| 1. |
- Dahl, Christoffer
(författare)
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Ett annorlunda BRUS : ett läromedels litteraturförmedling i spänningsfältet mellan tradition och förnyelse
- 2010
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Doktorsavhandling (populärvet., debatt m.m.)abstract
- This thesis discusses different challenges of mediating literature in textbooks. The study is based on a critical analysis of the textbook BRUS as well as other textbooks. BRUS displays evident and pas- tichelike influences from postmodern culture, features that are still unusual in textbooks. In my research therefore I ask: Which innovative as well as traditional features can be discerned in the BRUS material, and how can they be explained? Which notions of literature are represented by BRUS? What pedagogical challenges are expressed in BRUS? The result indicates several nontraditional features. For examplehow BRUS introduces literature to the reader through a postmodern discourse in which high culture and low culture are mixed. The selection of genres in BRUS contains a relatively high proportion of nonfiction literature, and literature that is considered as low culture. BRUS uses a significant large number of writing assignments which demand different creative performances. The purpose is presumably to engage the students in the process of constructing literary meaning by presenting contemporary literature that actually matters to young people. However, the intellectual operations lack analytical depth and are focused on describing contextual features which sometimes are tenuously connected to the literature. My conclusion is that BRUS initiates a variation of fruitful literary ideas in a pedagogical context. The problem is the lack of a critical filter and pedagogical metadiscussions in which BRUS for instance discusses what functions the study of literature might fill in today’s media landscape. In my opinion, such questions shouldbe in focus in a postmodern textbook.
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| 2. |
- Lozic, Vanja
(författare)
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I historiekanons skugga : historieämne och identifikationsformering i 2000-talets mångkulturella samhälle
- 2010
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Sweden has on various occasions been described as a multicultural society. So-called multicultural social change has resulted in numerous implications regarding attitudes in respect of history as a subject taught at upper secondary schools. The aim of this study is to problematise the relationship between students' (ethnic) identification and their view of history as a subject. The study focuses on the affects of history teaching on the students' perception of ethnic identification. On the basis of interviews with students, teachers as well as authors of history textbooks I analyse attitudes regarding the content and aim of history as a school subject as well as student's understanding of their ethnic identification. In addition I ask what the aim of history teaching in so-called multicultural societies is, discussing what kind of historical knowledge the interviewees regard as relevant and studying processes of identification. Consequently, I attempt to show what is expected of history as a subject in order for it to be accepted as both applicable and significant within a so-called multicultural social context. Many students want to learn about the history of their parents' country of birth, regarding it as a part of their identification. According to many students, prevalent history is Eurocentric, disregarding the importance of other cultures. Despite this, the importance of transmitting knowledge about Swedish and Western European history is widely articulated. Students' views regarding the content and aim of history are affected by aspects such as, a global economy, the media's impact on their world-view, their food-habits, their common generational experiences, their plans to travel and study abroad. Moreover, students are affected by visits to and contact with their parents' country of birth, their parents' world-views, their own complex ethnic identification, their relationships with their friends as well as where they are geographically. In addition, I examine how emigration from Sweden between 1850 and 1930 and post war immigration to the country have been depicted. The latter is based on selected history and civics textbooks, all published in Sweden between 1962 and 2007. By and large, textbooks construct a ‘we group’, which is described as culturally different from the ‘them group’ (immigrants), that is to say those who are discursively constructed as a group which deviates from the cultural norms that are regarded as dominant and universal for Swedish society.
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| 3. |
- Svensson, Anette, 1972-
(författare)
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A translation of worlds : Aspects of cultural translation and Australian migration literature
- 2010
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This study explores the exchange of cultural information that takes place in the meeting between immigrant and non-immigrant characters in a selection of Australian novels focusing on the theme of migration: Heartland (1989) by Angelika Fremd, A Change of Skies (1991) by Yasmine Gooneratne, Stella’s Place (1998) by Jim Sakkas, Hiam (1998) by Eva Sallis and Love and Vertigo (2000) by Hsu-Ming Teo. The concept cultural translation functions as a theoretical tool in the analyses. The translation model is particularly useful for this purpose since it parallels the migration process and emphasises the power relations involved in cultural encounters. Within the framework of the study, cultural translation is defined as making an unfamiliar cultural phenomenon familiar to someone. On the intratextual level of the text, the characters take on roles as translators and interpreters and make use of certain tools such as storytelling and food to effect translation. On the extratextual level, Fremd, Gooneratne, Sakkas, Sallis and Teo represent cultural translation in the four thematic areas the immigrant child, storytelling, food and life crisis. The first theme, the immigrant child, examined in chapter one, explores the effects of using the immigrant child as translator in communication situations between immigrants and representatives of Australian public institutions. In these situations, the child becomes the adult’s interpreter of the Australian target culture. The role as translator entails other roles such as a link to and a shield against the Australian society and, as a result, traditional power relations are reversed. Chapter two analyses how the second theme, storytelling, is presented as an instrument for cultural education and cultural translation in the texts. Storytelling functions to transfer power relations and resistance from one generation to the next. Through storytelling, the immigrant’s hybrid identity is maintained because the connection to the source culture is strengthened, both for the storyteller and the listener. The third theme, food as a symbol of cultural identity and as representation of the source and target cultures, is explored in chapter three. Source and target food cultures are polarised in the novels, and through an acceptance or a rejection of food from the source or target cultures, the characters symbolically accept or reject a belonging to that particular cultural environment. A fusion between the source and target food cultures emphasises the immigrant characters’ cultural hybridity and functions as a strategic marketing of culturally specific elements during which a specific source culture is translated to a target consumer. Finally, the fourth theme, life crisis, is analysed in chapter four where it is a necessary means through which the characters experience a second encounter with Australia and Australians. While their first encounter with Australia traps the characters in a liminal space/phase that is signified by cultural distancing, the second encounter offers a desire and ability for cultural translation, an acceptance of cultural hybridity and the possibility to become translated beings – a state where the characters are able to translate back and forth between the source and target cultures.
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| 4. |
- Tutunjian, Damon
(författare)
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Processing coordinated verb phrases : the relevance of lexical-semantic, conceptual, and contextual information towards establishing verbal parallelism
- 2010
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This dissertation examines the influence of lexical-semantic representations, conceptual similarity, and contextual fit on the processing of coordinated verb phrases. The study integrates information gleaned from current linguistic theory with current psycholinguistic approaches to examining the processing of coordinated verb phrases. It has been claimed that in coordinated phrases, one conjunct may influence the processing of a second conjunct if they are sufficiently similar. For example, The likelihood of adopting an intransitive analysis for the optionally transitive verb of a subordinated clause in sentences like Although the pirate ship sank the nearby British vessel did not send out lifeboats may be increased if the ambiguous verb (sank) is coordinated with a preceding, intransitively biased verb (halted and sank). Similarly, processing of the second conjunct may be facilitated when coordinated with a similar first conjunct. Such effects, and others in this vein have often been designated “parallelism effects.” However, notions of similarity underlying such effects have long been ill-defined. Many existing studies rely on relatively shallow features like syntactic category information or argument structure generalizations, such as transitive or intransitive, as a basis for structural comparison. But it may be that deeper levels of lexical-semantic representation and more varied, semantic or conceptual sources of information are also relevant to establishing similarity between conjuncts. In addition, little has been done to xi integrate parallelism effects to theories of the processing architecture underlying such effects, particularly for studies involving syntactic ambiguity resolution. Using two word-by-word reading and three eyetracking while reading experiments, I investigate what contribution detailed lexical-semantic representations, as well as conceptual and contextual information make towards establishing parallel coordination in the online processing of coordinated verb phrases. The five studies demonstrate that parallelism effects are indeed sensitive to deeper representational information, conceptual similarity, and contextual fit. Furthermore, by controlling for deeper representational information, it is demonstrated that expected facilitatory patterns arising from coordination of similar conjuncts may be disrupted. Implications for the architecture of the processing system are discussed, and it is argued that constraintbased/ competition models of processing best accommodate the pattern of results.
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