Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Plantation life in fiction'

This thesis constitutes the first detailed study of the life and works (published and unpublished) of the writer Giovanna Zangrandi (1910-1988). It is a study of the relationship between autobiography, fiction and history in her writing, in the light of recent developments in the criticism of autobiography and of feminist historiography and literary criticism. It aims to place Zangrandi's work in its historical and literary context and pays particular attention to the periods of fascism, the Resistance and neorealism. The thesis considers the nature of autobiography, and the implications of women writing about themselves, and analyses Zangrandi's use of autobiography, highlighting the inevitable intrusion of fiction into such writing. It uses that analysis, along with material including Zangrandi's unpublished diaries and testimonies of people who knew her, to write a biography of Zangrandi and to examine the way that she writes about the fascist period and the Resistance. The question of representing real life in fiction, rather than autobiography, is also discussed, with reference to Zangrandi's first novel and to neorealism. It is shown that, as well as her constant interest in the lives of women, her attitude to history and traditions of the Cadore, the mountainous region in the north of the Veneto, where she lived all her adult life and where nearly all her novels, short stories and autobiography are set, is of considerable importance. Her writing about the Cadore can be seen both as an attempt to write herself into those traditions, and as a means of expressing her commitment to improving society. Moreover, it is argued, her commitment takes the form of both autobiography and fiction as her concern to write about lived experience is balanced by a constant interest in the story-telling tradition of the Cadore and an interpretation of fiction that judges it to be an integral part of everyday life.

Captive Still Life is the fictional story of Marcus Penikett, a seventeen year old celebrity trapped in a scary, suburbanite housing community called Morningside. Marcus Penikett will never escape the childhood incident at the Zoo that made him and the Penikett family famous —the infamous TIME cover of his bleeding face hangs outside of his room, forever documenting and haunting Marcus with the past. Now, Marcus is determined to leave the housing community of Morningside, Georgia to get away from his control freak mother Elise, his absent professor father Otto and a menagerie of other Morningside residents. This plan is complicated by his love for fellow neighbor Olivia, sexual relationship with the maid Sue and Morningside's uncanny 'power' to thwart Marcus' goals.

LIFE IS GOOD—IF BUT BRIEFLY is a contemporary, satirical novel written in the third person. Walter Dingles, the story’s protagonist, is an introspective twenty-two-year-old with a knack for screwing things up. After finishing college, Walter realizes he’s emotionally ill prepared to face the world on his own. He moves back home vowing to get his shit together. He lands a job at his old high school, but his efforts are exacerbated when his grandfather’s porn collection ends up in the principal’s office, he unknowingly begins taking his mother’s estrogen supplements, and family secrets come to the fore. In the end, Walter comes to accept himself. Set in the heartland, LIFE IS GOOD—IF BUT BRIEFLY plays against the region’s reputation as a bastion of conservatism and wholesome family values, while expressing the mood and anxiety of a generation coming of age in a down economy.

My thesis consists of a novel in stories, each taking place in or around the Brooklyn Art Institute. My characters fall along a spectrum of artistic failure, whether because they have lost touch with both their former successes and their former selves, or because they are unable to reach the upper echelons of the artistic community. The stories themselves are a testament both to failure and to the dreams and desires that lead to it, and ultimately ask the reader whether it is better to lead a life of comfortable contentment or to fail gloriously.

This collection of six chapters is an excerpt from a novel based on the book of Job, as told through the viewpoint of a contemporary woman from Texas. A preface exploring the act of starting over, fictionally and creatively, precedes the chapters.

"Still Life" argues that Patrick White's fiction reveals objects in surprising, unexpected attitudes so as to challenge the process by which the mind usually connects with the world around it. In particular, White's novels disrupt readers' tacit assumptions about the lethargic nature of substance; this thesis traces how his fiction reaches beyond familiar linguistic and stylistic forms in order to reinvent humanity's generally passive perception of reality. The first chapter outlines the historical context of ideas about the "object," tracing their development from the Bible through literary movements such as romanticism, symbolism, surrealism and modernism. Further, the chapter considers the nature of language and the relation of object to word in order to distinguish between the usual symbolic use made of objects in literature and White's treatment of things as discrete, palpable entities. The second chapter focuses on White's first three published novels—Happy Valley (1939), The Living and the Dead (1941) and The Aunt's Story (1948)--as steps in his novelistic growth. Chapters Three, Four and Five examine respectively The Tree of Man (1955), The Solid Mandala (1966) and The Eye of the Storm (1973); these novels represent successive stages of White's career and exemplify his different formal and stylistic techniques. White's innovations demand a new manner of reading; therefore, each novel is discussed in terms of objects which reflect the shapes of the works themselves: "tree" defines the structure and style of Tree of Man "house" inspires Solid Mandala and "body" shapes Eye of the Storm. Reading White's novels in terms of structural analogues not only illuminates his methodology, but also clarifies his distinction between objective and subjective ways of understanding the world. Further, these chapters also refute critics' arguments that White's objects are merely victims of his overambitious use of personification and pathetic fallacy, or that they are the result of his dabbling in mysticism. "Still Life" concludes by showing how Patrick White's novels sequentially break down assumptions about reality and appearance until the reality of language itself falters. The author restores mystery to things by relocating the possibility of the extraordinary within the narrow, prescribed confines of the ordinary. White succeeds in changing readers' notions about the nature of reality by disrupting the habitual process by which they apprehend the world of things.
Arts, Faculty of
English, Department of
Graduate

This study examines booktalk, that is, teacher-led group discussions about books for children in a Swedish school. The empirical data comprise 24 hours of videorecorded booktalk in grades 4–7. In total, 40 children (aged 10–14 years) were recorded during 24 sessions. The present approach diverges from previous readerresponse studies in that it draws on authentic data, and in that it examines talk at a micro level, applying an approach from discursive psychology. By focusing on authentic book discussions, the study contributes to the development of readerresponse methods. All eight books applied in the booktalk sessions involved some type of  existential issue: freedom, separation, loyalty, and mortal danger (Chapter 4). Yet, such issues were rarely discussed. An important task of the present thesis was to understand why such issues did not materialise, that is, what did not take place. In Chapter 5, a series of booktalk dilemmas were identified. The booktalk sessions were generally lively and informal. Yet, booktalk as such was often transformed into other local educational projects; e.g. time scheduling, vocabulary lessons or reading aloud exercises. Gender was invoked in all booktalk sessions (Chapter 6). In line with predictions from reader-response theory, progressive texts were, at times, discussed in gender stereotypical ways. The findings also revealed a generational pattern in that the pupils discussed fictive children in less traditional ways than adult characters. The interface between texts and life was invoked in all booktalk sessions (Chapter 7). There was, again, a generational pattern in that children entertained ideas other than those of their teachers concerning legitimate topics in a school context. Also, the discussions revealed a problem of balance between pupils’ privacy, on the one hand, and engaging discussions on texts and life, on the other.

Thesis (M.A.)--Boise State University, 2002.
Web site. Master's project includes an explanatory text and CD-ROM entitled: Historical fiction : a web site supporting secondary U.S. history courses of study-Idaho Department of Education. Includes bibliographical references.

In this collection, the typical and the peculiar collide with the necessary and familiar. Where life, love, and loss, are random quantum elements that may or may not hold the universe together. Some of these stories explore characters that are a bit off, a tad quirky, underdogs trying to find something to hold on to. From musing about the atomic bomb and Hubba Bubba gum, to jogging at the speed of a particle in the Hadron accelerator, or ruminating on the awesome power of the sit-com, to taking a selfie with co-workers in the dark, to what bored kids do to preserve memories, this collection connects the absurd and the mundane, the universal and particular. These stories deal with choices and events that have the potential to change lives and shape character. And whether it's breaking the record for highest jump in a mattress outfit, longing for meatballs, what the downtown bus hub can teach, secret tattoos, cutting off your pinkie to save a relationship, or whales on the high sea, this collection oscillates between the random and the significant in order to enlighten or at least to entertain.

This thesis investigates the fictionalized life writings which are engrafted upon four of Marina Warner's novels through the mise en abîme technique called "metabiography". These novels are In a Dark Wood (1977), The Lost Father (1988), Indigo; or Mapping the Waters (1992) and The Leto Bundle (2000). Across this body of work, the evolution of metabiography in the postmodern novel is traced as it gradually turns from the theme of biographical research and its difficulties into the inclusion of different types of life writings within the very structure of these novels. Most importantly, it will be argued that a parallel comes to the fore between the textual exposure of life writing mechanisms and the taken-for-granted ideas or myths surrounding it. In other words, once the biographer's research methods and artistic writing techniques are fictionally uncovered, the alleged detachment and factuality of the genre are destroyed. Moreover, Warner's metabiography presents such a thematic and structural variety that other types of myths are deconstructed; either by (re)positioning the latter within their socio-historical circumstances, or by identifying their correspondences with different trends of literary theory and criticism. Warner's own concerns as a cultural historian provide the guiding principle to the typology of themes expanded by her fiction. The most recurrent ones are Catholicism, female iconography and its role in the subjection of women as well as post-colonial issues. Warner's engrafted life writings will thus be categorized and studied in relation to the variety of themes demystified: religious, folkloric, gender and ethnic/racial. The denomination of myths will be applied to the latter due to their nature as prejudiced ideas and generalizations.

Finding the Center is a collection of short stories with characters that search within themselves for answers to who they are and what is their place in the world. Through descriptive language, well-rounded characterization, and sometimes by use of experimental writing forms, the author examines themes such as mankind's place in nature, materialism, globalization, and the corporatization of America. Through a psychoanalytical approach toward writing, the characters grapple with their relationship; whether it is an understanding of one another or a clearer understanding of the role the environment plays in each of their lives. Uses of ancient myth as well as the creation of new myth hold up Midwestern rural values for inspection. The collection explores and develops images that are icons for the Midwest in the same way cowboys and rodeos are the iconographic images of the west, or like southern hospitality and genteel manners are icons of the south.
Department of English

The Gate is a collection of short stories by Cassondra Bird Combs. Combs' first collection is heavily inspired by the small Northern California towns she grew up in, and the disillusioned characters who live there. The Gate marks the introduction of an incredibly sympathetic voice, a voice hard to find in modern literature, that didn't rise from New York or Iowa but from a youth spent in solitude in the redwoods. Combs' characters range from a fifteen-year-old girl trapped in an endless abusive cycle to a young man whose parents have suddenly left him to a older woman trying to end her marriage by burning Christmas trees in the street. In these seven stories, Combs reminds us time and time again of the advantages and disadvantages of a rural life, and forges connection between character and reader in a remarkable way. In "Little World" a little girl is paralyzed by fear of the dark but is stronger than she knows. In "Turn" a young woman has to make peace with her past and escape. In "B-Side" a recovering addict realizes the thing he needs isn't the thing he wants. In a voice entirely in tune with the hum of the woods and alive with unusual descriptions and deft character traits, Combs' collection will keep you reading.

Charles Bukowski devoted his writing career to turning his own life into poetry and prose. In poems and stories about his experiences as one of the working poor in post war America, and in those depicting his experiences as a writer of the American underground, Bukowski represents himself as both a literary and social outsider. Bukowski expresses an alternative literary aesthetic through his fictional persona, Henry Chinaski, who struggles to overcome his suffering in a world he finds absurd, and who embarks on a quest for freedom in his youth to which he remains committed all his life. This thesis examines Charles Bukowski's autobiographical fiction with a specific emphasis on five novels and one collection of short stories. In the novels, Post Office (1970), Factotum (1975), Women (1978), Ham on Rye (1982) and Hollywood (1989), and in a number of short stories in the collection Hot Water Music (1983), Bukowski explores different periods of Chinaski???s life with a dark humour, revealing links between Chinaski???s struggle with the absurd and those aspects comprising Bukowski???s alternative aesthetic. The thesis focuses on such aspects of Bukowski???s art as the uncommercial nature of his publishing history, his strong emphasis on literary simplicity, the appearance of the grotesque and Bukowski???s obsession with nonconformity, drinking and sex. These aspects illuminate the distinctive nature of Bukowski???s art and its purpose, which is the transformation of an ordinary life into literature. This thesis argues that Bukowski illuminates possibilities that exist for individuals to create an identity for themselves through aesthetic self-expression. The thesis traces the development of Chinaski's non-conformist personality from Ham on Rye, based on Bukowski's youth in Los Angeles during the Depression, to Hollywood, Bukowski's ironic portrayal of Chinaski's brush with the commercial film industry. Through meeting the many challenges he faced throughout his life with defiance, honesty and an irreverent sense of humour, Bukowski invites readers to identify with his alternative world view. The thesis argues this particular aspect of his writing constitutes his most valuable contribution to twentieth century American fiction.

This practice-led PhD project consists of two parts. The first is an exegesis documenting how a fiction writer can enter a dialogue with the oral history project in Australia. I identify two philosophical mandates of the oral history project in Australia that have shaped my creative practice: an emphasis on the analysis of the interviewee’s subjective experience as a means of understanding the past, and the desire to engage a wide audience in order to promote empathy towards the subject. The discussion around fiction in the oral history project is in its infancy. In order to deepen the debate, I draw on the more mature discussion in ethnographic fiction. I rely on literary theorists Steven Greenblatt, Dorrit Cohn and Gerard Genette to develop a clear understanding of the distinct narrative qualities of fiction, in order to explore how fiction can re-present and explore an interviewee’s subjective experience, and engage a wide readership. I document my own methodology for producing a work of fiction that is enriched by oral history methodology and theory, and responds to the mandates of the project. I demonstrate the means by which fiction and the oral history project can enter a dialogue in the truest sense of the word: a two-way conversation that enriches and augments practice in both fields. The second part of the PhD is a novel, set in Brisbane and based on oral history interviews and archival material I gathered over the course of the project. The novel centres on Brisbane artist Evelyn, who has been given an impossible task: a derelict old house is about to be demolished, and she must capture its history in a sculpture that will be built on the site. Evelyn struggles to come up with ideas and create the sculpture, realising that she has no way to discover who inhabited the house. What follows is a series of stories, each set in a different era in Brisbane’s history, which take the reader backwards through the house’s history. Hidden Objects is a novel about the impossibility of grasping the past and the powerful pull of storytelling. The novel is an experiment in a hybrid form and is accompanied by an appendix that identifies the historically accurate sources informing the fiction. The decisions about the aesthetics of the novel were a direct result of my engagement with the mandates of the oral history project in Australia. The novel was shortlisted in the 2012 Queensland Literary Awards, unpublished manuscript category.

The Pink Papers is a collection of three short stories and a novel in progress consisting of four chapters. Each piece is a work of original fiction. The preface addresses the female writer and the female voice in fiction. "Broken Clock" and "Pink Paper" are the stories of two girls coping with endometriosis. "Normal Capacity" looks at the loss of a dream through the eyes of a first-year law student. The novel in progress, titled Blanchard, OK, is set in a rural farming town in Oklahoma. The novel tells the stories of 24-year-old Robin, her Aunt Paula, and Paula's boyfriend, Sam.

The novel Life As the Invisible Woman, details the death, re-birth and life of a young woman who learns through her experience that she creates "good" and "bad" in the context of her own life, and will continue to do so in an eternal process until, as the character Sarah states in the book, "there is more light in her than water and clay." It is also a story about abuse, domestic violence, and their devastating psychological consequences in the lives of those who experience them.Life As the Invisible Woman is being submitted as a partial manuscript in fulfillment of the creative project requirement for the degree of Master of Arts in creative writing.
Department of English

This study investigates the practice of writing a novel with its starting point in family photographs. It consists of the novel itself in latest draft form as well as a theoretical commentary on the writing of it. The particular focus for discussion is how the visual informs the written text and how the visual and verbal together become ‘imagetext’.1 The novel is narrated in the first person by Lily Adams who learns from the many ancestral portraits in black and white that line the halls of her childhood home that what they embody is not visually representative of a past she has been encouraged to believe in, but rather of one she is now forced to question as the pictures speak to her, in their own voices, of a world re-focused through their own lens. A critical commentary follows in three chapters: a chapter on ‘punctum’ discusses motivation and photography as a technical and creative driver for this work, and the following one on ‘ekphrasis’ makes literary connections between two main drafts, one in third person (see Appendix) and the other (latest) in first person, looking in detail at the way ‘ekphrasis’ or visual to verbal translation has developed in these two versions. The growth of the idea from earlier beginnings is traced and related to the notion of ekphrasis as it has shaped the later drafts. The concluding chapter on ‘ekphrastic realism’ draws these strands together by making an attempt to situate my novel within the canonical intersection of ekphrasis and magical realism. These make a contribution to an understanding of the concept of ekphrasis by way of ekphrastic writing, known merely as an obscure literary genre.

This thesis considers ways of reading posthumousness in narrative in various theoretical and literary constellations by focusing on temporality and historical time. Defining posthumousness in terms of a narrative perspective adopted after the death of a character or the narrator, I consider how writers reanimate historical characters, adopt imagined posthumous perspectives and reconstruct historical memory. I combine approaches to temporality by Paul Ricoeur and Mark Currie, incorporating elements of psychoanalytic and poststructuralist theory including Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok’s writing on crypts, Ned Lukacher’s analysis of primal scenes and prosopopoeia, and Jacques Derrida’s writing on the archive. Each chapter considers how historical time is imagined within narratives concerned with posthumousness. Chapter 1 considers how historical time is given a place within the posthumous narrative of Iain Sinclair and Rachel Lichtenstein’s Rodinsky’s Room. Chapters 2 and 3 develop ideas of historical time and the posthumous in relation to Wilhelm Jensen’s Gradiva and Orhan Pamuk’s The Black Book. Chapter 4 compares Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet and José Saramago’s The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis. Chapter 5 analyzes posthumousness in Bruno Schulz’s stories, and how these are reimagined by Jonathan Safran Foer (Tree of Codes), David Grossman (See Under: Love) and Cynthia Ozick (The Messiah of Stockholm). I focus on these novels’ engagement with posthumousness, including how primal elements of memory and historical time are given new presences. I consider how this approach to fiction and historical time gives the past a new life in narrative, giving time for what Schulz describes in his story ‘The Age of Genius’: ‘events that have no place of their own in time; events that have occurred too late, after the whole of time has been distributed, divided and allotted; events that have been left ... hanging in the air, homeless and errant.’

This thesis explores Doris Lessing’s writing of evolution and genetics in her space fiction through two contexts: first, through a historical global crisis for capitalism in the 1970s following a temporary breakdown of post-war Euro-US financial hegemony; and second, through a philosophical shift in scientific discourse from an age of reductionism to an age of complexity or emergence. After almost two decades of writing realism, Lessing started writing what she calls ‘space fiction’ in the late 1960s in the final section of The Four-Gated City (1969), and she did not stop for over a decade, with The Sentimental Agents of the Volyen Empire (1983). Focusing on Memoirs of a Survivor (1974) and the Canopus in Argos series (1979-83), I argue that space fiction allows Lessing two modes of inquiry, the first based in realism and the second on speculation: first, to explore the human body as a political object, or the biopolitical; second, speculations on resistance to biopolitical governance through living ambivalently (not competitively), for the sake of metabolic survival, or biosociality. If biopolitics is enabled through reductionist constructions of ‘the body’ as a unit of analysis (‘bio’ signifying ‘type’ or collection of genes), then biosociality understands ‘bio’ as metabolic systems that extend between individuals, across species differentiations. The posthumanism of biopolitics leads towards transhumanism, while the posthumanism of biosociality is what Eugene Thacker calls ‘peripheral life’: ‘life that is perpetually going outside itself’. The vehicle of this critique is what I call ‘epigenetic poiesis’. I develop this term throughout the thesis to describe literary and cultural representations of epigenetic changes, using ‘poiesis’ to describe how these changes emerge through responses to chance events which put subjects out of equilibrium, enabling or forcing fast adaptation to changed contexts (a forced displacement to another planet, an arranged marriage, an ice age). Lessing’s sf novels express modes of survival activated outside the restrictions of biopolitical control, chance responses to the end-game of a world-system that exploits, determines and tracks the bio-energy of the living matter under its dominion for the sake of accumulation and expansion. The novels also anticipate biopolitics under neoliberalism as a matter of data control, rather than the discipline of individuals. Throughout, the narratives disturb the construction of a liberal subject under capitalist modernity by staging a broader speculation on the intricacy, interdependency and interpretative activity of ‘life itself’ with regard to all kinds of material relations. The texts are literary engagements with what Nikolas Rose calls ‘vital politics’, both a reflection on the governmental co-option of life processes, and an exploration of the multifaceted dimensions of ‘life itself’ loosened from anthropocentric categorisations.

Australian hardwood plantations cover more than 1 million hectare, which is almost half of the total national plantations area. Hardwood plantations are commonly slow to mature, with a long rotation time potentially reaching 35 years. Pruning and thinning processes are required during the early stage of the plantation to produce high-quality logs for commercial purpose. Approximately, 50% of the trees are typically cut from the third year during the first thinning, with further 30% removed during the second thinning (10 to 15 years). It is estimated that more than 2 million cubic metres of logs are generated annually during the plantation mid-rotation thinning operation in Australia. However, these logs are considered as low commercial value product because of high defect ratio and poor mechanical quality. In order to ensure the continued expansion of the Australian hardwood plantation sector, higher value products need to be developed to maximise the utility of the available resources and to reduce wastage. The use of the low commercial value thinned logs may offer an opportunity to improve the environmental and economic performance of the hardwood forestry sector. Therefore, this study focused on the potential utilisation pathways for logs produced during the second thinning operation. The study used the case of South-east Queensland to demonstrate the framework, and it was conducted following the standardised methods for Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) (ISO14040:2006) and Life Cycle Costing (LCC) (AS/NZ4536:1999 R2014). To provide an equitable comparison among the different alternatives assessed in this study, the functional unit was defined as the treatment of 1 Mg of green timber logs from the second thinning at the plantation floor. Both the LCA and LCC analysis were conducted based on a 60-year timeframe. The OpenLCA 1.4.1 and SimaPro v.8.0.4.30 software were used in the simulation. Primary data were used whenever possible to calculate the life cycle inventory. Eco-invent 3.3 and AusLCI databases were used to model the background processes and in cases when the primary data were missing. The lifecycle impact assessment was processed followed the best practice guide for conducting LCA studies in Australia and included five different environmental impact categories: Global Warming (GWP); Eutrophication (EP); Acidification (AP); Fossil depletion (FDP) and Human Toxicity (HTP). Excel spreadsheet was used to conduct the LCC analysis and calculate the present value of the future costs. A constrained stepwise, multi-objective linear programming (LP) model was then constructed to identify the optimal solution for the plantation thinned logs utilisation. The LP problem was solved using LINDO software package over a 60-year period. The time intervals used was ten years. The constraints of the model were classified into three groups: the total feedstocks availability; final product requirements; and environmental and economic targets. A number of pathways may be followed to valorise the thinning logs including the production of engineered wood; solid fuel and biomass to liquid fuels (BTL). This study examined several products under each utilisation pathway in an attempt to identify the optimal combination to maximise the environmental and economic benefits from a lifecycle perspective. Under the engineered wood options, two possible utilisations were assessed: (1) veneer based composite (VBC) utility poles and (2) structural building frame using laminated veneer lumber (LVL). The LCA results indicated that engineered wood products manufactured from the second thinning could offer tangible environmental benefits compared to the conventional construction materials such as concrete and steel. The study highlighted that resin consumptions during engineered wood manufacturing, and use of preventatives for wood treatment were the major contributors to the environmental impacts of engineered wood. Furthermore, for the end of life treatment, incineration with energy recovery rather than landfilling was identified as the most favourable waste management option to reduce the environmental impacts. Additionally, using LVL in multi-level building structural frame presents greater environmental benefits than the VBC utility poles case. The longer durability and higher material efficiency of the LVL option compared to the VBC option contributed significantly to the better environmental performance. Under the energy utilisation pathway, six options were assessed: woodchip gasification in combined heat and power plant (WCG); wood pellets gasification in a combined heat and power plant (WPG); wood pellet combustion for domestic water and space heating (WPC); pyrolysis for power generation (PyEl); pyrolysis with bio-oil upgrading to transportation fuels (PyLT) and ethanol production for transportation fuel mix (EthP). All the bioenergy conversion options had noticeable environmental benefits, particularly on the GWP impact. The WCG option was identified as the best performer followed by the WPG and then WPC. The carbon offsets due to the displaced fossil fuel from electricity and heat generation were the main reason for lowering the GWP impact of these options. Although wood pellets have higher energy density than woodchips, they required additional manufacturing processes, extra energy consumption and additional transportation leading to higher environmental impacts which could not be offset by the improved energy density. The study highlighted that use of the biomass as solid fuel with the least processing requirement had higher environmental benefits than BTL options. Lastly, the environmental benefits gained are dependent on the energy being displaced by the final product. From a life-cycle cost perspective, the results showed that per functional unit, utilising thinned logs to produce engineered wood products was more likely to result in higher LCC than energy production. Overall, the VBC utility pole option had the highest LCC followed by the LVL building frame option. The shorter lifespan and lower material efficiency of the VBC compared to LVL option was a significant contributor to the higher LCC of the VBC option. In regard to the energy conversion, the WCG had the least LCC per functional unit among all options, followed by the EthP and PyEl options. However, it is important to note the shortcoming of the functional unit considered here was based on input (treatment of 1 Mg of thinned logs). To overcome this limitation, the output should be considered. For the energy pathway, the levelised cost per megajoule energy was calculated, which showed that the WCG had the best performance followed by the WPG and then WPC. This is in line with the LCA results. Nevertheless, the energy output does not offer a valid comparison for the engineered wood pathway. Therefore, the costs of the displaced products by the output were considered, in line with the LCA analysis, to provide a more equitable comparison. The concept of ‘substituted values’ (SV) was then introduced in this study to overcome this limitation. The ‘SV’ borrows the concept of ‘displaced emissions’ from the LCA. The SV was calculated as the difference between the LCC of the final product (alternative) and the displaced (substituted) product. When the substituted materials were considered, the engineered wood products presented the highest economic savings while the energy options continued to pose a cost. Nonetheless, the WCG option continued to have the best economic performance among the energy options. The LCA and LCC analysis showed conflicting results regarding the best option to follow in order to maximise the economic and environmental utility of the plantation thinning. Based on equal weighting of the economic and environmental objectives, the multi-objective optimisation (MOO) program solution indicated that the LVL and WCG were the dominating options. However, the percentage allocated to each option varied in different periods. For the first 30 years, the solution favoured energy production with 85% allocation to the WCG in the first 10 years period. Nevertheless, the percentage allocated to energy production declined progressively over the subsequent periods. The LVL option became more dominant starting from the 30th year of the simulation. The share allocated to the LVL option reached 100% of the biomass during the last 10 years period. However, when the environmental weight exceeded 70%, energy production (particularly the WCG option) became the dominant solution while the LVL option became less favourable with only 2% allocation of the biomass. On the other hand, the VBC option did not feature in the solution until the weight assigned to the economic objective exceeded 80%. This research study is relevant nationally and internationally as it presents a novel method to integrate LCA with LCC analysis in a multi-objective optimisation framework to identify the optimal utilisation of forestry products including multiple utilisation pathways. This study also presents a novel method to simplify the complex optimisation problem by converting the MOO question to a single objective optimisation (SOO) problem. The framework introduced three novelties: (a) introduce normalisation factors for better representation of the Australian situation; (b) incorporate the potential economic credits from alternative substitutions into the LCC; this is in line with the accepted accounting methods of LCA to allow credits for offset emissions, and (c) formulate and solve the problem as a stepwise constraint LP to avoid over/under allocation issues resulting from averaging over the timescale. Although the study focused on the South-east Queensland case, the developed method can also be applied in different industry sectors and locations. The outcomes of this research have major implications on Australian forestry sector, particularly on hardwood plantation management. The developed optimisation management strategy can enhance the current economic profitability of the forestry sector by developing new markets for the low value thinned logs from timber plantation while increasing the utilisation rate of wood waste hence to satisfy the global rising timber demand and accumulating global carbon. The results of the study are also relevant to other timber residues and low-grade products from the softwood and pulp-wood plantations. In addition, results of this study can be potentially used by decision-makers to make informed choices to lower the environmental impacts and lifecycle cost of utility infrastructures systems and buildings. Furthermore, this study has implications for the bio-energy generation sector. This study confirms the feasibility of using forestry residue as feedstock to substitute fossil fuel energy while mitigating negative environmental impacts and achieving sustainable development strategy. Globally, this study is a small yet significant contribution towards the achievement of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, specifically under the Affordable and Clean Energy; Climate Action and Responsible Consumption and Production.
Thesis (PhD Doctorate)
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
School of Eng & Built Enviroment
Science, Environment, Engineering and Technology
Full Text

AGenesis is a novel of "postmortal fiction" set entirely in an afterlife. Nessie, a recently dead woman, accidentally kills an already-dead man, and in the confusion that follows, sets out to discover how he could have died and what after-afterlife he might have gone to. During her travels, she is raped and then help captive by a city of tormented souls; she descends into madness until rescued by children, and she and her newborn but "undead" daughter set out again, this time to find the end of the afterlife. Nessie's daughter eventually seeks a way to enter a living world she's never known, while Nessie tries to end her suffering and find peace.

Dans les écosystèmes tropicaux de plantation à croissance rapide, la matière organique du sol (MOS) joue un rôle essentiel pour le maintien de la fertilité et la durabilité de la production. L'objectif principal de cette étude était de comprendre et de modéliser la dynamique de décomposition de la MOS sous plantation industrielle d'Eucalyptus, en relation avec les facteurs du milieu et les pratiques sylvicoles. L'utilisation couplée de traceurs isotopiques (13C en abondance naturelle dans une transition savane/eucalyptus et 15N en enrichissement) et de fractionnement granulométrique a permis de suivre le devenir d'intrants minéraux sous forme d'engrais marqué et organiques sous forme de chute de litière et de résidus d'exploitation. Des expériences de décomposition de litière enrichie en 15N, mises au point sur des hêtraies en milieu tempéré et reproduites au Congo, ont servi à l'élaboration et la calibration d'un modèle d'évolution continue du carbone et de l'azote dans la MOS.

It is the time of war in Vietnam, of civil rights trailblazing, of social upheaval, and Kurt and Ellis Frye, an immigrant father and his first-generation American son from the small farming town of Homer, Colorado, are forced to navigate the changing American West in absence of one another. After discovering an aptitude for pitching--especially the volatile knuckleball--Ellis takes it upon himself to become a professional ballplayer, leaving the wheat farm he was to inherit from his father and starting off across the country on a journey that will force him to encounter what it means to be an authentic person. Meanwhile, Kurt, his health failing, struggles to tend the farm on his own, forced to realize the gravity of loneliness in both the departure of his son and the death of his wife. The unpredictable flow of life brings the two back together, and, burdened with the choice of whether or not to reclaim the home they built together, discover one another's autonomy, the life they knew not. A Lonely Place Where the Heart Beats Loud is a story about baseball, of farming, of life in a changing America, but more importantly it examines what it means to experience homecoming and what we inherit from those we care for.

In the following nine linked stories, characters from disparate backgrounds and socio-economic strata converge in a rural community along the Missouri river in central Montana. A Texas-based oil exploration and production company takes up residence in the area, causing a stir in the neighborhood. Long-time local residents experience their daily lives amid a tourist driven economy and reaffirm their aspirations to leave despite significant obstacles and limitations. In "Show Me the Way to Go Home," a young waitress is stranded after a car accident and seeks help from residents living on the single row of houses in the area. In "Give Death Grace," a resident artist leaves to resolve her tumultuous past with her father. In "A Good Little Fisherwoman," a woman deals with the repercussions of her recent reproductive decisions during a fishing trip. In "Little Fires," a local man deals with the tragic burn injury of a child while also facing deeply rooted resentments with his mother. In "Dwelling," an aging local must decide whether or not she will sell her home to two strangers. In "Other Important Areas of Functioning," a woman decides to discontinue her mood stabilizing medications in favor of a more natural lifestyle. While this place means something different to each of these characters, they all coexist while facing individual challenges.

This is a study of the collective identities of Japanese American elderly in a former sugar plantation community in the rural town of Puna, Hawai'i. Investigating their plantation stories in which they remember, evaluate, and represent their past lives on the plantation from the 1920s, to the 1980s, I explore a process of which they collectively delineate their identities in terms of ethnicity, class, generation, and gender. My analysis focuses on the contents as well as the contexts of plantation stories that include their social and cultural circumstances now and then, transitions in the socioeconomic environment in Hawai'i, and historical events that they have gone through. The purpose of this study is to produce an ethnography of remembering that captures ethnographic voice-cultural testimony in which the Japanese American elderly narrate their plantation experience as both an internally-oriented emotional manifestation and an externally-based common understanding of their community. I demonstrate how the Japanese American elderly employ their memories to reconstruct plantation experience and define their peoplehood as the collective identities of plantation-raised Japanese Americans.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, San Diego, 2008.
Title from first page of PDF file (viewed September 23, 2008). Available via ProQuest Digital Dissertations. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (p. 274-284).