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External Validity Of Grammatical Word Category Classification Using An Adaptation And Selection Model, Michelle Chatterton Mar 2015

External Validity Of Grammatical Word Category Classification Using An Adaptation And Selection Model, Michelle Chatterton

Theses and Dissertations

The process of acquiring language requires children to learn grammatical categories and apply these categories to new words. Researchers have proposed various explanations of this process in the form of algorithms and computational modeling. Recently, adaptation and selection models have been tested and applied as a possible explanation to the process of acquiring grammatical categories. These studies have proven promising, however, the external validity of this approach has not been examined by grammatically coding samples outside the training corpus. The current thesis applies an adaptation and selection model, which pauses the evolution of dictionaries after every thousand cycles to allow …

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Identifying And Understanding The Difference Between Japanese And English When Giving Walking Directions, Keiko Moriyama Barney Mar 2015

Identifying And Understanding The Difference Between Japanese And English When Giving Walking Directions, Keiko Moriyama Barney

Theses and Dissertations

In order to better identify and understand the differences between Japanese and English, the task of giving walking directions was used. Japanese and American public facilities (10 each) were randomly chosen from which to collect data over the phone in order to examine these differences based on the following five communication styles: 1) politeness, 2) indirectness, 3) self-effacement, 4) back-channel feedback (Aizuchi), 5) and other linguistic and cognitive differences in relation to space and giving directions. The study confirmed what the author reviewed in the literature: Japanese are more polite, English speakers tend to give directions simply and …

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Burke's Poetic Metaphor And Obama As Poet, Devon S. Cook Mar 2015

Burke's Poetic Metaphor And Obama As Poet, Devon S. Cook

Theses and Dissertations

At the end of Permanence and Change, Kenneth Burke calls for a new orientation toward life and social action which he refers to as “the poetic metaphor” (261). This essay connects Burke's briefly used poetic metaphor with his theories on the use of “poetic” language in the essay “Semantic and Poetic Meaning.” What results from this synthesis is a critical tool for rhetorical analysis which allows for the discussion of style as a vehicle for communication about ethics and morals in public discourse. Obama's The Audacity of Hope is used as the example of a text which uses “poetic” …

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An Investigation Of The Impact Of A Flipped Classroom Instructional Approach On High School Students' Content Knowledge And Attitudes Toward The Learning Environment, Matthew R. Bell Mar 2015

An Investigation Of The Impact Of A Flipped Classroom Instructional Approach On High School Students' Content Knowledge And Attitudes Toward The Learning Environment, Matthew R. Bell

Theses and Dissertations

The idea of the “flipped classroom” is a relatively new concept in education that has become increasingly popular. Instructors who flip their classrooms reverse the roles of school work and homework by recording video lectures for students to watch before coming to class. Students then work on their homework in the classroom while the instructor is present to help them. Very little research has been done on the effectiveness of the flipped classroom to determine if students can perform better on exams by learning in a flipped classroom environment, especially for high school demographics. The purpose of this research is …

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A Diachronic Analysis Of North And South Korean Monophthongs: Vowel Shifts On The Korean Peninsula, Jessica M. Morgan Mar 2015

A Diachronic Analysis Of North And South Korean Monophthongs: Vowel Shifts On The Korean Peninsula, Jessica M. Morgan

Theses and Dissertations

The linguistic situation on the Korean peninsula is one ripe for research. For the past 70 years the two halves of the peninsula have been isolated from one another, thus creating two very different environments for development and change within the Korean language. It is hypothesized that due to conflict, divide, and social turmoil on the peninsula, the Korean language will have undergone a period of change in the last 70 years. This particular investigation looks at North and South Korean monophthong systems for evidence of a phonological shift. Studies of North Korea's language planning (Yong, 2001; Kumatani, 1990) will …

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Modeling Children's Acquisition Of Grammatical Word Categories From Adult Input Using An Adaptation And Selection Algorithm, Nicole Adele Stenquist Mar 2015

Modeling Children's Acquisition Of Grammatical Word Categories From Adult Input Using An Adaptation And Selection Algorithm, Nicole Adele Stenquist

Theses and Dissertations

It is understood that children learn the use of grammatical categories in their native language, and previous models have only been partially successful in describing this acquisition. The present study uses an adaptation selection algorithm to continue the work in addressing this question. The input for the computer model is child-directed speech towards three children, ages ranging from 1;1 to 5;1 during the course of sampling. The output of the model consists of the input words labeled with a grammatical category. This output data was evaluated at regular intervals through its ability to correctly identify the grammatical categories of language …

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Sacred Things, Sacred Bodies: The Ethics Of Materiality And Female Spirituality In Purple Hibiscus, Kylie Mcquarrie Mar 2015

Sacred Things, Sacred Bodies: The Ethics Of Materiality And Female Spirituality In Purple Hibiscus, Kylie Mcquarrie

Theses and Dissertations

Thing theorist Bill Brown writes that “the thing names less an object than a particular subject-object relation.” This article examines the subject-object relation between African things and African bodies in Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's first novel, Purple Hibiscus. While the main character, Kambili, eventually learns to assimilate Western Catholicism into her Nigerian reality, her Christian fundamentalist father, Eugene, uses Catholicism to justify his self-hating destruction of African things and bodies. This article argues that both reactions are rooted in the characters' ability or inability to see African material things, including both objects and bodies, as autonomous subjects. Adichie's …

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Teaching Culture Using E-Portfoliosin A 4th-Semester University Spanish Classroom, Ricardo Gustavo Cetz Mar 2015

Teaching Culture Using E-Portfoliosin A 4th-Semester University Spanish Classroom, Ricardo Gustavo Cetz

Theses and Dissertations

The World-Readiness Standards for Learning Languages (ACTFL, 2014) encourage teachers to help their students use the target language to “investigate, explain, and reflect” on the relationships between cultural products, practices, and perspectives. However, while most language instructors agree that language and culture should be connected, many fail to teach culture explicitly because they are so focused on the language components of their courses. Of those who do teach culture explicitly, many either teach only about the cultural products and not the perspectives, or they teach the culture in English because of its complexity. This project explores the use of e-portfolios …

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An Investigation Into The Motivational Practice Of Teachers Of Albanian And Japanese, Ana-Lisa Clark Mullen Mar 2015

An Investigation Into The Motivational Practice Of Teachers Of Albanian And Japanese, Ana-Lisa Clark Mullen

Theses and Dissertations

This study explores the use and effectiveness of motivational strategies with teachers and learners of Albanian and Japanese at the Missionary Training Center (MTC) in Provo, UT. Each teacher was observed three times using a modified version of the Motivation Orientation of Language Teaching (MOLT) observation scheme that was first used by Guilloteaux & Dornyei (2008). Learners were surveyed using an instrument from that same study. Teachers were surveyed using a modified version of the instrument created by Cheng & Dornyei (2007). Data collected from these three instruments provide insight into (a) the relationship between teacher motivational practice and learner …

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Monophthongal Vowel Production In Females With Primary Sjögren's Syndrome Following A Hydration Treatment Of Nebulized Saline, Kara Rytting Mar 2015

Monophthongal Vowel Production In Females With Primary Sjögren's Syndrome Following A Hydration Treatment Of Nebulized Saline, Kara Rytting

Theses and Dissertations

Sjögren's Syndrome (SS) is an autoimmune disease that causes extreme dryness, or sicca,of the eyes and mouth, as well as other potential drying of the throat and intestines. Speech, voice, and swallowing problems are common in individuals with SS. Therefore, this study examined the possible changes in acoustic characteristics of monophthongs (/i, æ, α, u, ʌ/) in eight females with SS following laryngeal hydration treatments. An ABAB experimental design was implemented. Treatment consisted of nebulized isotonic saline immediately following completion of audio-recordings. Using acoustic analysis software the duration, formant frequencies, and vowel space area (VSA) was calculated for the participant's …

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A Motivational, Online Guide To Help English Language Learners With The Development,Implementation, And Evaluation Of Their Individual Pronunciation Improvement Plans, Sofia Laura Carreno Galdame Mar 2015

A Motivational, Online Guide To Help English Language Learners With The Development,Implementation, And Evaluation Of Their Individual Pronunciation Improvement Plans, Sofia Laura Carreno Galdame

Theses and Dissertations

Intelligibility is one of the major concerns among ESL learners due to its impact on their ability to communicate with native speakers of English (Derwing & Munro, 2005). Even though pronunciation is often addressed in classrooms, it is difficult to tackle all intelligibility issues relevant for each student. Therefore, it is crucial for ESL learners to spend some extra time outside of class improving their pronunciation. Faced with a daunting task of regulating and taking charge of their own learning, they often have questions with respect to what exactly they need to work on, what activities will help them achieve …

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Comparing The Effect Of Smoothing And N-Gram Order : Finding The Best Way To Combine The Smoothing And Order Of N-Gram, Wenyang Zhang Mar 2015

Comparing The Effect Of Smoothing And N-Gram Order : Finding The Best Way To Combine The Smoothing And Order Of N-Gram, Wenyang Zhang

Theses and Dissertations

The SRILM is a toolkit for building and applying statistical language models (LMs), designed and developed primarily for use in speech recognition, statistical tagging and segmentation, and machine translation. It has been under development in the SRI Speech Technology and Research Laboratory since 1995. The toolkit has also greatly benefited from its use and enhancements during the Johns Hopkins University/CLSP summer workshops in 1995, 1996, 1997, and 2002. In this thesis, the effect of smoothing and order of N-gram for language model we build by srilm toolkit is studied. My primary method is to use comparison. Firstly, training corpus and …

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Accountability And Transformative Literacy, Kristin Williams Feb 2015

Accountability And Transformative Literacy, Kristin Williams

Theses and Dissertations

In a conceptual study of accountability measures and transformative teaching practices, this extensive literature review investigates the accountability measures in schools such as high-stakes tests and teacher evaluation methods. The study also examines how teachers and schools can meet obligations by federal mandates while still incorporating effective and critical literacy practices using democratic literacy frameworks and approaches toward democratic whole school reform.

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Effective Conversations About Literature In Esl, Andrea Ortiz-Soto Feb 2015

Effective Conversations About Literature In Esl, Andrea Ortiz-Soto

Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this thesis was to investigate how to facilitate effective conversations about shared texts in English as a Second Language lessons. Since effective instructional talk between students and teachers help English learners develop speaking and listening skills, as well as improve their understanding of written texts, students need lots of opportunities to engage in meaningful conversations about literature. In the course of this study, six bilingual students practiced to express and elaborate their ideas. They learned to ask their teacher and their peers inferential and critical questions, and respond to those in turn. They discussed stories as well …

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Stakeholder Perspectives Of The Effectiveness Of Augmentative And Alternative Communication Techniques In Children With Autism, Daria Constantinescu Feb 2015

Stakeholder Perspectives Of The Effectiveness Of Augmentative And Alternative Communication Techniques In Children With Autism, Daria Constantinescu

Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this study was to utilize focus groups and individual interviews to investigate the effectiveness and efficiency of augmentative and alternative (AAC) techniques in facilitating language in children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) as expressed by the opinions and attitudes of stakeholders involved in the process. ASD is a disorder that affects an individual's social and communication skills that usually surfaces within a child's first three years of life. There have been numerous studies conducted comparing different types of AAC intervention systems, but there is little information on stakeholders' opinions. The current study utilized one focus group interview …

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Raising The Standard: An Assessment Of Peer Collaboration As An Enhancer Of Speech Evaluation Fidelity, Terrell Kody Frey Feb 2015

Raising The Standard: An Assessment Of Peer Collaboration As An Enhancer Of Speech Evaluation Fidelity, Terrell Kody Frey

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores the state of speech evaluation training in the basic communication course at Illinois State University. Specifically, a new type of pedagogy known as the "peer workshop" is integrated into the course as a potential supplement to the speech evaluation training procedures. Quantitative and qualitative methods reveal how the course has become engrained into the academic expectations of the student body and identify written peer feedback as a necessary focus of future training in the classroom. Specific theoretical and pedagogical implications, as well as limitations and future directions, are discussed in detail.

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Language Development In Kindergarten Students Using Melodic Learning, Tara Hart Feb 2015

Language Development In Kindergarten Students Using Melodic Learning, Tara Hart

Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this study is to investigate a non-traditional method of enhancing language through the use of songs, chants, and rhymes. To investigate this, data was systematically collected and then analyzed in order to determine the specific benefits on the development of oral and written language from the use of these strategies. Prior to the study, each student was assessed using the second edition of the Developmental Reading Assessment (DRA2). Using the Word Analysis assessment, they were tested on their ability to identify uppercase and lowercase letters of the alphabet, rhyme, determine initial sounds of words, and read sight …

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Nurturing Young Learners In Practice: A Case Study Of Key Teacher Dispositions That Support Child Centered Practice In An Urban Preschool Environment, Lorraine Ricchezza Feb 2015

Nurturing Young Learners In Practice: A Case Study Of Key Teacher Dispositions That Support Child Centered Practice In An Urban Preschool Environment, Lorraine Ricchezza

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation examines an educator's disposition to positively impact children's cognitive and social emotional development in the preschool setting as evidenced in child centered practices that arouse curiosity, foster social interaction, and promote children's learning as expressed in interpersonal interactions that affirm differences among young children in an urban preschool setting. Through examination and interpretation, this study delineates educator perspectives on child differences and reciprocal relationships as integral to developmentally appropriate practice. Seven female educators at the ABC Elementary School in Urban City, New Jersey participated in this study. This study involved key data sources. During 8 months of data …

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The Persistence Of The Caliphate Debate In Egyptian Legal Thought: Historical Analysis From 1925 To 2014, Assil Salem Feb 2015

The Persistence Of The Caliphate Debate In Egyptian Legal Thought: Historical Analysis From 1925 To 2014, Assil Salem

Theses and Dissertations

In the early centuries of Islam, the term caliph was referred to the highest leader of the Muslim community. He had two roles; firstly as a ruler practicing the roles of the Prophet and secondly as a religious leader leading the communal prayers. The Caliphate has appeared for fourteen centuries and was abolished by Mustafa Kemal Atātūrk in 1924. Although Muslims have been without caliph for ninety years, heated controversy on the restoration of the Caliphate has been debated among Egyptians since 1920s until 2015. This thesis aims to answer the caliphate question,” is the Caliphate obligatory in Shari’a?” by …

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The Effects Of A Small-Group Direct Instruction Intervention On The Reading Achievement Of English Language Learners, Laurie Ottehenning Feb 2015

The Effects Of A Small-Group Direct Instruction Intervention On The Reading Achievement Of English Language Learners, Laurie Ottehenning

Theses and Dissertations

This study analyzes the effects of a Tier 2, small group intervention developed by the Exemplary Center for Reading Instruction (ECRI) that employs direct instruction strategies (including scripted sequenced lessons, teacher modeling, and repeated practice). The reading achievement of 15 English language learners (ELLs) in the ECRI intervention was compared to the reading achievement of 12 ELLs in a computer-based reading intervention. The reading achievement of 27 ELLs was also compared to the reading achievement of 48 non-ELLs in the interventions. Repeated measures ANOVAs and independent t-tests analyzed the results of the Kaufman Test of Educational Achievement-II Brief, pre- and …

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Introducing Public Service Media Principles To The State-Owned Newspapers: The Case Study Of Al-Ahram, Salma Adel Hussein Feb 2015

Introducing Public Service Media Principles To The State-Owned Newspapers: The Case Study Of Al-Ahram, Salma Adel Hussein

Theses and Dissertations

Egypt has a large number of state-owned newspapers that are considered as the mouthpieces of the political power. In order to remove the state control over the content provided by these newspapers it is recommended that these newspapers undertake bold reforms. The thesis suggests their transformation to public service newspapers. It explores if Al-Ahram can be transformed into one that is practicing editorial and financial independence in addition to good governance. In order to respond to this question it compares the current situation of Al-Ahram to a suggested ideal set up, by undertaking a gap analysis. Then a SWOT analysis …

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Hyperlink-Extended Pseudo Relevance Feedback For Improved Microblog Retrieval, Tarek Elganainy Feb 2015

Hyperlink-Extended Pseudo Relevance Feedback For Improved Microblog Retrieval, Tarek Elganainy

Theses and Dissertations

Microblog retrieval has received much attention in recent years due to the wide spread of social microblogging platforms such as Twitter. The main motive behind microblog retrieval is to serve users searching a big collection of microblogs a list of relevant documents (microblogs) matching their search needs. What makes microblog retrieval different from normal web retrieval is the short length of the user queries and the documents that you search in, which leads to a big vocabulary mismatch problem. Many research studies investigated different approaches for microblog retrieval. Query expansion is one of the approaches that showed stable performance for …

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Language Attitudes Towards Dialects Of Arabic In Egypt, Ibrahim Eltouhamy Feb 2015

Language Attitudes Towards Dialects Of Arabic In Egypt, Ibrahim Eltouhamy

Theses and Dissertations

It has been widely believed that a negative attitude is consistently to be found with the rural dialects of Egyptian Arabic, and that their speakers, especially those who emigrate to urban areas, ultimately tend to change their dialects to adapt, at least partially, to the prestige variety of vernacular Arabic, in this case the urban Cairene dialect (Bassiouney, 2009; Haeri, 1991; Miller, 2005; Woidich, 1994). In this regard, language attitudes towards rural dialects of Arabic in Egypt have been only slightly investigated sociolinguistically, as the majority of studies of Arabic language attitudes have been limited to investigating speakers’ attitudes toward …

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Using Games To Learn Vocabulary In Arabic As A Foreign Language Classroom: A Study Of Teacher And Student Beliefs, Haitham Salaheldin Mohamed Feb 2015

Using Games To Learn Vocabulary In Arabic As A Foreign Language Classroom: A Study Of Teacher And Student Beliefs, Haitham Salaheldin Mohamed

Theses and Dissertations

Vocabulary has been always neglected in most of foreign language classrooms. Many strategies, techniques and activities were suggested to make vocabulary acquisition easier and sustained. Games are one of these tools offered to help in learning and teaching vocabulary. Since beliefs are the core of every discipline that deals with learning and behavior. It is important to understand what teachers and students think of games, in other words what are their beliefs towards games. This study explored student and teacher beliefs about using games in learning vocabulary in the Arabic as a Foreign Language classroom. The study aimed to answer …

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Consensus Building In Tunisia: A Study From 2011 - 2013, Amatelrauf Tawfik Ghanem Feb 2015

Consensus Building In Tunisia: A Study From 2011 - 2013, Amatelrauf Tawfik Ghanem

Theses and Dissertations

In the wake of the Arab Spring that swept North Africa and the Middle East in late 2010, different processes of political change have been underway in the region with different results in the nature of each political system. Some transitioned to democracy while others to new forms of authoritarianism or underwent cosmetic reforms without any real effect on the nature of the system. The interest of this research is to examine transition to democracy. It focuses on Tunisia as a case where a democratic transition was initiated after toppling the Former President of Tunisia, Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali. Tunisia …

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Enhancing Emotion Elicitation Using The Contextual, Multimodal Features Of A Social Network, Ahmed Rizk Feb 2015

Enhancing Emotion Elicitation Using The Contextual, Multimodal Features Of A Social Network, Ahmed Rizk

Theses and Dissertations

In our research we addressed the problem of emotion elicitation of social networks. People tend to use social networks as a mean to express their emotions. Some people for example use a social network like Facebook as an outlet to express their negative emotions like frustration or anger and expect their network of friends to interact with them in a way that might help them deal with such emotions. Through friends' comments and likes people get feedback and support that could help neutralize their negative emotions. In the same manner, people use such networks to express their positive emotions like …

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Our Stories, Our Lives: Performed Storytelling In Cairo, Dana Alawneh Feb 2015

Our Stories, Our Lives: Performed Storytelling In Cairo, Dana Alawneh

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores the work of two storytelling groups in Cairo through different conceptual frameworks. Affect, class politics, marginalization, art and the political are the main lenses through which I delve into the work of the groups in an attempt to understand a condition in which such groups exist and what it means to be part of a storytelling community in Cairo. Moreover, through my analysis I try to question the approaches of each group towards the issues they address, why and how they choose to tell certain stories. Moreover I question the method how the stories are told and …

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Barriers Towards Employees' Structural And Psychological Empowerment: A Study Of Non-Managerial Employees In Governmental Service Organizations In Cairo, Passant Bassem Feb 2015

Barriers Towards Employees' Structural And Psychological Empowerment: A Study Of Non-Managerial Employees In Governmental Service Organizations In Cairo, Passant Bassem

Theses and Dissertations

The aim of this thesis is to pave the way for non-managerial employees’ empowerment in governmental service organizations in Egypt. Based on a review of previous studies that discussed the Egyptian bureaucracy, this study hypothesized that all the structural and psychological empowerment barriers - namely the organizational cultures and work context factors, managerial employees’ leadership style, and non-managerial employees’ readiness level and personalities - do exist within the governmental service organizations. Questionnaires were distributed to 223 non-managerial employees in Real Estate offices, Social Insurance and Pension offices, Traffic Services offices, Civil Registry offices, Health offices (Ministry of Health), Tax offices, …

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Teacher Politeness: A Cross-Cultural Comparison In Esl Classrooms, Yasmine Mostafa Soheim Feb 2015

Teacher Politeness: A Cross-Cultural Comparison In Esl Classrooms, Yasmine Mostafa Soheim

Theses and Dissertations

There have been a plethora of studies investigating politeness in different segments of the society. Research on classroom politeness has addressed many different themes, given its tactical role in the teacher-student relationship. For instance, a teacher could intentionally or unintentionally define her/his social distance with the students by means of politeness strategies employed in the classroom. In Egypt, with the growing number of private educational institutions, where the English language is overtly foregrounded, many native speakers are hired as ESL teachers. On one hand, these teachers, who just arrived from their home countries where the teaching and learning attitudes might …

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A Morettian Literary Atlas Of Naguib Mahfouz's Cairo In Three Early Realist Novels: Cairo Modern, Khan Al-Khalili, And Midaq Alley, Paul A. Sundberg Feb 2015

A Morettian Literary Atlas Of Naguib Mahfouz's Cairo In Three Early Realist Novels: Cairo Modern, Khan Al-Khalili, And Midaq Alley, Paul A. Sundberg

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis includes a variey of “literary map experiements” on a dataset of mappable, non-generic, places found in three early realist “Cairo novels” by Naguib Mahfouz: Cairo Modern (1945), Khan al-Khalili (1946) and Midaq Alley (1947) and analyses of the mapped results. Experiments in the “atlas” are conducted on each novel separately and – in a more ‘distant” reading – on combinations of the three novels. The methodology is one originated by Stanford literary historian Franco Moretti in his Atlas of the European Novel 1800-1900 and Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Lierary History. To the researcher’s knowledge, this …

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