Dreamland : a novel, and, Modes of textual division in the post-2000 novel : critical thesis

This thesis comprises two parts. The novel, Dreamland, is the story of seventeen-year-old Joe Duffy, who leaves his family home in Liverpool in search of his older brother who has gone missing in London. The themes, techniques, and findings examined in the critical thesis have informed the composition of the novel: in particular, the creative work exploits the capacity of techniques of narrative division to interact with linguistic content in the representation of the protagonist’s consciousness. The second part is a critical study that investigates the form and function of a mode of textual division in a group of twenty-first-century novels whose linguistic content is presented in short narrative sections divided by horizontal margins of white space; it is a technique that imparts an unconventional ‘gappy’ appearance to the pages. This gappy mode of textual division in certain contemporary novels is historicized in two preliminary chapters: the first chapter surveys formative pre-novelistic influences on conventions of narrative division; the second chapter follows the course and career of modes of narrative division in novelistic practice. The primary focus of the thesis is contained in the third chapter where case studies are made of four twenty-first-century novels that share the distinctive gappy format. By a close reading of these works, the thesis analyses how their modes of textual division interact with the linguistic content of the novels to generate a range of interpretative possibilities for their narratives

Unnatural Ecopoetics: Unlikely Spaces in Contemporary Poetry

The shift toward and identification of what I am calling unnatural ecopoetics represents an important development for ecopoetics and more broadly for ecocriticism--first, through broader applicability of ecopoetic theory and second, through increased clarity surrounding the term ecopoetics. The identification and detailed breakdown of the central tenets of both early ecopoetics and the unnatural ecopoetics I am espousing here helps stabilize a field that has long been afflicted with conflicting definitions and understandings. Since its inception, the lack of clarity inherent within the term ecopoetics has been surprisingly detrimental to the field's expansion. I propose defining ecopoetics as a theoretical lens that studies the methods by which poets attempt to express the material and nonmaterial elements of real-world environmental experience, including subjective elements of that encounter, through poetic form and language. Put another way, ecopoetics investigates how poets attempt to use unique forms to capture the multiple elements that constitute lived experience while simultaneously foregrounding the textual space in which such expression occurs. Rather than separating the material world from nonmaterial aspects of experience, this understanding of the term ecopoetics focuses on the ways in which individual memory, personal experience, ideology, and the limitations of the senses shape experience and, just as importantly, on how new forms and experimentation with language can work to expose the agential power of the material and nonmaterial worlds alike. Unnatural ecopoetics employs experimental forms and self-reflexive commentary to express the disjointed and nonlinear aspects of experience while simultaneously moving the inherent limitations of the text to the fore. By continuing to move the definition of ecopoetics forward in this way, I not only expand the applicability of ecopoetic theory across literary studies and gain a more diverse understanding of the ways in which people from a variety of economic situations, cultures, locations, and ethnic backgrounds understand and interact with their environments, but also acknowledge the ways in which nature and culture are irreversibly intertwined

Making local news : journalism, culture and place

In the closing decade of the twentieth century Joümalism was perceived to be in crisis, as profit-driven, corporatized media conglomerates seemed to enforce market driven editorial approaches. What debate there was about such matters in the UK tended to focus on the national news media, particularly that section of the press colloquially known as `Fleet Street'. Yet the impact of these tendencies was also apparently evident among local newspapers, which Tunstall (1996) said had suffered `meltdown'. These titles supposedly contained less news and more newszak (Franklin 1997). One of the most notable consequences of this trend , was an apparent decline in the amount of political information published. Yet at the end of the 1990s more politics was introduced into the UK with the establishment of devolved governments in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. Drawing on descriptions and analyses of the local press in the USA, Canada, Australia and elsewhere, as well as other parts of the UK, this study explores the contemporary making of local news by taking a snapshot of the local press in south-east Wales at the beginning of the twenty-first century, and against the backdrop of the introduction of the National Assembly for Wales. Interviews with a group of local newspaper editors and with a number of journalism educators; documentary and data analysis; post factor participant observation and a short non-participant observation, and thematic textual analysis of a time-based sample of fourteen English-language weekly, two evening, one morning and one Sunday newspapers were undertaken. Specific attention was paid to the reporting of politics. The persistent idea of proximity - the role of constructs of territorial and cognitive place - in journalism was taken as a starting point to utilize the work of Aldridge (2003), Griffin (2002), Hartley (1998), Law (2001), Rossow and Dunwoody (1991) and Temple (2004) to suggest forms of journalism which were banal, precise, enabling and affiliated. These indicated that what was called `news' was routinely scoped, mobilizing identity, utility and association, around what was believed to constitute territorial and cognitive belonging. Moreover, senses of belonging were often complementary rather than conflicting. These ideas challenge the orthodoxy that news is primarily scaled (from `small' to `big') and that journalism is essentially competitive. While it was found that these conditions were not exclusive to the local press, the ways in which they were configured were specific. The key aspect was the preparedness of journalists to concede their `professional' claims to news-making to contributing members of the public. That this occurred far more readily in the local press led to the conclusion that local journalism was not merely a minor variant of journalism practised elsewhere, but a distinct emergent form more ambivalently related to press commercialism. Furthermore, it is suggested that formal press structures and the accepted hierarchies of journalism no longer express as precisely as they were once assumed to such distinctions in contemporary editorial approaches

Protest literacies:texts and practices contesting military policing and mega-events in Rio de Janeiro

During the mid to late 2000s, a period of contentious politics emerged in the city of Rio de Janeiro (Brazil) concerning social movement responses to so-called ‘mega-events’ due to be hosted there – e.g. the 2014 FIFA World Cup and the 2016 Olympic Games. Central to contentions were newly implemented policing and housing policies associated with preparations for these mega-events: firstly installation of policing in favelas and secondly an extensive programme of evictions and displacements referred to in short as ‘pacification’ and ‘removals’ respectively. In my thesis, I chart the development of local social movements’ responses to these mega-events, focussing especially on one area of favelas named Maré in the North Zone periphery of Rio. I describe these developing contestations over a period of ten years from around 2006-2016 which I frame in terms of an extended episode or cycle of contention and protesting about a specific set of themes – most prominent to which is a series of deaths of favela residents killed during military police operations in favelas. Based on one year of fieldwork in Rio over 2013-2014 and archival research thereafter, the empirical focus of the study is on protest events (e.g. demonstrations and protest marches), the themes that were contested through these, how such events connected over time, and the social uses of literacy and related communication technologies in their mobilization, performance, and dissemination. Firstly, from a synchronic perspective, the findings show five sets of literacy practices which were central to protest events and social movement activities: campaigning literacies, memorial literacies, media-activist literacies, arts-activist literacies, and demonstration literacies. Seen as interconnecting and taken together, these were the principle literacies of social protest, or protest literacies. Secondly, from a diachronic perspective, I highlight multiple examples of meaning making trajectories that interlinked ongoing protest events from 2006-2016. The two main examples were realised through flows of recontextualized and resemiotized texts and practices, referred to as symbolization trajectories and memorialization trajectories. Lastly, I show how traditional protesting texts and practices locally were becoming reshaped by the uptake of new communications technologies (websites, blogs, SNS, etc.), which had started to become used by social movements during the period in discussion (from around 2006 onward). In this changing social-political setting and changing communications-technological environment, new roles and usages for texts emerged. These allowed for the amplification of local voices on national and global scales – especially so, over 2013-2014, the year of my fieldwork and also the period of the largest and most sustained protesting in Rio and Brazil for thirty years. Theoretically, my thesis draws on and contributes toward ethnographic and historical traditions in the New Literacy Studies, whilst combining this research lens with work from Discourse Studies, Social Movement Studies, and Cultural Anthropology, amongst others. Data and findings contribute to both local and global academic and activist work on the issues addressed, from the impacts of global mega-events upon local communities, to the increasing militarization of public spaces and social life, as well as social movements’ contestations of these and other issues, through traditional and changing means of protest