Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Flash fiction'

Appalachian writing brings a voice to the region that is often obstructed or excluded by popular culture throughout the United States. Crowded with stereotypes, many stories of Appalachian culture are misconstrued or never heard at all. This makes the work of modern Appalachian writers especially significant. Perhaps one of the best ways to reach a broader audience of people in this fast-paced digital time is through shorter writings, and in this thesis I will be presenting my process of writing modern flash fiction and poetry and of sharing the truths of working class, Appalachian people.

La presente tesi di laurea magistrale consiste nella proposta di traduzione, dal cinese all’italiano, dell’opera intitolata 瓦歷斯微小說 Walisi Wei Xiaoshuo - la flash fiction di Walis Nokan 瓦歷斯.諾幹 - pubblicata dall’autore taiwanese nel 2014. L’opera raccoglie centosettanta testi appartenenti al genere definito flash fiction, caratterizzato da brevità e intertestualità. Nella suddetta raccolta, i racconti vengono suddivisi in otto sezioni, i cui temi sono indicati dai rispettivi titoli : Letteratura, Esseri viventi, Il mondo dello Jianghu, Oggetti, Cronache sociali, Indigeni, Emozioni e Sogno. La traduzione è preceduta da un primo capitolo introduttivo, in cui ogni sezione viene descritta e analizzata per guidare il lettore nell’approccio ai testi tradotti. Nel medesimo capitolo, inoltre, vengono presentati l’autore dei racconti, la cui origine taiwanese risulta evidente e marcata in tutta l’opera e, soprattutto, il genere cui appartengono i testi. Infine, attraverso il commento traduttologico, si analizzeranno le problematiche e le difficoltà che si sono riscontrate nella traduzione dei racconti.

This project is a collection of interconnected short stories all based in the Los Angeles area. Each story is able to stand on its own as a short piece, but ultimately plays a larger role of possessing a relationship with those that come before and after it. The collection is broken into three segments, each segment possessing its own theme. And while each segment, and the stories within each segment, flourishes with the theme they are placed in, each and every story still interconnects with each other in order to produce the framework of the book entirely; that being the story of two young lovers: “Leslie,” and “Thomás.” These two characters that I have produced are at the basis of this project. Their stories are peppered throughout the collection in order to better convey the sporadic nature of their relationship.

The critical preface, "Learning to Break the Rules" discusses workshop rules as guidelines, as well as how and why I learned to break them. The creative portion of this thesis is made up of eight short stories: "The Many Incarnations of Blazer Chief," "Anna's Monsters," "The Pecan Tree's Daughter," "When the Seas Emptied," "The Umbrella Thief," "How to Forget," "Fracture," and "Stealing Dreams."

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Coordena??o de Aperfei?oamento de Pessoal de N?vel Superior - CAPES
O Google Docs (GD) ? um editor online de textos por meio do qual m?ltiplos autores podem trabalhar s?ncrona ou assincronamente em um mesmo documento, o que pode auxiliar no desenvolvimento da habilidade de escrita em ingl?s (WEISSHEIMER; SOARES, 2012). Ao escrever colaborativamente, os aprendizes t?m mais oportunidades para perceber as lacunas na sua produ??o escrita, visto que s?o expostos a mais insumo lingu?stico por parte dos colegas coautores (WEISSHEIMER; BERGSLEITHNER; LEANDRO, 2012), e priorizam o processo de (re)constru??o textual, em detrimento da preocupa??o com o produto final (i.e., o texto pronto) (LEANDRO; WEISSHEIMER; COOPER, 2013). Ademais, no processo de aprendizagem de uma segunda l?ngua (L2), a produ??o de linguagem propicia a consolida??o de conhecimentos existentes e a cria??o de novos conhecimentos (SWAIN, 1985; 1993). Levando isto em considera??o, o presente estudo, de natureza quasi-experimental (NUNAN, 1992) e abordagem mista (D?RNYEI, 2007), objetiva investigar o impacto da escrita colaborativa mediada pela ferramenta GD no desenvolvimento da habilidade de escrita em L?ngua Inglesa (LI) e na percep??o de erros sint?ticos ou noticing (SCHMIDT, 1990). Trinta e quatro licenciandos em Letras/Ingl?s integraram o estudo, sendo 25 no grupo experimental e nove no grupo controle. Ambos os grupos passaram por um pr?-teste e por um p?s-teste para que pud?ssemos medir o noticing de estruturas sint?ticas. Os participantes do grupo experimental foram expostos a uma experi?ncia de aprendizagem h?brida, a qual consistiu em aulas presenciais de leitura e produ??o escrita em LI e na escrita colaborativa de tr?s narrativas completas contadas em 100 palavras, denominadas flash fiction (FF), fora de sala de aula, online por meio do GD, durante 11 semanas. O grupo controle teve igualmente aulas presenciais de leitura e produ??o escrita em LI, por?m n?o praticou nenhum tipo de escrita colaborativa. Analisamos a primeira e a ?ltima narrativa produzida pelos participantes do grupo experimental a fim de medir a acur?cia gramatical, operacionalizada como a quantidade de erros gramaticais a cada 100 palavras (SOUSA, 2014) e a densidade lexical, operacionalizada como a rela??o entre o n?mero de palavras produzidas com propriedades lexicais e o n?mero de palavras produzidas com propriedades gramaticais (WEISSHEIMER, 2007; MEHNERT, 1998). Adicionalmente, os participantes do grupo experimental responderam a um question?rio online sobre a experi?ncia h?brida a qual foram expostos. Os resultados quantitativos mostram que os participantes passaram a produzir textos com mais densidade lexical ap?s 11 semanas de interven??o pedag?gica. J? os resultados quantitativos do noticing e da acur?cia gramatical foram contr?rios ao esperado, por?m nos fornecem insights sobre o modelo de teste, no caso do noticing, e sobre a atitude ? positiva ? dos participantes em rela??o ? escrita colaborativa de FF. Os resultados qualitativos evidenciam a utilidade da escrita colaborativa mediada por tecnologia no processo de aprendizagem de L2.
Google Docs (GD) is an online word processor with which multiple authors can work on the same document, in a synchronous or asynchronous manner, which can help develop the ability of writing in English (WEISSHEIMER; SOARES, 2012). As they write collaboratively, learners find more opportunities to notice the gaps in their written production, since they are exposed to more input from the fellow co-authors (WEISSHEIMER; BERGSLEITHNER; LEANDRO, 2012) and prioritize the process of text (re)construction instead of the concern with the final product, i.e., the final version of the text (LEANDRO; WEISSHEIMER; COOPER, 2013). Moreover, when it comes to second language (L2) learning, producing language enables the consolidation of existing knowledge as well as the internalization of new knowledge (SWAIN, 1985; 1993). Taking this into consideration, this mixed-method (D?RNYEI, 2007) quasi-experimental (NUNAN, 1999) study aims at investigating the impact of collaborative writing through GD on the development of the writing skill in English and on the noticing of syntactic structures (SCHMIDT, 1990). Thirtyfour university students of English integrated the cohort of the study: twenty-five were assigned to the experimental group and nine were assigned to the control group. All learners went through a pre-test and a post-test so that we could measure their noticing of syntactic structures. Learners in the experimental group were exposed to a blended learning experience, in which they took reading and writing classes at the university and collaboratively wrote three pieces of flash fiction (a complete story told in a hundred words), outside the classroom, online through GD, during eleven weeks. Learners in the control group took reading and writing classes at the university but did not practice collaborative writing. The first and last stories produced by the learners in the experimental group were analysed in terms of grammatical accuracy, operationalized as the number of grammar errors per hundred words (SOUSA, 2014), and lexical density, which refers to the relationship between the number of words produced with lexical properties and the number of words produced with grammatical properties (WEISSHEIMER, 2007; MEHNERT, 1998). Additionally, learners in the experimental group answered an online questionnaire on the blended learning experience they were exposed to. The quantitative results showed that the collaborative task led to the production of more lexically dense texts over the 11 weeks. The noticing and grammatical accuracy results were different from what we expected; however, they provide us with insights on measurement issues, in the case of noticing, and on the participants? positive attitude towards collaborative writing with flash fiction. The qualitative results also shed light on the usefulness of computer-mediated collaborative writing in L2 learning.

La presente dissertazione propone la traduzione di una raccolta di microstorie cinesi Moyi (Trono Infestato) scritta e composta da Ling Dingnian (10 giugno 1951) e pubblicata nel giugno 2012 da una casa editrice taiwanese. Ling Dingnian (inserisca tra parentesi la data di nascita) è una figura di spicco nell’ambito della microfiction cinese e possiede una florida produzione letteraria che spazia tra raccolte di microstorie, romanzi e pubblicazioni di ricerca su riviste letterarie. Cittadino cinese impegnato politicamente, l’autore attraverso le proprie microstorie si fa portavoce dei valori tradizionali cinesi, simboleggiati da alcuni oggetti o temi fondamentali nelle trame dei suoi racconti. La tradizione però si affianca ad una visione più ampia ed oggettiva: servendosi della brevità e della sinteticità del genere della flash fiction, insieme ad altri artifici narrativi come l’inner change, si celano le contraddizioni e le ambiguità di un impalcatura culturale apparentemente solida e strutturata. Il corpo della dissertazione, suddiviso in tre capitoli principali presenta prima un'introduzione all'autore e al genere letterario della flash fiction. La seconda parte è composta dalla proposta di traduzione ad una raccolta di micro-storie dell'autore, seguita dal commento traduttologico che va a costituire il terzo capitolo.

Can words create worlds? My fiction thesis, El mundo es mentira (The World Is a Lie), explores different voices and points of view to examine the ways in which they not only tell stories, but also generate spaces, atmospheres and, ultimately, worlds of their own. Moreover, the book aims to be a meeting ground where these voices dialogue with the voices of the literary tradition, reinterpreting and rewriting it. This collection was conceived as an experimental laboratory as well: it is comprised by short and micro-stories which question and challenge conventional forms of storytelling by incorporating poetic, memoiristic and essayistic devices.

Willing to overstep literary conventions in order to ensure that meaning and purpose reign over structure, cross-genre writing works to push boundaries of genre and tear down the walls of limitation. This cross-genre thesis aims to test literary restrictions of structure and style and, as literary endeavors often do, to rattle our existence. In this thesis, nonfiction and fiction work together to drive meaning to the surface of the page, meaning that is universal in the individual stories as well as in the human experience. Although some characters are fictional and some real, they often intersect, their journeys and discoveries merging into one. The many voices of this thesis, while diverse, speak to similar themes and meaning. The main character of "Silhouettes," a homosexual male who yearns to find his identity away from the place he once called home, experiences feelings of abandonment and loss. The narrator of "A Crimson Trail" longs to uncovers truths about her uncle's suicide and endures similar feelings of loss. "Abandoned Laurels" explores a complex mother-daughter relationship and wades through themes of mourning, regret, and shame. The remaining stories explore similar themes, including those of longing, death, and familial relationships. Shorter pieces are scattered amongst longer works and supplement themes developed in the thesis. Each section contributes to the characters' longing for identity, recovery, and understanding of the past. These related characters and their stories--both real and fictional--merge in a collective endeavor to sift through loss, explore the past, and, most importantly, find identity and hope in the future amidst the rubble of the present.
B.A.
Bachelors
Arts and Humanities
English; Creative Writing

This PhD submission is composed of a collection of short stories and an accompanying critical commentary, focusing on the theme of missing people. The short story collection reflects the diverse experiences relating to the phenomenon of missing people: child abduction, grooming and sexual exploitation, suicide, relationship breakdown and loneliness. The stories in the collection are of various lengths, from 'flash fiction' of fewer than 500 words, to longer, more sustained stories. The accompanying commentary investigates the theme of missing people, drawing upon legal, sociological and creative sources. The research underpinning the project was conducted in close consultation with agencies, charities and other professionals working within the field, as well as drawing upon personal accounts by people who have been missing themselves or testimonies of those affected by a loved one's disappearance. The short story - as a form that is often characterised by what is unsaid, by what is left out, by absence - is a particularly fitting vehicle for exploring the theme of missing people. This thesis demonstrates the link between the form of the short story and the theme of absence. It also uses fiction as a means of throwing new light onto the human meaning and significance of the phenomenon of missing people.

This collection of prose-poems and flash fiction, together with a few short stories, shows how romantic relationships colour our perspectives on the world. The collection has echoes throughout of speakers' voices, theme, imagery and tone. There is a narrative logic too, but working on a subtle level of echo and resonance

Mirrors and Vanities is a multi-modal collection which showcases the diversity of working in long and short storytelling forms. Featured in this thesis are fiction, nonfiction, graphic narrative, and screenplay. Using unconventional approaches to storytelling in order to achieve emotional resonance with the audience while maintaining high standards for craft, these stories and essays explore the costs inherent to the subtle nuances of interpersonal relationships. The fiction focuses on the complications of characters keeping secrets. A husband discovers the truth behind his wife's miscarriage. A girl visits her fiance in purgatory. A boy crosses a line and loses his best friend. Meanwhile, the nonfiction centers on self-discovery and gender roles associated with power struggles. A schizophrenic threatens to ruin my mother's wedding. I rediscover my relationship with my father through food writing. Sword-work teaches me to fail and succeed at making martial art. The title work of the thesis is a collaged story highlighting the tribulations of a physicist fixated on recovering his lost love by manipulating the multiverse. The multi-modal format implicates the nebulosity of physics theories and how different aspects of the narrative can be presented in various formats to best suit the nature of the storytelling. Through the interactions of characters in mundane and extraordinary circumstances, the works in this thesis examine the consequences of choice, the contrast between reality and expectation, coming of age, and the Truth of narrative.
M.F.A.
Masters
English
Arts and Humanities
Creative Writing

Tahar Ben Jelloun is a Moroccan poet and novelist who is presently active and writing in French. This thesis deals primarily with the novelistic works of the author, examining the way in which he uses rituals as a narrative device or as a theme, and how they can be seen to reflect on other salient features of his writing. Ritual is examined as a metaphor whose incorporation into a novel can paradoxically implicate the reader and the author in the work, in the same way that ritual in life may implicate the participants in a myth. The implications of this interpretation are manifold in Ben Jelloun's work, and this thesis examines these under several broad themes, including those of meaning, enigma, freedom and the body. The thesis argues that Ben Jelloun's use of ritual reinforces his strategy of subversion and manipulation as key elements in the generative process.

This thesis examines the way in which the fictional biographies of Virginia Woolf, Orlando and Flush, prefigure central tenets of postmodern fiction. To demonstrate the postmodern elements present in Orlando and Flush, this thesis focuses on how the fictional biographies exhibit three postmodern characteristics: concern for historiography, extensive use of parody, and the denaturalization of cultural assumptions. Born from Woolf’s desire to revolutionize biography by incorporating elements of fiction alongside historical fact, these two novels parallel later works of historiographic metafiction in several key respects. Woolf’s extensive use of parody in Orlando and Flush prefigures how postmodern parody foregrounds the many ways in which all narratives are inherently constructions. Woolf also expresses a postmodern attitude by denaturalizing cultural assumptions about sexual difference and social class. When taken together, these three traits reveal how Orlando and Flush possess an ontological philosophy indicative of postmodern literature.

Our ways of thinking modernism and its legacy are imprinted with the pattern of an opposition, a struggle between two sets of extremes: objective and subjective; form and feeling; mechanistic and organic; mind and body; knowing and being; self and world; aesthetic and historical. The three writers whose work I explore in this thesis challenge prevailing notions of this oppositional discourse. Entering the scene of modernism late in its history, Elizabeth Bowen, Eudora Welty and Maurice Merleau- Ponty develop a new kind of vision that makes us rethink the relationships between perceiver and perceived, between mind, body and world. All three writers undertake a fundamental reorganisation of the relationships between internal consciousness and external things through the narration of a perception that is outside the limits of discrete sensations or causal relationships. Physical things are neither pure objecthood nor merely external triggers for the ramblings of a solipsistic consciousness, rather they infringe on a consciousness whose own edges are indistinct. This writing establishes an interdependent and interlocutory relationship between subject and world, which become not opposite ends of a perceptual scale, but aspects of a common flesh. The intimate connection to the world is both comforting and threatening, both reinforcing subjectivity and de-centring it. The re-ordering of the connections between self and world leads to a reassessment of collective identity and historical agency, as well as impacting upon approaches to modes of representation. In trying to express the pre-linguistic experience of embodied consciousness, this writing looks to models of mute expression found in visual images. Exploring how the invisible aspects of experience emerge within the visible realm, the writing takes on an often hallucinatory or uncanny character. Charting the passage from being to doing, from perception to creation, from the style of the flesh to the style of fiction, Merleau-Ponty, Welty and Bowen dissolve received boundaries and distinctions at every level.

This dissertation defends the microrrelato, an extremely brief work of narrative fiction, as the “fourth narrative genre,” as informed by research in embodied cognitive science, often referred to as the field of “neurohumanities.” The hallmark brevity of the microrrelato means that the literary perception of the text—and the creation of an imagined story world—is highly influenceable by its context, though the traditional literary criticism often published regarding the microrrelato does not seem to defend its distinction. I offer a reexamination of the microrrelato by defining it using a radial-structure conceptualization as informed by research from cognitive science on prototypes to inform a more comprehensive approach to defining the microrrelato and its relationship to other narrative, fictional, and literary forms. By looking at the prototypical conceptualization of the microrrelato through the lens of the neurohumanities, its distinction as its own category of narrative prose becomes clearer. Whereas the vast majority of research in the neurohumanities uses larger works of literature as summative case studies, very little has yet been applied to such short, “sudden” pieces of narrative fiction. It is through this examination that I demonstrate that fictional texts do not need to be extensive in order to afford the realization of cognitive processes in readers that construct imagined story worlds or afford them enriched narrative experience. The brevity or “suddenness” of the microrrelato is precisely what affords the reader the opportunity to do so. Furthermore, by applying empirical research from the field of neurohumanities, including data that I have collected, to the microrrelato, this dissertation also provides insight into the nature of fiction and the act of reading itself.

This thesis contains five short stories, each narrated by a character with a psychological disorder. The disorders represented are as follows: alcohol use disorder, schizophrenia, Alzheimer’s disease, phobic disorder, and autism spectrum disorder. Research was conducted in two parts: (1) study of psychological texts including peer reviewed articles and case studies and (2) study of literary works including memoirs and novels. The author aims to use storytelling to humanize and therefore generate empathy for those with mental illnesses.

Sweat Stones is a story collection and a novel excerpt. All of its parts are set in the American South, and are concerned with the intersection between class and geography. The majority of the characters are a part of underrepresented portions of their local population—they are trapped within cycles of poverty, in turns longing for escape and wearing their mixed brands of anguish like badges. The longer stories have firm roots in Realism, while the shorter ones, which serve as breaks between the collection’s major sections, are tinged with degrees of Absurdism or Magical Realism. Through these stories I hope to have translated what can be translated about a place—its rhythms and personalities, the images and logics that distinguish it from anywhere else. It’s a kind of language-made hallucination. As the characters buckle under the weight of their rigors, their stories push against the limits of plausibility. Most share these stylistic concerns, especially those written in first-person. But even when the voice and tone shift into what seems like a different narrative realm, what holds them together are the dire situations of the characters. A poor family suffers the death of a child and the father has to leave them for work. A marginalized group of stage riggers use up all of their energy for nothing. A man feeds into his self-loathing as a series of capricious relationships unravel. Sweat Stones, which takes its name from the flat slates that heat the contemplative atmosphere of a sweat lodge, is a reflection on the mutual burdens borne of laborious life. It’s a gesture of solidarity for a particular kind of struggle, in which I have participated in one form or another. Along the way I met the people, grew up around the places that would become the subjects of this fiction.

O microconto é um género textual com presença relevante nas línguas espanhola e inglesa, e as suas características podem ser aproveitadas na sala de aula de língua estrangeira para desenvolver actividades de análise e de produção criativas que potenciem a aprendizagem e a reflexão sobre a língua alvo. O presente relatório enquadra a utilização do texto literário no ensino de língua estrangeira e descreve e analisa a implementação de actividades sobre o microconto na realização da Prática de Ensino Supervisionada na Escola Básica e Secundária Josefa de Óbidos.
The short short story is a genre with a very strong presence in the Spanish and English languages, and its characteristics can be explored in the language classroom so as to develop analysis and creative production activities that enhance the learning of and reflection upon the target language. The present report contextualises the use of the literary text in the foreign language classroom and it describes and analyses the implementation of activities that revolve around the short short story during the Preservice Teacher Training at Escola Básica e Secundária Josefa de Óbidos.

This dissertation examines the figures of the shaman and the cyborg, arguing that both act as intermediaries between the organic world of bodies and the artificial world of culture and machines. Using the sf of Robert Holdstock, David Zindell and Kathleen Ann Goonan as starting points, new forms of embodiment in the context of the cyborg and the shaman's shared narrative of radical boundary dissolution are critically and imaginatively examined. Throughout this thesis, the works of Deleuze and Guattari, Sadie Plant, Manuel De Landa, Erik Davis, Donna Haraway, Terence McKenna, and other speculative theorists who operate at the nexus of technological culture and the shamanic imagination serve as guidelines.
English Studies
M.A.

This dissertation focuses on selected novels written by contemporary indigenous authors from Aotearoa/New Zealand and examines the fictional imagination of the human body as a medium of cultural identity and memory. The novels discussed are Keri Hulme’s »The Bone People« (1984), »Nights in the Gardens of Spain« (1995) and »The Uncle’s Story« (2000) by Witi Ihimaera as well as James George’s »Hummingbird« (2003). In order to further decolonisation processes and to come to terms with the colonial past and the complexity of present realities, the fictional works position the human body as an active entity in the negotiation of specific cultural epistemologies. This project explores the narrative translation of corporeality that is used to locate alternative concepts of identity and cultural memory. Taking into account indigenous perspectives, this thesis makes use of the current theoretical approaches presented by pragmatism and affect theory in order to analyse the investment of the novels in feeling and the reciprocal relationship between text and corporeality depicted by the narratives. On the one hand, the novels aim to undermine oppressive and marginalising categories by placing particular emphasis on »sensuous gaps« in the text. On the other hand, the narratives intend to construct alternative identities and evoke specific aspects of indigenous histories and knowledge by imagining the human body in terms of »sensuous inscription«. The novels portray individuals who act from a place in-between different cultures, and articulate a desire to dissolve polarities and emphasise individual and cultural transformation as a formative element in the creation of complex identities and new perspectives
Diese Dissertation stellt einige ausgewählte Romane, die von zeitgenössischen neuseeländischen Autoren mit Wurzeln in der Maori-Kultur stammen, im Hinblick auf deren Darstellung des menschlichen Körpers als Mittler kultureller Identität und Erinnerung in den Fokus. Betrachtet werden Keri Hulmes »The Bone People« (1984), die beiden Romane »Nights in the Gardens of Spain« (1995) und »The Uncle’s Story« (2000) von Witi Ihimaera sowie James Georges »Hummingbird« (2003). Im Zuge von Dekolonialisierungsprozessen, der Vergangenheitsbewältigung und Komplexität gegenwärtiger Realitäten positionieren die Fiktionstexte den menschlichen Körper als vermittelnde Instanz kulturspezifischer Epistemologien. Besondere Aufmerksamkeit richtet diese Arbeit auf die im fiktionalen Rahmen angestrebte Translation von Leiblichkeit, die zur Verortung alternativer Identitätskonzepte und kultureller Erinnerungsmuster sinnstiftend genutzt wird. Unter Berücksichtigung indigener Konzepte werden neuere Ansätze des Pragmatismus und der Affekttheorie für die literaturwissenschaftliche Analyse herangezogen, um die sinnlich-emotional gefasste Investition der Romane und die Wechselbeziehung zwischen Text und Körperlichkeit, die in den Fiktionstexten zum Tragen kommt, zu untersuchen. Dabei rücken die Narrationen zum einen eine Unterhöhlung einschränkender und marginalisierender Lebensmodelle durch eine Betonung »sinnlicher Risse« im Textfluss in den Vordergrund; zum anderen beabsichtigen sie durch eine »sinnliche Gravur« des imaginierten menschlichen Körpers eine Konstruktion alternativer Identitäten und kulturspezifischer indigener Erinnerungsstiftung. Die Romane zeichnen Individuen, die zwischen mehreren kulturellen Horizonten agieren, und artikulieren dabei ein Bestreben, Polaritäten aufzulösen und durch die Betonung individueller und kultureller Transformation komplexe Identitäten und neue Perspektiven zu verhandeln

The thesis comprises the novel 'A Knowledge of Spirit and Flesh', and an exegesis that locates the novel within three major theoretical strands - female spirituality, the 'interior journey' and ecriture feminine - and shows their relevance to the novel. Knowledge of Spirit and Flesh is set in Reformation Slovakia in 1643, and fictionalises actual events of the time. These occurred in the city of Bratislava, and focussed on the laundry-maid Regina Fischer, brutally haunted by a malicious ghost intent on releasing his soul from purgatory.The novel tells the story of Regina and the Catholic priest sent to write down her story to save her from a witchcraft accusation by the Lutherans of the city. The novel explores themes of resistance, both political and personal, within a context of religious tension. The exegesis scrutinises A Knowledge of Spirit and Flesh in relation to feminist, numinous and writing theorisations. The exegesis is centrally concerned with the notion of 'feminism/patriarchy', and it implications for feminist fiction and theory. The exegesis asks: how can the female fiction writer transcend the stalemate of 'feminism/patriarchy' in her work? The exegesis explores three key paradigms - the numinous feminine, the 'interior joumey' and ecriture feminine - as sites of resistance outside the patriarchal Symbolic Order, and thus posits an alternative framework to that upon which many current feminist theories are based.