The paper discusses erotic desire and the motif of going on pilgrimage in the opening of Geoffrey Chaucer’s General Prologue to The Canterbury Tales and in William Shakespeare’s sonnets. What connects most of the texts chosen for consideration in the paper is their diptych-like composition, corresponding to the dual theme of eros and pilgrimage. At the outset, I read the first eighteen lines of...

Research on storytelling over the last 100 years has distinguished at least two levels of narrative representation (1) story, or fabula; and (2) discourse, or sujhet. We use this distinction to create Fabula Tales, a computational framework for a virtual storyteller that can tell the same story in different ways through the implementation of general narratological variations, such as varying di...

The idea of control or power is central to the notion of democracy, since the ideal is one of giving kratos to the demos: giving maximal or at least significant control over government to the people. But it turns out that the notion of kratos or control is definable in various ways and that as the notion is differently understood, so the ideal of democracy is differently interpreted. In this li...

Researchers have long been fascinated by the strong continuities evident in the oral traditions associated with different cultures. According to the 'historic-geographic' school, it is possible to classify similar tales into "international types" and trace them back to their original archetypes. However, critics argue that folktale traditions are fundamentally fluid, and that most international...

A hypothesis about what is the principal cognitive precondition of successful systematic acquainting children with computers is put forward. For this, the notion of the Thought-Producing Self of the child is introduced. It is stated that the System of Emotional-Imaginative Teaching (EIT-system) based on the Theory of Dynamic Conceptual Mappings allows for realizing the Thought-Producing Self of...

i Acknowledgements I want to thank my advisor, Dr. Jeff Dupree, for providing me with knowledge and advice over the past two years, and for helping me learn what it means to be a researcher. He always urged me to learn more and move forward with a clear hypothesis in mind. His guidance was instrumental in completing my project and I cannot thank him enough for everything he has done for me. I w...