea that lay at the foundation of American studies in mid-twentieth century, only to be exposed as “ideological fiction” by the New Americanists. Surprisingly, neither its advocates nor its critics have made the scholarly effort necessary to theorize or conceptualize Americanness. The subtitle indicates what is distinctive about this project: this is a study of the concept of Americanness. Thus, following Reinhart Koselleck’s history of concepts (Begriffsgeschichte), I propose that “Americanness” is not an ordinary word, but a concept with a broad, albeit historically specific, semantic field. Thus, in the three decades before the Civil War, the semantic field of “Americanness” was constituted at the intersection of several concepts, in different stages of their respective histories; among these, nation, representation, individualism, sympathy, race, and womanhood. By tracing the representations of these concepts in literary texts of the antebellum era, paying attention to their overlapping with the rhetoric of national identification, I uncover some of the meaning of “Americanness” in that period. As far as literary history writing is concerned, Begriffsgeschichte has a double potential: first, to explain the source of confusion between historically different semantic loads of the same concept and, second, to check the critic’s tendency to relativize concepts and therefore make the past a little too familiar. The concept-focused close reading of literary works of the past involves a reformulation of the text/context binary so as to account for contingencies without diminishing the importance of exegesis (a crippling tendency in contemporary literary studies); ultimately, this work aims to reconsider the relationship between history and literature.To lay out the meaning of “Americanness” I analyze a wide range of antebellum texts by Emerson, Melville, Thoreau, Douglass, Whitman, Stowe, Jacobs, Hawthorne, Poe, and Fuller, against the background of critical reception and recent scholarship. Thus, to college students and faculty, this book offers a period study of major American writers of the antebellum era.
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| 7. |
- Cananau, Iulian
(författare)
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Putting Context to New Use in Literary Studies : A Conceptual-Historicist Interpretation of Poe's 'Man of the Crowd'
- 2017
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Ingår i: Partial Answers. - 1565-3668 .- 1936-9247. ; 15:2, s. 241-261
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Poe’s adherence to a strict aesthetic formalism used to be problematic for studies of the relationship between his work and its American context; the methodology of New Historicism has helped to surmount this problem but sometimes with excessive emphasis on socio-historical contexts. This essay examines critical practices at work in the interpretation of Poe’s canonical piece “The Man of the Crowd” in light of the recent debates in literary studies around the problem of context and contextualization in general and the “hegemony” of new historicism in particular. It then suggests an alternative method of reading literary texts and their contexts — one based on Reinhart Koselleck’s history of concepts. It offers an analysis of “The Man of the Crowd” as an illustration of this method.
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| 8. |
- Grimbeek, Marinette, 1982-
(författare)
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Girls Making Families : Agential Assemblage in Nnedi Okorafor’s Speculative Fiction
- 2023
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Ingår i: Populating the Future. - Gävle, Sweden : Kriterium/Gävle University Press. - 9789189593060 - 9789189593077 - 9789189593084 - 9789189593091 ; , s. 133-156
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Bokkapitel (refereegranskat)abstract
- A girl or young woman facing new or dangerous challenges without the support of a family is a recurring motif in Nnedi Okorafor’s multiple award-winning fiction. Okorafor’s protagonists tend to reinvent traditional conceptions of families and create new family constellations through assemblage. These may include members of different human tribes, or even extraterrestrial, engineered or magical nonhuman creatures – and such assemblages are driven by the desire to find new ways of being in the world and relating to others. This chapter examines the kinmaking strategies of four of Okorafor’s protagonists to show how they form cross-culture and cross-species kinships. Binti, Onyesonwu, Phoenix, and Fatima/Sankofa all reinterpret traditions and create new families ranging beyond biological reproduction or kinship ties. To some extent, all the texts under discussion here could be classified as coming-of-age stories, in which assembled families complement and often replace biological families; the assembled families populating Okorafor’s texts are both vehicles of individual agency and utopian expressions of malleable traditions in an ecologically fragile world fraught with racial tension. Although agential assemblage through naming and storytelling has utopian implications in Who Fears Death (2010) and the Binti Trilogy (2015–18), assemblage is also central in the death and dying in The Book of Phoenix (2015) and Remote Control (2021). The assembled families populating Okorafor’s fiction are both vehicles of individual agency and utopian expressions of malleable traditions in an ecologically fragile world fraught with racial tension. Assemblage thus seems central to Okorafor’s utopian Africanfuturist impetus, and the chapter therefore concludes with a brief reflection on the role of narration in Okorafor’s agential assemblages.
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| 9. |
- Björkvall, Anders, 1972-, et al.
(författare)
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Att skapa mening är att lära : Datorer och yngre barns textanvändning
- 2012
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Ingår i: Resultatdialog 2012. - Stockholm : Vetenskapsrådet. - 9789173072137 ; , s. 48-57
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Konferensbidrag (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Yngre barn, i detta fall 7‐ och 8‐ åringar, använder datorer både i skolan och hemma. I så kallade ”en till en”‐projekt har varje barn en dator i skolan, och huvuddelen av undervisningen är knuten till denna dator. Projektet visar hur kopplingar mellan det som barnen gör med datorer hemma och i skolan, och mellan självvalda och lärarinitierade aktiviteter i klassrummet, kan ha underutnyttjad potential för lärande. Dessutom diskuteras principer för hur yngre barns texter där skrift, bild och grafik blandas kan bedömas. Ett barn barn kan till exempel skapa julkänsla i en text genom samspelet mellan färger och skrift, medan andra förlitar sig helt på skriften.
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| 10. |
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