This thesis examines literary representations of agents who predict the future, as well as the relationship that fiction itself has with the future. These dual layers of analysis are oriented...Show moreThis thesis examines literary representations of agents who predict the future, as well as the relationship that fiction itself has with the future. These dual layers of analysis are oriented around two key concepts—“futurology” and “futurity”—which are considered in relation to Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis and Nathaniel Rich’s Odds Against Tomorrow.Show less
This thesis puts in dialogue two texts – Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) and Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) – comparing them through the analytical...Show moreThis thesis puts in dialogue two texts – Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) and Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) – comparing them through the analytical perspective of dystopian literature. The thesis demonstrates that dystopian fiction extrapolates from history to build nightmarish societies, but also that certain historical experiences can be revitalized and actualized through a dystopian conceptualization. In fact, Atwood’s dystopian novel can be used as a “dystopian lens” to understand Jacobs’s testimony of women’s lives under chattel slavery as a “concrete dystopia”, that is a historical experience characterized by dystopian features. In order to do so, Atwood’s text is at first situated within existing scholarship and theory on dystopian literature and thoroughly analysed by highlighting how the text encourages reflection on women’s sexual and reproductive exploitation. Successively, I shift the focus to the context of American chattel slavery by reading Jacobs’s Incidents as dystopian in terms of setting and narrative devices and trajectories. By doing so, Jacobs’s testimony is liberated from its historical contingency and can be actualized. Atwood’s dystopian novel as analytical lens illuminates the ways in which coercive power, psycho-physical alienation, body commodification and systemic destruction of identity characterise women’s experience of slavery in Incidents. Moreover, it invites us to reflect on the ways sexual violence and appropriation of motherhood shape the slave woman’s construction of the subject as site of production and reproduction of oppression. However, the analytical comparison of the two texts sheds also light on the ways hope is performed by the narrative’s protagonists through storytelling. After being addressed by their testimonies, we, the witnessing readers, should be able to recognize the dystopian and utopian potential in our own reality as regards women’s sexual and reproductive self-determination and freedom, which seem to be continuously under threat.Show less
This thesis analyses how Brexit and its causes and consequences are reflected in three contemporary English novels. Scholars such as Anderson, Said and Leerssen have shown that national and...Show moreThis thesis analyses how Brexit and its causes and consequences are reflected in three contemporary English novels. Scholars such as Anderson, Said and Leerssen have shown that national and cultural identities are constructions. A decisive moment such as the outcome of the Brexit referendum shows how people have different constructions with regard to their common nation. This thesis explores what is distinct about English identity and shows the fragmented way in which it is formed. The chosen novels explore how these constructions influence both individuals and relationships. Anthony Cartwright’s The Cut, Amanda Craig’s The Lie of the Land, and Jonathan Coe’s Middle England show how people are confronted with the fact that they have been imagining their nation in fundamentally different ways than their fellow countrymen. The analysis shows that fragmentation and imagination have been key factors in the Brexit process.Show less
This thesis delves into the concept of the queer 'Other' in Gothic literature, using Mary Shelley's 'Frankenstein', Bram Stoker's 'Dracula' and Oscar Wilde's 'The Picture of Dorian Gray' as...Show moreThis thesis delves into the concept of the queer 'Other' in Gothic literature, using Mary Shelley's 'Frankenstein', Bram Stoker's 'Dracula' and Oscar Wilde's 'The Picture of Dorian Gray' as examples to analyse the discourse surrounding the figure of the queer Other in nineteenth-century society. Key concepts are the (sexually) queer monster and queer(ing) space and social constructs.Show less
The thesis studies the Angolan novel Os Papéis do Inglês (2000), by Ruy Duarte de Carvalho. The approach to the novel will consider that the hybridity of the postcolonial space is transformed into...Show moreThe thesis studies the Angolan novel Os Papéis do Inglês (2000), by Ruy Duarte de Carvalho. The approach to the novel will consider that the hybridity of the postcolonial space is transformed into structural element and method of constructing the narrative. This hybridism is present in different levels: in the construction of characters, in narrator’s voice, in the styles and genre of the writings. It is a result mainly of the overlap of elements which are normally seen as opposites, like Fiction and History, Literature and Science. By bringing such elements together, Ruy Duarte deconstructs central ideas and categories of the Western thought and draws attention to different forms of seeing and understanding the world. This work will study two conceptual deconstructions that can be found in the novel: first the ideas which distinguish literature and scientific writings, mainly regarding the realm of anthropology and ethnography, showing how those polarities are entangled in the postcolonial universe; and in second place the concept of a linear chronological time, focusing on the idea of spectral presences and hauntings which disrupt the borders between past and present. Lastly, I will consider how those deconstructions work in the context of the Angolan literary project, as to assess how the book engages in a literary debate regarding the ideas of nation and identity, so important in the context of postcolonial states. Therefore, by subverting some paradigms of European thought, Ruy Duarte seems to be proposing alternative ways in which the Western world can relate to non-western areas.Show less
For Svetlana Alexievich, both conventional history writing and art have proven inadequate to capture, or approximate to capture, reality. She turns to the voices of the ordinary people, writing a...Show moreFor Svetlana Alexievich, both conventional history writing and art have proven inadequate to capture, or approximate to capture, reality. She turns to the voices of the ordinary people, writing a work founded on oral stories. In some sense, with Second-hand Time Alexievich also seems to take the storytelling tradition up again, albeit in a different, more reflective manner now, to agitate against the rise of coherent textual narratives representing reality with a sense of closure. Through the way Alexievich has written a portrait of the history of the Soviet Union and its fall, she has expressed the belief that the real events of history are not the ones conventional historiography deals with. Only the ‘subjective’ experiences of big history by its participants, their little histories, can capture some kind of true history. Not only has Alexievich with Second-hand Time appropriated claims on truths and literature back to the common people, but also their grasp on their history and its writing. Alexievich transcends McCord’s ‘ideology of form’ and in the form of Second-hand Time implicitly expresses a philosophy on history, literature, language, human truths and, above all, their interconnectedness. In doing so she empowers the people by taking away the boundaries of language in which they are supposedly confined, ascribing them agency to speak in a language in between, or even outside of existing discourses on which they supposedly rely to produce them. Through recording the spoken language of literature as such, Alexievich is writing back history, and with it autonomy. By the simultaneous elimination of the hierarchy of artists/non- artists she has democratized the production of literature, hence giving agency to the common people on multiple fronts. Lastly, Alexievich expresses a different idea of what literature is and makes clear that writing literature is more than the realization of literary imagination; it is the touching upon of human truths by any voice. When universal human truths uttered in a new language spontaneously appear in the conversational side of human life, fundamentally defined by its ‘momentariness’, a sparkle of literature occurs. In Alexievich’s conception of literature, eternity and the eternal here and now coincide.Show less
