Derry Girls provides a humorous take on the Northern Irish Troubles. The sitcom, following the lives of a group of teenagers living in Derry in the 1990’s, combines the grimness of the sectarian...Show moreDerry Girls provides a humorous take on the Northern Irish Troubles. The sitcom, following the lives of a group of teenagers living in Derry in the 1990’s, combines the grimness of the sectarian conflict with the recognisability of teenage hardship. In the series, trauma is inherently linked to the everyday concepts of youth, humour, and community. These concepts are used to allow the characters and the audience to think critically on the events occurring in the series, as the conflict is presented with such normalcy. Additionally, they highlight a sense of hope and kinship and advocate for a youth-inclusive approach to peacebuilding. The series can also be seen as a product of its time; not only does it portray the zeitgeist of 1990’s Derry, it is also a response to the ongoing violence and paramilitary activity in Northern Ireland since the Good Friday Agreement. Derry Girls underlines the importance of community in the processing of trauma, established the ‘Derry Girls’ as an exemplification of peacebuilding, and uses humour as a means of the demystification of conflict.Show less
This study aims to examine the extent and limits of the comparison between Holland and China in French travel Literature of the 19th century. We particularly intend to comprehend the nature of the...Show moreThis study aims to examine the extent and limits of the comparison between Holland and China in French travel Literature of the 19th century. We particularly intend to comprehend the nature of the precise comparison: of which elements it consists, why she is made and in which manner. In order to answer this question, we analyse a corpus of multiple travel journals from different writers. We apply a method of Imagology, together with concepts as Orientalism and exoticism. From the analysis of the corpus results three research tracks: the material aspect of the comparison, the cultural aspect and the limits of Chinese Holland. The comparison between Holland and China has proved to be a complex structure, resulting from a long tradition as well as (erroneous) stereotypes based on different types of images.Show less
This thesis will address the position of female walker in London during the 1930s. The aim is to focus on significance of the figure of the flaneur in relation to the differences of mobility...Show moreThis thesis will address the position of female walker in London during the 1930s. The aim is to focus on significance of the figure of the flaneur in relation to the differences of mobility between men and women. In addition, the specific role of and differences between public spaces as opposed to private spaces are discussed. In order to do so, the short story Street Haunting, written by Virginia Woolf in 1930, will be used to incorporate all these aspects. It is important to question these matters as these issues are still at bay in today’s society. The gap this thesis will fill is that it discusses the issue of having no explicitly gendered narrator, yet, almost all literature on the short story interpret the narrator to be female. This is due to certain social cues within the short story. The main question that will be answered is: How is the walker represented in Street Haunting and how does this relate to public and private spaces? The method used in order to arrive at an answer for this main question is close reading. This entails that every sentence of the short story will be examined closely and will be deconstructed and be read in its context in order to interpret the meaning of it. The aim of this thesis is to make readers aware that the power-related gender-mobility issues that are addressed in the short story, are still relevant today.Show less
This thesis will discuss how Le Guin has adapted both the standard medieval dragon and the dragons in the narratives of Tolkien and Lewis in her own work, The Books of Earthsea.
The main effort of this thesis is a detailed mapping of the hero’s journeys of Victor Frankenstein and his Monster, through Joseph Campbell’s monomyth model, in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein; or, The...Show moreThe main effort of this thesis is a detailed mapping of the hero’s journeys of Victor Frankenstein and his Monster, through Joseph Campbell’s monomyth model, in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. Subsequently, a comparative analysis of their hero’s journeys reveals great similarities throughout the novel, mirroring their intertwined existences. Most notably, their shared failing of the Atonement with the Father stage of the monomyth model is what causes their journeys to end and causes them to become failed heroes. There are two narrative elements in Frankenstein that essentially doomed the heroes to this outcome by uniquely hampering the heroes’ agency within the monomyth model: dual protagonists and Gothic doubles. The combined presence of these elements in the same novel makes it nigh unimaginable for heroes to successfully face the Atonement with the Father, due to the hero’s agency being compromised and the default antagonism of Gothic doubles.Show less
This thesis analyzes two American novels as interventions in the cultural memory of slavery. By considering Toni Morrison's seminal novel Beloved (1987) and Nathan Harris's contemporary text The...Show moreThis thesis analyzes two American novels as interventions in the cultural memory of slavery. By considering Toni Morrison's seminal novel Beloved (1987) and Nathan Harris's contemporary text The Sweetness of Water (2021) as documents of cultural memory, this thesis argues that they contribute to an understanding of the history of slavery and reflect cultural changes in how it is remembered publicly.Show less
This study analyses the representation of different ghosts in Anglophone novels taking place during Vietnam’s twentieth-century history and how the novels and ghosts challenge the dominant cultural...Show moreThis study analyses the representation of different ghosts in Anglophone novels taking place during Vietnam’s twentieth-century history and how the novels and ghosts challenge the dominant cultural narratives. Within this thesis, I argue that these ghosts are presented in different manners depending on how the novel challenges the dominant narrative and memory, whether the ghosts and characters in the novel enact the cultural norms in the United States or Vietnam, and which kind of haunting is observable in the novel. Regardless of these factors, the ghosts challenge the dominant collective narrative in a specific imagined community, a collection of communities as a whole, such as the dominant collective memory prevalent in the United States or Vietnam, or on a worldwide scale. The thesis focuses on the following three novels. The first of these novels is She Weeps Each Time You’re Born (Barry 2014), where ghosts are present as metaphysical entities that try to pass on into the afterlife through recounting their deaths whilst simultaneously introducing formerly silenced information and ghosts as unobservable entities where trauma and grief haunt the living. The second novel analysed is On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (Vuong 2020), which presents the intertextual ghosts that serve as metaphors as trauma influences the character’s everyday lives and the family becomes similar to a ghost due to their invisible existence in the United States after immigrating. The third novel is The Mountains Sing (Phan Quế Mai 2020), where a character nicknamed Wicked Ghost is similar to a metaphysical ghost and haunts the neighbourhood and protagonist’s family. Alongside the character nicknamed Wicked Ghost are the unobservable ghosts of trauma and grief which haunt the protagonist and her family, as well as the ghost as a metaphor for the absent presence of historical events institutionally forgotten. These novels discuss events before, during, and after the Vietnam War from the perspective of a Vietnamese author and Vietnamese characters, and all three novels include a variety of ghosts that are either metaphysical or intertextual. Thus far, little research has been done on such novels, as their increased representation is recent. This study then serves as a starting point for other academic research that might surround ghosts’ function in Anglophone literature on conflicts in Vietnam.Show less
Tra la fine del XX e l’inizio del XXI secolo, l’Italia è stata al centro di grandi cambiamenti demografici e socio-culturali in seguito all’aumento del numero di arrivi di migranti e rifugiati in...Show moreTra la fine del XX e l’inizio del XXI secolo, l’Italia è stata al centro di grandi cambiamenti demografici e socio-culturali in seguito all’aumento del numero di arrivi di migranti e rifugiati in cerca di una vita migliore e di opportunità di lavoro in Europa centrale. L'obiettivo centrale di questa tesi è di esplorare come la letteratura ed il cinema italiano approcciano il tema dell’immigrazione. La domanda di ricerca è dunque la seguente: in che modo viene trattato il tema dell’immigrazione in generi letterari e cinematografici diversi? In particolare, verrà analizzato in che modo (e perché) le diverse modalità narrative e generi cinematografici e letterari degli ultimi anni (2015-2020) riescano ad approcciare questo tema. La scelta del genere narrativo, influisce sulla modalità di rappresentazione di personaggi e luoghi, ed influisce sullo spessore con cui il tema viene trattato? Inoltre, ha importanza se chi scrive abbia vissuto da vicino, o meno, il viaggio migratorio? Le opere vengono narrate da chi è partito dal proprio paese per emigrare in Italia, oppure da chi sia in Italia e “accoglie? Al fine di rispondere alla domanda di ricerca centrale, e le varie sotto domande nella tesi sono state analizzate tre opere diverse: il film comico Tolo Tolo (2020) diretto da Checco Zalone, il documentario Fuocoammare (2016) diretto da Gianfranco Rossi e il romanzo Adua (2015) scritto da Igiaba Scego. Questa analisi viene fatta attraverso il metodo di lettura ravvicinata nel contesto di genre theory e imagology.Show less
