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- Berglund, Ylva, 1964-
(författare)
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Expressions of Future in Present-day English: A Corpus-based Approach
- 2005
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This corpus-based study of the use of expressions of future in English has two aims: to examine how certain expressions of future are used in Present-day English, and to explore how electronic corpora can be exploited for linguistic study.The expressions focused on in this thesis are five auxiliary or semi-auxiliary verb phrases frequently discussed in studies of future reference in English: will, ’ll, shall, going to and gonna. The study examines the patterned ways in which the expressions are used in association with various linguistic and non-linguistic (or extra-linguistic) factors. The linguistic factors investigated are co-occurrence with particular words and co-occurrence with items of particular grammatical classes. The non-linguistic factors examined are medium (written vs. spoken), text category, speaker characteristics (age, sex, social class, etc.), region and time. The data for the study are exclusively drawn from computer-readable corpora of Present-day English. Corpus analyses are performed with automatic and interactive methods, and exploit both quantitative and qualitative analytical techniques.The study finds that the use of these expressions of future varies with a number of factors. Differences between spoken and written language are particularly prominent and usage also varies between different types of text, both within spoken and written corpora. Variation between groups of speakers is also attested. Although the linguistic co-occurrence patterns are similar to some degree, there are nonetheless differences in the collocational patterns in which the expressions are used.Methodological issues related to corpus-based studies in general are discussed in the light of the insights gained from this study of expressions of future.
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| 2. |
- Cullhed, Christina, 1952-
(författare)
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Grappling with Patriarchies : Narrative Strategies of Resistance in Miriam Tlali's Writings
- 2006
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This study is the first one devoted solely to the writings of the South African black novelist Miriam Tlali. It argues that her works constitute literary resistance not only to apartheid, noted by previous scholars, but also to South African patriarchies. Examining Tlali’s novels Muriel at Metropolitan (1975) and Amandla! (1980), and several short stories from Mihloti (1984) and Footprints in the Quag (1989), the study pits these texts against the black literary tradition dominated by men and also reads them within the social context of South African patriarchies, with its social restrictions on women and its taboos concerning sexualities. To distance herself from the patriarchal values inherent in the male literary tradition and to negotiate social and sexual restrictions on women, I argue, Tlali deploys narrative strategies like generic difference, generic dialogism, a double-voiced discourse, “whispering,” and “distancing.”Drawing on the theories of Mikhail Bakhtin and Julia Kristeva, this study first explores “novelistic” traits in Muriel which function both to resist male literary conventions, like the epic mode of narrative, and to criticise their patriarchal ideology. Second, relying on Bakhtin, it analyses the generic dialogism and double-voicedness in Amandla!. Finally, making use of Kristeva’s semiotics and her theory of sacrifice, the study traces the development of a sacrificial discourse of gendered violence from Amandla! to some of Tlali’s short stories. Supported by Martha J. Reinecke’s explication of Kristeva, I show that Tlali’s texts insist that gendered violence upholds the sacrificial economies of both patriarchal apartheid and African patriarchy. The strategies of “whispering” and “distancing,” I claim, surface in Tlali’s addressing of the sensitive issues of black women’s victimisation and gendered violence. “Whispering” entails muting the criticism of the perpetrators of gendered violence, whereas “distancing” results in dis/placing gendered violence on the margins of the community. This study also examines the literary/social context of Tlali’s oeuvre: it explores specific traits of the South African black literary tradition, how the issue of rape has been addressed there, and the depiction of African patriarchy in autobiographies by South African black women.
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| 3. |
- Haines, Colin, 1966-
(författare)
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"Frightened by a Word" : Shirley Jackson and Lesbian Gothic
- 2007
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This study examines representations and configurations of lesbianism in literary narrative and, in particular, three novels by American author Shirley Jackson (1916-1965). As recent scholarly work has demonstrated, representations of sexuality between women in literature tend toward the ghostly, the Gothic. Examining the ideological import of such representations, this study likewise considers what happens in narrative once lesbianism is "occulted" this way. Central to this analysis is the issue of subjectivity, of who sees what, how, and why. In its examination of three novels by Shirley Jackson--Hangsaman (1951), The Haunting of Hill House (1959), and We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962)--this study draws on theories of performativity and subjectivity as put forward by feminism/queer theory and, in particular, Judith Butler. Central to this investigation is how these texts repeat and, simultaneously, fail to repeat literary conventions linking lesbian and Gothic, as well as how that repetition, and its failure, affect overall interpretation.
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| 6. |
- Lilja, Sara, 1979-
(författare)
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Gender-Related Terms in English Depositions, Examinations and Journals, 1670–1720
- 2007
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This dissertation focuses on gender-related terms as well as adjectives and demonstratives in connection with these terms used in texts from the period 1670–1720. The material in the study has been drawn from both English and American sources and comes from three text categories: depositions, examinations and journals. Two of these text categories represent authentic and speech-related language use (depositions and examinations), whereas the third (journals) is representative of a non-speech-related, non-fictional text category. While previous studies of gender-related terms have primarily investigated fictional material, this study focuses on text categories which have received little attention so far.The overarching research question addressed in this study concerns the use and distribution of gender-related terms, especially with regard to referent gender. Data analyses are both quantitative and qualitative, and several linguistic and extra-linguistic factors are taken into account, such as the semantic domain to which the individual gender-related term belongs, region of origin and referent gender. Adjectives and demonstratives collocating with the gender-related terms are also investigated, as previous research has shown that referent gender has an impact on the use of adjectives as well.The results show that the use of gender-related terms is influenced by both region of origin and referent gender. It is suggested that this is due in part to the difference in nature between Early Modern English society and the early American colonies, and in part due to the social roles which men and women had. Referent gender also has an impact on the type of adjectives used in connection with gender-related terms: adjectives collocating with gender-related terms denoting men have positive connotations to a larger extent than do adjectives collocating with their female counterparts; meanwhile, gender-related terms denoting women tend to collocate with negative adjectives.
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| 7. |
- Matlok-Ziemann, Ellen, 1961-
(författare)
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Tomboys, Belles, and Other Ladies : The Female Body-Subject in Selected Works by Katherine Anne Porter and Carson McCullers
- 2005
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This study investigates how the Southern writers Katherine Anne Porter and Carson McCullers negotiate the process of becoming a woman in their texts and expose and ridicule the artificiality of that category. Focusing on a selection of Porter’s “Miranda stories” (published between 1935 and 1941) and “The Princess” (1993) and McCullers’s The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1940), The Member of the Wedding (1946), and The Ballad of the Sad Café (1943), I argue that both writers voice their protest against patriarchal society that forecloses women’s assumption of subjectivity. Using Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s and Simone de Beauvoir’s theory of “being-in-the-world,” which rejects the notion of a mechanistic body but understands the mind as always embodied, and Simone de Beauvoir’s concept of the female body-subject, I show how Porter and McCullers find a reciprocal relationship with others, as Beauvoir advocates it, impossible; in patriarchal society woman is always cast as the Other. Yet, while both writers criticize patriarchal violence and often use the same means to challenge and ridicule rigid gender norms, there are differences in their perception of identity. Porter suggests that the concept of identity as constantly changing and unfixed does not exist in Southern plantation society, the Old Order. But even when “being-in-the-world” becomes, in fact, possible after the demise of the Old Order, this dialectical relationship is disturbed and experienced as threatening and burdensome. McCullers, on the other hand, expresses a strong desire for ambiguity and change. McCullers suggests, I argue, that an ideal way of being in the world–“becoming”–can be achieved by a suspension of gender boundaries. Only then is it possible for a woman to engage in a reciprocal relationship with others as she no longer regards her body as a prison.
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| 8. |
- McElwee, Johanna, 1975-
(författare)
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The Nation Conceived : Learning, Education, and Nationhood in American Historical Novels of the 1820s
- 2005
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This study explores the role of learning and education in American historical fiction written in the 1820s. The United States has been, and still is, commonly considered to be hostile to scholarly learning. In novels and short stories of the 1820s, however, learning and education are recurrent themes, and this dissertation shows that the attitudes to these issues are more ambivalent than hitherto acknowledged. The 1820s was a period characterized by a political struggle, expressed as a battle between intellectuals, represented by the sitting president, John Quincy Adams, a Harvard professor, and anti-intellectuals, headed by the war hero Andrew Jackson. The battle over the place of scholarly learning in the U.S. was played out not only on the political scene but also in historical fiction, where the themes of learning and education become vehicles for exploring national identity. In these texts, whose aim is often to establish an impressive national history, scholarly learning carries negative connotations as it is linked to the former colonizer Britain and also symbolizes social stratification. However, it also stands for civilization and progress, qualities felt to be necessary for the nation to come into its own. The conflicting views and anxieties surrounding the issues of learning and education tend to center on a recurrent character in these texts, the learned person.After providing an overview of how the themes of learning and education are treated in historical narratives from the 1820s, this dissertation focuses on works of three writers: Hobomok (1824) and The Rebels (1825) by Lydia Maria Child, The Prairie (1827) by James Fenimore Cooper, and Hope Leslie (1827) by Catharine Maria Sedgwick.
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| 9. |
- Sveen, Hanna Andersdotter
(författare)
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"Honourable" or "Highly-sexed" : Adjectival Descriptions of Male and Female Characters in Victorian and Contemporary Children's Fiction
- 2005
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This corpus-based study examines adjectives and adjectival expressions used to describe characters in British children’s fiction. The focus is on diachronic variation, by comparing Victorian (19th-century) and contemporary (late 20th-century) children’s fiction, and on gender variation, by comparing the descriptions of female and male characters. I adopt a qualitative as well as a quantitative approach, and consider factors such as lexical diversity, adjectival density, collocation patterns, evaluative meaning, syntactic function and distribution across semantic domains. Most findings are related to a dichotomy set up between an idealistic and a realistic portrayal of characters. The study shows that an idealistic portrayal of characters is typical of the Victorian material and a realistic portrayal of characters typical of the contemporary material. Further, gender differences are much more pronounced, and reflect traditional gender role patterns more in the Victorian material than in the contemporary material. For instance, a pleasant appearance is typically described for Victorian female characters and social position for Victorian male characters. Moreover, descriptions of mental properties of Victorian female characters are conspicuously rare. Such gendered patterns are less distinct in the contemporary material, although appearance is still more extensively described for female than male characters. As regards how the qualities are attributed to characters, the descriptions of Victorian female characters were found to be the most formulaic compared to the descriptions of Victorian male, contemporary female and contemporary male characters.
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| 10. |
- Zetterberg Pettersson, Eva, 1965-
(författare)
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The Old World Journey : National Identity in Four American Novels from 1960 to 1973
- 2005
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- A commonly held assumption among literary critics is that the motif of the European journey is exhausted in American literature in the post-World-War-II period. Challenging this view, the present study claims that the Old World journey narrative lives on, but in new guises, and that it continues to be a forum for the discussion of American national identity. Studying four novels about Americans traveling to Europe – William Styron’s Set This House on Fire (1960), Mary McCarthy’s Birds of America (1971), John A. Williams’s The Man Who Cried I Am (1967) and Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying (1973) – this thesis examines the ways in which the European journey is utilized for a questioning of “America.” Informed by the political debates of their time, which lead, for example, to the displacement of hegemonic ideologies such as nationalism, they share a critical stance vis-à-vis the conventional construction of national identity. They represent, however, different strands of the contemporary political counterculture; while the first two texts view national identity from the center of American society, addressing a moral and an ideological/intellectual critique, respectively, the last two represent marginal perspectives, that of the African American and feminist protest movements. The function of the European setting in the four novels is also scrutinized: in all of them the European setting provides the backdrop for a story that deals, almost exclusively, with American culture; it serves in a variety of ways, for example as a many-facetted stage, an experimental ground, or a zone of liberation. The Coda sketches recent developments in the 1980s and 1990s, finding the motif of initiation and the figure of the independent warm-hearted American girl to persist and the myth of American innocence to continue to be contested.
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