Reading Mutant Narratives : The Bodily Experientiality of Contemporary Ecological Science Fiction

Reading Mutant Narratives explores how narratives of environmental and personal transformation in contemporary ecological science fiction can develop more-than-human modes of embodied experience. More specifically, it attends to the conflicted yet potentially transformative experientiality of "mutant narratives". Mutant narratives are viewed as uneasy hybrids of human-centered and posthumanist science fiction that contain potential for ecological understanding. Drawing on narrative studies and empirical reading studies, the dissertation begins from the premise that in suitable conditions, reading fiction may give rise to experiential change. The study traces and describes experiential changes that take place while reading works of science fiction. The bodily, subjective and historical conditions of reading are considered alongside the generic contexts and narrative features of the fictional works studied. As exemplary cases of mutant narratives, the study foregrounds the work of three American science fiction authors known for their critiques of anthropocentrism and for their articulations of more-than-human ecologies: Greg Bear, Paolo Bacigalupi, and Jeff VanderMeer. While much of contemporary fiction naturalizes embodied experience and hides their own narrative strategies, mutant narratives have the potential to defamiliarize readers’ notions of bodies and environments while also estranging their embodied experience of reading fiction. As a theoretical contribution to science fiction studies, the study considers such a readerly dynamic in terms of "embodied estrangement". Building on theoretical and practical work done in both embodied cognitive and posthumanist approaches to literature, the study shows how engagements with fictional narratives can, for their part, shape readers’ habitual patterns of feeling and perception. These approaches are synthesized into a method of close reading, "performative enactivism", that helps to articulate bodily, environmental, and more-than-human aspects of readerly engagement. Attending to such experiential aspects integrates ecological science fiction more deeply into the contemporary experiential situation of living with radical environmental transformation.Reading Mutant Narratives keskittyy ekologista kriisiä käsitteleviin "mutanttikertomuksiin" ja niille tyypilliseen kokemuksellisuuteen. Mutanttikertomukset ovat tieteisfiktiivisiä kertomuksia, joissa ihmiskeskeiset ja posthumanistiset piirteet yhdistyvät ja antavat lukijalle mahdollisuuksia ekologiseen ymmärrykseen. Esimerkkeinä mutanttikertomuksista tutkimus nostaa esiin kolmen yhdysvaltalaisen tieteiskirjailijan, Greg Bearin, Paolo Bacigalupin ja Jeff VanderMeerin, teoksia. Nämä teokset asettavat ihmisen osaksi ekologisia, evolutiivisia ja teknologisia vuorovaikutussuhteita, joissa myös ihmisruumiit ja ruumiillinen kokemus muuttavat muotoaan. Väitöskirja tutkii siis, kuinka tieteisfiktiiviset kertomukset ympäristöllisestä ja kokemuksellisesta muutoksesta voivat kehittää ruumiillista kokemusta. Kertomuksentutkimukseen ja empiiriseen lukijatutkimukseen tukeutuen tutkimus lähtee oletuksesta, että sopivissa olosuhteissa kirjallisuuden lukeminen voi edesauttaa kokemuksellisia muutoksia. Tutkimus tarkastelee tieteisfiktion lukemista eletyn ruumiillisen kokemuksen tasolla. Lukukokemuksen analyysissa otetaan huomioon sekä lukijan ruumiillinen, subjektiivinen ja historiallinen tilanne että luettujen teosten kytkeytyminen romaanikerronnan ja tieteisfiktion lajityypin perinteisiin. Suuri osa nykykirjallisuudesta esittää ruumiillisen kokemuksen luonnollisena ja kätkee oman kerronnallisen vaikutusvaltansa, mutta mutanttikertomusten kerronnalliset keinot saattavat outouttaa lukijoiden ruumiillista kokemusta suhteessa sekä elettyyn ympäristöön että kirjallisuuteen itseensä. Tieteisfiktion tutkimuksen käsitteistöä uudistaen väitöskirja kutsuu tällaista lukemisen dynamiikkaa "ruumiilliseksi vieraannuttamiseksi". Lukukokemuksen analyysien avulla tutkimus esittää, kuinka kirjallisuuden lukeminen ohjaa osaltaan lukijoiden tunne- ja havaintotottumusten muotoutumista. Se tuo yhteen ruumiillis-kognitiivisia ja posthumanistisia lähestymistapoja kirjallisuudentutkimukseen ja muotoilee "performatiivis-enaktiivisen" lähilukemisen metodin, joka auttaa sanallistamaan lukukokemuksen ruumiillisia, ympäristöllisiä ja ei-inhimilliseen kurovia puolia. Ruumiillisen kokemuksellisuuden syventäminen tämän metodin avulla tuo ekologisen tieteisfiktion tiiviimmin osaksi globaalin ympäristömuutoksen kokemuksellista tilannetta

Using Novels in English Language Teaching in Cyprus

This thesis reports on a mixed-methods descriptive study concerning the students and teachers’ perceptions of the role of literature – and novels in particular – in English language teaching and learning. Literature has always been a perpetual feature of language learning, and the transition from the aesthetic study of literature to its use as a resource for linguistic development in the language classroom has marked its implementation and use. For many decades, the use of literature for language teaching was marginalised because of the advent of communicative language teaching. Nevertheless, the current trend favours a resurgence of interest in using literature for language purposes, appreciating its valuable contribution in English language teaching. However, very limited empirical research has been done to examine the use of novels in language teaching. The quantitative component of this research involved 144 students of an English-speaking private school in Cyprus and 26 English language teachers. Both groups responded to a distinct self-completed questionnaire. A follow-up qualitative investigation was carried out with five of the teachers who completed the questionnaire. Lastly, twelve unstructured, non-participant observations were organised with the students who completed the questionnaire, in their classrooms. For a statistical analysis, IBM SPSS Statistics 19 was used, while the qualitative data analysis was done with NVivo 10 and the results from the quantitative and qualitative enquiry were then integrated in order to respond to six research questions. The findings of the study present the students and teachers’ beliefs on the role of novels in ELT and elucidate the acceptance of novels as an invaluable source of motivating and stimulating activities that can contribute to the increase of students’ language awareness. Additionally, the findings resulting from an examination of the students and teachers’ beliefs substantiate and promote the catalytic role of novels in developing an intercultural awareness, where language and culture are seen as interrelated entities and novels are perceived as vivid cultural representations

Thinking with Games in the British Novel, 1801-1901

Thesis advisor: Maia McAleaveyMy dissertation explores how nineteenth-century novelists imagined rational thinking as a cognitive resource distributed through physical, social, national, and even imperial channels. Scholars studying nineteenth-century discourses of mind frequently position rational thinking as the normalized given against those unconscious and irrational modes of thought most indicative of the period's scientific discoveries. My project argues, in contrast, that writers were just as invested in exploring rational thinking as multivalent procedure, a versatile category of mental activity that could be layered into novelistic representations of thinking by "thinking with games": that is, incorporating forms of thinking as discussed by popular print media. By reading novels alongside historical gaming practices and gaming literatures and incorporating the insights of twenty-first century cognitive theory, I demonstrate that novelists Maria Edgeworth, Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, George Eliot, and Rudyard Kipling experimented with models of gaming to make rational thinking less abstract and reveal its action across bodies, objects, and communities. If Victorian mind-sciences uncovered "thinking fast," games prioritized "thinking slow," a distinction described by psychologist Daniel Kahneman in his recent book, Thinking, Fast and Slow (2013). Scenes of games often slow thinking down, allowing the author to expose the complex processes of rational, cognitive performance. Furthermore, such scenes register the expanded perspective of recent cognitive literary studies such as those by Alan Palmer and Lisa Zunshine, which understand thinking, at least in part, as externalized and social. In effect, by reading scenes of thinking along the lines proposed by strategic gaming, I demonstrate how novels imagined social possibilities for internal processing that extend beyond the bounds of any individual's consciousness. Of course, games easily serve as literary tropes or metaphors; but analyzing scenes of gaming alongside games literature underscores how authors incorporated frameworks of teachable, social thinking from gaming into their representations of rational consciousness. For strategy games literature, better play required learning how to read the minds of other players, how to turn their thinking inside out. The nineteenth-century novel's relationship to games is best understood, I suggest, within the landscape of popular games literature published at its side - sometimes literally. An article on "Whistology" appears just after an installment of The Woman in White in Dickens's All the Year Round; the Cornhill Magazine published a paean to "Chess" amid the serialization of George Eliot's Romola. As a genre, strategy manuals developed new techniques for exercising the cognitive abilities of their readers and, often along parallel lines, so do the novels I discuss. Prompting the reader to think like a game player often involved recreating the kinds of dynamic, active thinking taught by games literature through the novel's form. My dissertation explores how authors used such forms to train their readers in habits of memory, deduction, and foresight encouraged by strategy gaming.Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2017.Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.Discipline: English

Performative Gender and Pop Fiction Females: Emancipating Byronic Heroines through a Feminist Education

I can be a regular bitch. Just try me. With this phrase emblazoned across her t-shirt, Lisbeth Salander, pierced, tattooed, and bedecked in leather, waltzes from the pages of Stieg Larsson\u27s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. This woman who subverts authority, maliciously tattoos and sodomizes a man, and intentionally distances herself from close relationships of any kind has somehow managed to capture both the attention and admiration of the American audience. This disheartening phenomenon stems from a renewed interest in the Byronic heroine, a female possessing those traits traditionally assigned to Byronic heroes and men, and the rise of the Byronic heroine, as I will discuss, is intrinsically linked to the ebb and flow of the Third Wave of feminism. Hermione (Harry Potter) offers a picture of a heroine that embodies the Second Wave\u27s agenda; she is intelligent, independent, and only barely Byronic. While Katniss (Hunger Games) and Lisbeth (Girl with the Dragon Tattoo) are thoroughly Byronic, the plots surrounding these heroines greatly contrast the fates of previous Byronic heroines. Unfortunately, though their lives may be saved, their futures are lost. The breakdown of the gender binary, as seen in the rise of the successful Byronic heroine, does not bode well for the future of a society that insists on culturally-constructed gender. Though the First and Second Wave produce innocuous literary ripples, such as Hermione Granger, the leap into the deep end of the Third Wave, accompanied by characters like Katniss Everdeen and Lisbeth Salander, is not only alarming, but it is also cause for immediate concern. By first examining the history of feminism and its literary products, and then by establishing a connections between Byronism and education, I will lay the groundwork for my argument, ultimately establishing that the cultural reception of each of these two Byronic heroines, Katniss and Lisbeth, indicates the permeating, damaging effects of the Third Wave\u27s attempt to eliminate gender binaries, seen to its fruition through emancipatory education

Narratives of Troubled Journeys: Personality disorder and the medicalisation of moral dilemmas

This thesis examines the interaction of the medical and moral in the historical evolution of “personality disorder” starting with the relationship between Prichard’s (1835) diagnosis of “Moral Insanity” and an anti-modern religious text (Hancock, 1824) describing disorder of the moral faculty. Moral insanity is traced through to Psychopathic Personalities and the military’s Medical 203 to Personality Disorder in DSM I (1952) through to DSM 5 (2013). The extent to which DSM medicalises everyday moral categories is examined by building on the works of writers theorising moral orders and moral selves, such as Harré (1993), Bakhtin (1981, 1984, 1986) and Taylor (1989). This thesis moves from macro-level concerns to the micro-level using dialogical narrative methodology (Sullivan, 2012) alongside Bakhtin’s conceptual tools to examine how medical and personal narratives of "Personality Disorder" interact in lived experience by analysing a triangulation of my psychiatric clinical notes, contemporary diary entries and an autobiographical account. An analysis is undertaken of several diverse autobiographical accounts of ‘successful’ recovery from mental health crisis already available in the public sphere. Consideration was given to how concepts developed throughout this study might be used in future work, concepts such as “dialogical search for a new narrative”, the dialogical ethics of “habitual excess and insufficiency” and “authoritative narrators”. This thesis’s originality is in linking DSM 5’s diagnosis of personality disorder to anti-modern moral discourses on disorder of the moral faculty, and in revealing complex genre relationships between literal/medical and literary/moral understandings of emotional and mental crisis and recovery