This thesis explores the themes of family, loss and belonging in Wes Anderson's Rushmore (1998), The Darjeeling Limited (2007), and Moonrise Kingdom (2012). The thesis connects objects and places...Show moreThis thesis explores the themes of family, loss and belonging in Wes Anderson's Rushmore (1998), The Darjeeling Limited (2007), and Moonrise Kingdom (2012). The thesis connects objects and places within these films to the abovementioned themes, and shows parallels between the use of objects in these films and the way in which objects are used in George Eliot's novel The Mill on the Floss (1860) - objects have a multiplicity of functions in both. Key to Anderson's films are relations between characters, and objects and places in the films signify these bonds. In the end, the characters in the films find a place to belong in the other.Show less
This thesis contains a description of married women's role regarding childcare and eldercare in China during the Maoist era. Next to that it describes the most recent practices and expectations of...Show moreThis thesis contains a description of married women's role regarding childcare and eldercare in China during the Maoist era. Next to that it describes the most recent practices and expectations of married women in urban China and their role regarding childcare and eldercare. The thesis concludes that most recently the role regarding childcare has become bigger and heavier due to a lack of affordable childcare services. The role regarding eldercare has become a little smaller due to, among others, a reinterpretation of the concept 'xiao'.Show less
This thesis offers a close reading of three neo-slave narratives, Octavia Butler's "Kindred," Toni Morrison's "Beloved" and Charles Johnson's "Middle Passage" focusing on the themes of slave and...Show moreThis thesis offers a close reading of three neo-slave narratives, Octavia Butler's "Kindred," Toni Morrison's "Beloved" and Charles Johnson's "Middle Passage" focusing on the themes of slave and post-slavery community, family and gender in relation to the historical trauma of slavery. This thesis first addresses the historiographical debates about the agency and resistance of enslaved people within a system of systematic oppression and dispossession and then demonstrates how the three novels negotiate this issue. Both "Kindred" and "Beloved" probe into the limitations and possibilities of the community as a site of black male and female empowerment. Instead of romanticizing life in the free and enslaved black communities, both Butler and Morrison challenge these sites and call attention to the costs of resistance to the slavery regime. On the other hand, in his effort to liberate his fiction from black identity politics that foreground the works of Butler and Morrison, Johnson explores the cultural hybridity of his protagonist, but he ultimately only reproduces patriarchal values he overtlty parodies.Show less
