During the last decade, Europe has faced what is considered to be the largest migration wave since the Second World War. It affected and continues to influence national and international socio...Show moreDuring the last decade, Europe has faced what is considered to be the largest migration wave since the Second World War. It affected and continues to influence national and international socio-political decisions and policies for European and Western countries. The migration wave peaked in 2015, with more than a million refugees, including Syrian refugees, seeking asylum. The main reason for Syrian migration was the Syrian revolution, sparked by the demonstrations that started in 2011. Pro-democratic protests called for freedom, aiming to end the oppressive regime under the Assad family that has exhausted the country for around five decades. The unforeseen result of these protests was a brutal war. The Syrian conflict and the Syrian diaspora have been framed in European news and media coverage as the “refugee crisis.” It has been framed as a crisis not only due to the severity of the situation but also based on a tradition of “Othering,” as the refugees generally come from a Muslim majority. While there is a common agreement on the passivity, generalization, and dehumanization at work in media coverage of the refugees, art, and literature often try to provide alternative narratives. Using critical analysis as a research method, this research investigates the representation politics of refugees in two case studies: a book by Wendy Pearlman, and an exhibition by Carlos Motta, focusing on the concept of belonging and its politics. Furthermore, I employ post-coloniality discourse that enables a critical reading of political and cultural power relations, including history, race, and queerness. The analysis of the cultural objects will show that these art-works have provided a personal space for refugees to tell their stories, which symbolizes a positive step away from the mainstream media representation. However, these representations do not automatically also generate a critical examination of the belonging crisis of refugees, especially while the art-works do not establish a dialogue with the “Other.”Show less
The postmodern era may not have reached its end, yet its very characteristics invite research into a number of issues that postmodernism has so far failed to address in a satisfactory way. In the...Show moreThe postmodern era may not have reached its end, yet its very characteristics invite research into a number of issues that postmodernism has so far failed to address in a satisfactory way. In the last three decades, many have declared the death of postmodernism and demanded a theoretical system that could better represent the current sociocultural scene. In this post-postmodern fever, metamodernism offers itself as a cultural philosophy able to gather some important sociocultural and artistic tendencies of the last decades and illuminate the contingencies that shaped them by interpreting these tendencies as one single responsive wave to postmodern culture. This thesis will explore the legitimacy of the metamodern paradigm through the analysis of the tv show Maniac as the main case study.Show less
This thesis examines the role of education in the Mysterious Benedict Society series on two levels. On the level of the story, I analyze how the two opposite characters of Nicholas Benedict and...Show moreThis thesis examines the role of education in the Mysterious Benedict Society series on two levels. On the level of the story, I analyze how the two opposite characters of Nicholas Benedict and Ledroptha Curtain function as "educators" in the intradiegetic world. Then, on a second level, I delve into the ways in which the text can "educate" its readers. I place my research in a framework of children's literature theory and criticism, narratology, and a text on education by Jacques Rancière.Show less
This thesis looks at the concept of double consciousness through a comparison of hip-hop artist Kendrick Lamar's albums 'To Pimp a Butterfly' (2015) and 'DAMN.' (2017). To capture the...Show moreThis thesis looks at the concept of double consciousness through a comparison of hip-hop artist Kendrick Lamar's albums 'To Pimp a Butterfly' (2015) and 'DAMN.' (2017). To capture the particularities of the development of double consciousness in 'DAMN.', the author proposes to add the new concept of post-critical double consciousness to the theoretical field.Show less
The main purpose of this thesis is to draw attention to the "positive" signification of physical suffering. In four chapters bodily female suffering is analysed -respectively- as a way of self...Show moreThe main purpose of this thesis is to draw attention to the "positive" signification of physical suffering. In four chapters bodily female suffering is analysed -respectively- as a way of self-identification, a call to action, a means of identification with the disastrous Other, and a condition for the production knowledgeShow less
This thesis analyzes Khaleed Hosseini’s novels A Thousand Splendid Suns (2007) and And the Mountains Echoed (2013) by focusing solely on the notions of honor, shame, and the subsequent loss of the...Show moreThis thesis analyzes Khaleed Hosseini’s novels A Thousand Splendid Suns (2007) and And the Mountains Echoed (2013) by focusing solely on the notions of honor, shame, and the subsequent loss of the self in the social environment depicted in these novels. With a close reading of the cultural settings in the novels and the interaction of characters in their settings, this research explores the interrelationship of honor and shame and their interconnectedness with the cultural construction of the self. I will argue that the social factors of honor and shame influence the composition of various characters’ identity in the novels.Show less
Research master thesis | Literary Studies (research) (MA)
open access
2018-06-01T00:00:00Z
In this paper I approach the novel Distant Star (1996) by Roberto Bolaño (Chile, 1953-2003) with the goal of rendering visible the reflection and articulation that it undertakes of the fields of...Show moreIn this paper I approach the novel Distant Star (1996) by Roberto Bolaño (Chile, 1953-2003) with the goal of rendering visible the reflection and articulation that it undertakes of the fields of literature/poetics and life/politics. By means of the development of a theoretical and methodological framework mainly influenced by Mieke Bal and Jacques Rancière, I reach the conclusion that the novel offers an original contribution to the problem of political commitment in the Latin American intellectuals of the 20th century. I introduce the concepts of "poetics of juego", "doubling/mirroring" and "menardism".Show less
This thesis explores how the hybrid form of photo-fiction suits migrants’ experiences. Taking Aleksandar Hemon’s The Lazarus Project (2008) and W. G. Sebald’s The Emigrants (1996) as my case...Show moreThis thesis explores how the hybrid form of photo-fiction suits migrants’ experiences. Taking Aleksandar Hemon’s The Lazarus Project (2008) and W. G. Sebald’s The Emigrants (1996) as my case studies, I focus on themes of history, memory, and identity. I analyze how the tensions between photographs and prose complicate our understanding of the way traumatic historical events shape the present, the unjust historical treatment that migrants endure, the mobilization and materialization of memories, the constructed nature of migrant identities, and the way exile becomes a desired state of being in the world. Through comparative close readings of Hemon and Sebald’s novels I explore how both authors challenge the conventional notion that photography’s telos is bearing witness to historical truths and how their novels also call for a reconsideration of the relationship between memory and photography. I seek to show that the hybrid photo-fiction form, which emphasizes blurriness and dualities inherent in acts of memory and in constructions of self-histories and identities, illuminates how migrants meaningfully engage with the world. Sebald and Hemon’s novels move us between two aesthetics, engage us with two modes of storytelling, and in doing so highlight the positive nature of hybridity and the beauty in rootlessness and rupture.Show less
This thesis is a reflection on a recently popular word "post-truth". In my writing, I want to reveal the problems with the use of "post-truth", especially the definition of it by the Oxford...Show moreThis thesis is a reflection on a recently popular word "post-truth". In my writing, I want to reveal the problems with the use of "post-truth", especially the definition of it by the Oxford Dictionary. Instead of considering truth as objective facts as the dictionary does, I read "truth" through intersubjective communication.Show less
This thesis is about the relation between knowledge and literature in The Order of Things written by Michel Foucault. Literature plays an important role in this book, because it owes its existence...Show moreThis thesis is about the relation between knowledge and literature in The Order of Things written by Michel Foucault. Literature plays an important role in this book, because it owes its existence to a passage of Borges, and because Cervantes and Sade are discussed in relation to the discontinuities in the episteme of Western Culture. Why does Foucault ascribe such an important role to literature in a philosophical book that addresses itself to the general space of knowledge? Foucault seems to imply that there is something that literature can do in relation to positive knowledge. This thesis is about the strange, epistemological status of literature in Foucault's earlier work. What is the role and function of literature with regard to the discontinuities Foucault establishes in the Western episteme? And what could the role of Borges be in The Order of Things?Show less
Exploring the intimate links between text and skin, this thesis examines the ways in which Virginia Woolf and Ali Smith approach tactile experience within the touch-transforming contexts from which...Show moreExploring the intimate links between text and skin, this thesis examines the ways in which Virginia Woolf and Ali Smith approach tactile experience within the touch-transforming contexts from which their novels The Waves (1931) and How to be Both (2014) emerge. Drawing on the first sustained study that investigates literature and tactility since the publication of seminal works on touch by thinkers of deconstruction such as Jacques Derrida and Jean-Luc Nancy, it looks at the two texts from the perspective of a tactful reading. Engaging with the texts with close attention and from a distance, it argues that tactile experience not only resides in the contact of skin on skin, but also in the space between skin and skin. Looking primarily at how the writers give expression to a touch that transforms and a touch that reaches out both in and through their texts, it also draws attention to the way that memory, the shared thematic concern of the novels, too exhibits moments of change and nearness. Finally, this thesis seeks to open up a discussion on the limits and possibilities of a tactful approach and relates it to the potential it offers to the reading of recent innovative literary projects that respond to some of today’s most poignant issues regarding tactility, digital technology and human connection. Inspired by the astounding and intimate sensory surrounds of Ann Hamilton’s large-scale multi-media installation the event of a thread (2012), it demonstrates an attention to the presence of the tactile, and perhaps most importantly, an attention to the presence of each other.Show less
The first chapter, entitled “The Narrative”, will provide a short critique to the conventional relationship between word, fact and experience: here will firstly emerge the basilar dualistic frame...Show moreThe first chapter, entitled “The Narrative”, will provide a short critique to the conventional relationship between word, fact and experience: here will firstly emerge the basilar dualistic frame that governed the problem of narrative by separating the official, general, scientific claim of historiography from the personal, variable and subjective narrative of the individual. This reflection will depart from accounting a double crisis of narrative: the one of experience, which forbids any personal narration to become paradigmatic for other individuals, and the one of scientific discourses, differently carried out by several postmodernist thinkers, that argues the inherently interpretative and therefore subjective status of sciences (among which historiography), which prevents them to reach the claim for universality they pursuit. By trying to find a new configuration that would integrate and to rehabilitate these two narratives, our argument will approach the foucaultian idea of an “history of the present”, the only model that would simultaneously unify the formalization of the past with the constant interpretation promoted by the individuals in the present. The second chapter, named “The Voice”, will examine all the possible reasons according to which the materiality of voice would embody the best tool to carry on the claim for an history of the present: we should say that whereas the first chapter engages the problem of the message, the second discusses the problem of the medium. Accordingly, we will attempt to disentangle the human voice from Derrida’s popular critique of logocentrism, by comparing it with several different models that picture the voice as a collective connecter as well as the only medium capable to give the full dimensions of the human: his feelings, his imaginary, his activity into the real world. The last chapter, which takes the name of “The Community”, departs from the possibility for an heterogeneous group of ‘vocalized individuals’ to constitute a community, namely a group definable according to common parameters. For the voice turns out to be the element which transcends all the particular claims for identity, the essential experience of language will become the fundamental experience of a globalized word. What we will be stressing is that, in this plateau, the language is no longer separable from action: by being configured as an action-in-progress, the respective community cannot be completely defined once for allShow less
This thesis concentrates on two novels, One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) by the Colombian author Gabriel García Márquez and Big Breasts and Wide Hips (1996) by the Chinese author Mo Yan. I...Show moreThis thesis concentrates on two novels, One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) by the Colombian author Gabriel García Márquez and Big Breasts and Wide Hips (1996) by the Chinese author Mo Yan. I attempt to compare the ways in which García Márquez and Mo Yan rewrite history by a close examination of the two novels mentioned above. Moreover, I aim to explore the significance of their attempts to rewrite history.Show less
The departure of this study was shaped by my attempt to answer how literature denies losing contact with the events. In other words, my concern was one’s state of getting used to their frequent...Show moreThe departure of this study was shaped by my attempt to answer how literature denies losing contact with the events. In other words, my concern was one’s state of getting used to their frequent appearance in the everyday: in conversations, in newspapers, in topics of discussion. This is because habituating oneself to any event, to any disaster, would bring an end to every possible response to life. Nothing meaningful can remain after the event, if there is none of its impacts to be sensed. Literature, on the other hand, has the aesthetic capacity to resist such idea. It has the capacity to be attentive to the sensation of events: to how every moment will, and should continue to make us startled, to make us disturbed, and provoked. This is also the very reason why Sylvia Plath and Ingeborg Bachmann, whose texts are central to this study, are writing for the sake of what comes, and should come after the event. By telling about this, they deny, in their own writing, to bring an end to the ability to response.Show less
