Research master thesis | Literary Studies (research) (MA)
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This thesis explores to what extent water bodies in ancient poetical texts materially influence the poetics of the text in which they appear. Ancient poetical texts, such as self-reflexive poems...Show moreThis thesis explores to what extent water bodies in ancient poetical texts materially influence the poetics of the text in which they appear. Ancient poetical texts, such as self-reflexive poems and literary-critical treatises, often use water bodies as metaphors to formulate aesthetic value judgements or poetical ideas. When scholarship on such texts chooses to concentrate on the text’s water bodies, the focus has been predominantly put on their function as metaphor. As such, there has been a lack in the interpretative discourse on ancient poetics in which water is not only treated metaphorically, but literally and materially as well. Employing recent advancements made in the emerging, ecocritical field of Blue Humanities, in specific the theory and methods provided by hydropoetics, this thesis offers a viable way to read water in ancient poetical texts literally. Taking as main case studies Callimachus’ Hymn to Apollo, Longinus’ On the Sublime and Catullus 64, the thesis investigates how water’s material formations such as seas, rivers, springs, flows, trickles and whirlpools autonomously contribute to the poetical constructs of these texts. It thereby serves to further classical scholarship on ancient poetics, as well as employ and reflect on present-day reading methods that help or fail to do justice to the material agency of water bodies. (Formally, this thesis is a double thesis in order to fulfill both the programs of Literary Studies and Classics and Ancient Civilizations.)Show less
Research master thesis | Literary Studies (research) (MA)
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This study examines de Digitale Stad, or the Digital City, a pioneering virtual community in the Netherlands (1994-2001), as a metaphorical urban space. Drawing from urban theory, play theory and...Show moreThis study examines de Digitale Stad, or the Digital City, a pioneering virtual community in the Netherlands (1994-2001), as a metaphorical urban space. Drawing from urban theory, play theory and media theory, this thesis analyzes how users navigated and positioned themselves in the virtual realm. By focusing on DDS and the early Web, it sheds light on the Digital City's significance as an experimental space reflecting and influencing the evolving Dutch internet landscape.Show less
Research master thesis | Literary Studies (research) (MA)
open access
This study examines de Digitale Stad, or the Digital City, a pioneering virtual community in the Netherlands (1994-2001), as a metaphorical urban space. Drawing from urban theory, play theory and...Show moreThis study examines de Digitale Stad, or the Digital City, a pioneering virtual community in the Netherlands (1994-2001), as a metaphorical urban space. Drawing from urban theory, play theory and media theory, this thesis analyzes how users navigated and positioned themselves in the virtual realm. By focusing on DDS and the early Web, it sheds light on the Digital City's significance as an experimental space reflecting and influencing the evolving Dutch internet landscape.Show less
Research master thesis | Literary Studies (research) (MA)
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The text seek to define Queerfuturism as an extrapolation of Afrofuturism, investigating a series of case studies based on their engagement with contemporary Queer discourse.
Research master thesis | Literary Studies (research) (MA)
closed access
This thesis explores the conceptual mechanisms that underlie utopian world-making and rest on grammatical structures, identified as ‘grammars of utopia’. Examining case studies from modern and...Show moreThis thesis explores the conceptual mechanisms that underlie utopian world-making and rest on grammatical structures, identified as ‘grammars of utopia’. Examining case studies from modern and contemporary English and Greek literature, the thesis shows utopia to be both beyond and within grammatical limits: the conception of an ideal society, which a utopia is, is a gesture away from a given reality – its limitations, more precisely – as well as towards an alternative one, and this latter is the one drawing limits to the utopian thought anew. Herbert George Wells’ A Modern Utopia (1905), James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), Aldous Huxley’s Island (1962), and Sotiris Dimitriou’s The Silence of the Dry Weed (2011) map five categories without which we cannot make sense of or construe utopian narratives: modality, polarity, conditionality, subjectivity, and mood. Therefore, close reading these works provides a first grammatical ‘study of Utopian fantasy mechanics’, as proposed by Fredric Jameson (2005, xiii). Αt the same time, all texts try (and more or less succeed) to remap these five configurations and invite possibilities of alternative grammars of utopia that are yet to come.Show less
Research master thesis | Literary Studies (research) (MA)
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My thesis explores the ways in which Eiichiro Oda’s successful manga series One Piece uses cultural references to prevent singular storytelling. It studies the incorporation, adaptation, and...Show moreMy thesis explores the ways in which Eiichiro Oda’s successful manga series One Piece uses cultural references to prevent singular storytelling. It studies the incorporation, adaptation, and transformation of popular cultural elements in the characters Donquixote Doflamingo and Usopp. This process highlights the continuous flow of cultural capital, which in turn opens up and acknowledges the plurality and diversity of perspectives, voices, and narratives.Show less
Research master thesis | Literary Studies (research) (MA)
open access
2023-08-30T00:00:00Z
In this thesis I use two nineteenth-century novels (Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South [1854] and Émile Zola's Au Bonheur des Dames [1883]) to analyze how novelistic things, depicted in their...Show moreIn this thesis I use two nineteenth-century novels (Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South [1854] and Émile Zola's Au Bonheur des Dames [1883]) to analyze how novelistic things, depicted in their stages of production and exchange, represent the contradictory nature of life under industrial capitalism. In my readings of the two novels I emphasize how, in a new world of industrial production and conspicuous consumption, new ways of relating to things emerged. These things were no longer products of the household or made to measure, as the nineteenth century saw an increase in factory-produced, mass-market goods whose bonds with their human makers and owners were deeply shaped by the new economic system. It is these bonds – complicated, contradictory and sometimes puzzling – that my thesis focuses on.Show less
Research master thesis | Literary Studies (research) (MA)
open access
2023-08-30T00:00:00Z
When we read a book of history, we produce a mental image of the past we read about. That mental image is informed by the text. Sometimes, when we read a book of history, the text is so vivid, the...Show moreWhen we read a book of history, we produce a mental image of the past we read about. That mental image is informed by the text. Sometimes, when we read a book of history, the text is so vivid, the descriptions so penetrating, that we are left with more than an image: emotion, thought, realisation. The text has affected us. This act of communication, the communication of ‘historical experience,' is the focus point of this thesis. To explore this fascinating concept, the main case study is Johan Huizinga's Herfsttij der Middeleeuwen. The choice for this work is twofold: one, Johan Huizinga is the first person to introduce the concept of historical experience, which he called historische sensatie; two, Herfsttij der Middeleeuwen is a work of history known for its affective use of language. Focussing on those textual elements that drive historical experience, this paper will explore how Herfsttij der Middeleeuwen is able to convey this affect of the (imagined) past. Further, the Dutch source text will be compared to the three English translations to see how historical experience transfers in a translation process.Show less
Research master thesis | Literary Studies (research) (MA)
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In popular culture, the European Middle Ages (ca. 500-1500) are commonly portrayed as a culturally homogenous time period in which the supremacy of the white, heterosexual male is taken for granted...Show moreIn popular culture, the European Middle Ages (ca. 500-1500) are commonly portrayed as a culturally homogenous time period in which the supremacy of the white, heterosexual male is taken for granted. This makes the period attractive to the far-right, whose members view the Middle Ages as an alternative to our modern, multicultural times. In the past, Medieval imagery and rhetoric have consequently been appropriated by groups and individuals ranging from the Ku Klux Klan and the Nazis to Anders Breivik, the Charlottesville protesters and Vladimir Putin. In this thesis, Guus van der Peet examines how the appropriation of history has taken place in the Dutch Language Area. He analyses four case studies: 1) an antisemitic sequel to the Middle Dutch classic Vanden Vos Reinarde; 2) the academic publications of Jan de Vries, a national-socialist professor in Leiden; 3) two Youtube videos from the Flemish far-right student association Schild & Vrienden; 4) two speeches by alt-right politician Thierry Baudet. In the end, Van der Peet concludes that there is a significant difference between the Flemish and Dutch appropriation of the past. Whereas the Flemish far-right repeatedly references the Middle Ages, the Dutch far-right deviates from the international tradition by instead appropriating the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.Show less
Research master thesis | Literary Studies (research) (MA)
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This thesis examines the depiction of solitude in the novels Caleb Williams, Frankenstein, and A Tale of Two Cities, and the relationship between these depictions and eighteenth- and nineteenth...Show moreThis thesis examines the depiction of solitude in the novels Caleb Williams, Frankenstein, and A Tale of Two Cities, and the relationship between these depictions and eighteenth- and nineteenth-century discourses on solitude. In particular, this thesis shows the tension between philosophies of sociability and sympathy, such as Rousseau’s and Hume’s, and the moral dimension of solitude. While previous research has examined solitude by focusing on either Romantic solitude or on loneliness as an imposed condition by social forces, this thesis aims to investigate the moral value of solitude, and its relation to social criticism. Taking a cultural materialist approach, this thesis examines cultural discourses surrounding solitude and offers close readings of the novels to argue that these novels present sociability as a divisive force in society, and solitude as both necessary to foster a connection to humanity, and a necessary condition for justice and morality. The privileging of solitude over sociability shows how these novels respond to the emphasis of Enlightenment philosophy on sympathy and similarity and suggest an alternative foundation for justice and morality in situations where sociability and similarity are insufficient.Show less
Research master thesis | Literary Studies (research) (MA)
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This thesis examines a possible contribution to the narratological analyses as carried out within the field of Law and Literature by both signalling narrative speaker functions in analyses by James...Show moreThis thesis examines a possible contribution to the narratological analyses as carried out within the field of Law and Literature by both signalling narrative speaker functions in analyses by James Boyd White (1990) and Jeanne Gaakeer (1998) and locating these them in case law. The assumption that lies at the core of this thesis is that with the help of systematic analysis, it is possible to distinguish between four different speaker functions that manifest themselves in written case law: an authoritative author of legal decisions (chapter II), a narrator of the verdict (chapter III), characters that take part in the legal process and that are reflected upon in the judgment (chapter IV) and the text of the judgment itself (chapter V). These four possible speaking entities need to be disentangled to understand what authority or authorities we see when analysing judgments and to systematically conduct comparative research within the field of law and literature.Show less
Research master thesis | Literary Studies (research) (MA)
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This thesis explores Woolf’s relationship with eugenics, illness, and disability, a relationship that is characterized by ambiguity and contradictions, and has divided the critics in their...Show moreThis thesis explores Woolf’s relationship with eugenics, illness, and disability, a relationship that is characterized by ambiguity and contradictions, and has divided the critics in their assessment of Woolf’s work in relation to disability and illness. This thesis is an intervention in this debate by analyzing how Woolf conceives of and conceptualizes notions of illness and disability. This thesis further aims to investigate whether she can be considered a proto-crip theorist. It argues that Woolf’s ambiguity and contradiction in her attitudes towards disability allow for and encourage a crip theoretical reading, and that ultimately, Woolf can certainly be called a nascent crip theorist in her rejection of bodily normativity and in her celebration of non-normative bodyminds, as well as in the ways in which she deconstructs ableist ideologies. The result is a thesis that offers us significant insights into how Woolf in particular and modernist art, literature, and culture in general, conceived of disability, but it also allows us to trace the continuities and differences between attitudes toward disability during the early twentieth century and these attitudes in the present day.Show less
