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- Sundström Sjödin, Elin, 1972-
(författare)
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Where is the critical in literacy? : Tracing performances of literature reading, readers and non-readers in educational practice
- 2019
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- In many instances in society, educational and other, literature reading is emphasised as something that develops persons in positive ways. The present thesis explores this claim in relation to literature reading in educational practices. By tracing how values and critical aspects of reading are enacted, the purpose is both to problematize taken-for-granted truth claims about literature reading and to develop an understanding of the elements involved when reading, readers and critical aspects of reading are created. The studies focus on different educational practices; a teacher’s narrative about grading, information brochures about reading to children and the policy and practice of a reading project at special residential homes for detained youth in Sweden. In these practices, the thesis explores where and when the critical takes place, in what constellations and with what consequences. The thesis draws on critical literacy, where reading is regarded as taking action and having self-empowering potential. However, with help of a pragmatic and material semiotic approach, the investigations steps away from what is taken for granted about reading and about what critical means, and instead reading, readers and the critical are analysed as transactional effects.The studies show how students can be placed at risk by rationales for reading literature that construct and establish them as lacking of culture or as literacy inadequate. The thesis further shows that the critical in literacy can be ambivalent as well as multiple, and it can be enacted by both human, discursive and material actors.
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| 2. |
- Hort, Sofia, 1984-
(författare)
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Skrivprocesser på högskolan : Text, plats och materialitet i uppsatsskrivandet
- 2020
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The purpose of this study is to explore how students in a higher education context handle the writing of their final essay. Applying a sociomaterial approach, the study offers comprehensive case studies of students’ writing processes. The thesis attempts to show how student writers handle writing challenges through different technologies and at different places. It does so by implementing the Mobile Technologies Process Logs (MTPL)-method, wherein participating students take an active role to create and gather data on their own writing processes.The results show that some students’ textual work could be described in terms of being comprehensive, and hence handled through varied writing technologies at various writing places. These students write a lot of texts to move the writing process forward. Other writers take a more product-oriented view in their writing, and hence write through fewer technologies, at a few places, and with a wish to finish their final text product directly. Many of the students make explicit how they process the literature through writing texts. The knowledge production, the analysis, which is central to academic writing, seems however more implicit and difficult for the students to handle, specifically if having a product oriented view on writing. The results also show how students mobilize different textual actions to meet challenges that writing an (digital) essay implies. This work is clearly emplaced ,at diverse or at more homogenous writing places.It is significant to make textual strategies as well as the functions of writing technologies and place visible to all students. It seems vital at times where higher education, as well as the students entering this institution, are put in front of a raft of (new) challenges. At the same time as the idea of the bad student writer is prevailing, higher education institutions seem not to teach how an academic writing process could be managed in successful ways. This thesis contributes to this field of inquiry with results on how students’ writing processes can be characterized.
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| 3. |
- Sandberg, Tommy, 1986-
(författare)
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The Difference Approach to Narrative Fiction : A Recurring Critique of Narratology and Its Implications for the Study of Novels and Short Stories
- 2019
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The aim of this thesis is to advance the critical examination of narratology, or the study of storytelling. I analyze four versions of a critique of the dominant theory of narrative fiction in narratology and discuss this critique’s methodological implications. The critics, Sylvie Patron, Lars-Åke Skalin, Richard Walsh, and the proponents of unnatural narratology have, I suggest, similar understandings of narratology’s handling of works like novels and short stories as well as similar alternative approaches. I situate the critique among relevant theories of fiction and salient aspects of narratology, and conclude that the most radical critics have a difference approach to narrative fiction. This means treating this literary practice as following another rule system for creating meaning than other kinds of storytelling. These critics seem to base their reasoning on their readerly intuitions about how novels and short stories function; yet their approach also lends itself to, for instance, discussions on how such works afford life visions or worldviews. In contrast to this approach, I describe narratology, in the critics’ view, as having a sameness approach that treats narrative fiction as a subtype of “narrative” in the sense of the communication of events by a narrator.The three opening articles of the thesis comprise a metadiscussion of the critique. I here describe, in part with Greger Andersson, the critics’ ideas, characterize the critique as a whole, and speculate about why it has had no apparent effect on narratology. The two latter articles utilize the difference approach in analyses of Angela Carter’s “The Loves of Lady Purple” and Sara Stridsberg’s Drömfakulteten (The Faculty of Dreams) while discussing narratological concepts and issues. Future studies might continue this discussion or inquire further about, for example, the relations between different narrative practices or what role different intuitions about narrative fiction play in descriptions and analyses.
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| 4. |
- Andersson, Greger, 1958-
(författare)
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The book and its narratives : a critical examination of some synchronic studies of the book of Judges
- 2001
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- During recent decades, there has been a trend among biblical scholars towards applying methods borrowed from literary studies to the familiar texts of the Old and New Testaments. A major reason for this reorientation is the search for a meaningful and interpretable text; hence, it can be seen as a protest against the historical-critical school and its ambition to reconstruct an authentic text by means of a diachronic analysis. Synchronic scholars argue for a new understanding of the biblical text, claiming that the object of interpretation is the text in its present form, regarded as a literary production. Consequently, they can study texts that are commonly considered to be patchworks or conglomerations as meaningful literary works regardless of their pre-history or authorship. In this thesis I do not focus on studies that concern individual narratives or poems but on those that apply a synchronic approach to large units of texts such as books or collections of books. My example is the book of Judges, and the fundamental issue is whether the synchronists’ description of its structure and of the relationship between the individual narratives and the larger text is sustainable. Through analyses of the book’s introduction and the stories about Ehud, Deborah, Jephthah and Samson, I argue that the scholars under consideration are often compelled to form interpretations that are in conflict with a “natural” or “intuitive” reading. I hence claim that they are not reading these stories in accordance with the conventions that are generally applied to narratives. The arguments in which they refer to implicit devices, allusions and the structure of the larger text are assessed as unconvincing.I argue that that these scholars make two common theoretical mistakes. Firstly, they do not consider the specific restrictions that apply to “the literary point of view”. Secondly, they disregard the fact that narratives are autonomous and hence resistant to reworking. If several independent narratives are put together, they are not thereby transformed into a larger single narrative even though they may contain common patterns and motifs. Hence, the individual story represents the primary level of meaning and discrete elements are understood as motifs within aliterary construction. The stories of the book of Judges are therefore texts within a text. This explains why the book lacks a coherent ideology or morality. The tensions and ambiguities in the book cannot be resolved by classifying it as a literary production and studying it synchronically: on the contrary, doing this confirms and explains the difficulties in the book – that is, the inconsistent character of both the book and its narratives and the bizarre events that are recounted therein – and its polyphonic character.
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| 5. |
- Ledin, Johanna, 1965-
(författare)
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Annan-orientering i masskommunicerande brevtexter : en tentativ modell
- 2017
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The aim of this thesis is to operationalise the concept of other-orientation. Based on an explorative approach, a tentative model for analysing the marks of other-orientation is developed. The model consists of four grammatical and pragmatic categories in language: deixis, speech acts, modality, and evaluative words. The process of finding out the significant marks in each category and develop a model has been an interplay between a thorough linguistic coding, an interpretative, evaluating reading, and abductive reasoning in a step-by-step process.Theoretically the study is based on dialogism. From this perspective, the very fact that human nature is social indicates that other-orientation is a constituent component in every communicative act. For that reason, the challenge has not been to prove that other-orientation exists in texts, but to explore how a text is made interactive, contextual, dynamic and other-oriented by means of grammatical and pragmatic selectives such as words, phrases, and clauses.The data consists of eight personally addressed mass communication letters about everyday matters. Each text has its model reader in a readers’ collective. Consequently the language in the texts is construed to form a dialogue between an in-text writer and reader that share the same context, although the distance between the real writer and reader is crucial.One result of the study is the model as such, another the analyses in which the functions of other-orientation related to the four categories are presented. Moreover, the linguistic analyses show differences between texts and readers’ collectives. Texts aimed at large anonymous collectives generally feature a direct address singular you, a high rate of positive evaluative words, more responsive speech acts, and some more potential modality. In texts aimed at a small familiar collective, there is an "I" or a "we" addressing a collective "you". There are not as many evaluative words but more assertions without any evaluation or modality.When it comes to other-orientation, the categories of deixis and speech acts tend to be of greater importance compared to modality and evaluative words. It makes a difference if you address a reader with a singular or collective "you" and if you choose to interact with responsive speech acts or informative statements. These contrast ways to address a reader are of importance for the construction of genre and say a great deal about other-orientation in texts.
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