This Bachelor essay discusses the social-spatial segregation in contemporary Brazilian society as represented in the feature film Que horas ela volta? (2015) by the Brazilian director Anna Muylaart...Show moreThis Bachelor essay discusses the social-spatial segregation in contemporary Brazilian society as represented in the feature film Que horas ela volta? (2015) by the Brazilian director Anna Muylaart, award winner in the Sundance Film Festival and the Berlin International Film Festival. It portrays the interaction of social classes within the private space. The cinematographic representation of the restructuring of power relations established in Brazilian society is examined through narrated places, along the line of place as a social constructed space, based on the theory by Henri Lefebvre, and woven together with intersubjective time-space-identity constructions based on the idea of bakhtin’s chronotope. Two spatial themes in the film, the area of the private pool and the connection of the private with the outside world, are analyzed as elements of representation of the restructuring of power relations. It will be argued that the film makes clear how colonial principles are internalized by all social classes and still structure social-spatial relations in contemporary Brazilian society, however obnubilated, while new generations contest and renew these persistent structures.Show less
The art of sympathy constitutes an essential element in George Eliot’s concept of authorship. Regarding her novel The Mill on the Floss (1860), this thesis examines the function of imagination and...Show moreThe art of sympathy constitutes an essential element in George Eliot’s concept of authorship. Regarding her novel The Mill on the Floss (1860), this thesis examines the function of imagination and how George Eliot seeks to develop this function within the realm of the realist novel. The thesis starts with describing Eliot's view on the art of sympathy influenced by e.g. Feuerbach's concept of double-consciousness and Hazlitt’s discussion of Shakespearean sympathy and how she thinks it should be applied to the realist novel. A second section proposes a new reading of The Mill on the Floss based on one of Bakhtin’s theories, as explicated in his essay Discourse in the Novel (1975). This is done to distinguish the narrator's voice from George Eliot's own voice and to examine what Eliot implies with the narrator’s different shifts (and inconsistencies). The next two sections present the narrator and the difficulties he has when telling the story of Maggie Tulliver. First, the thesis discusses the difficulty the narrator is faced with when he discovers that Maggie's characteristics and circumstances go beyond his scientific comprehension of life. Second, the thesis illustrates that when seeking the audience's sympathy for his character Maggie, the narrator is confronted with the inaptness of the contemporary literary conventions to do so. These last two sections give insights on how Eliot both explores and expresses the limits of its omniscient narrator’s knowledge and style, and experiments with how she can replace it with the ‘art of sympathy’.Show less
