Research master thesis | Literary Studies (research) (MA)
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2025-03-20T00:00:00Z, 2025-03-20T00:00:00Z
This thesis explores the conceptual mechanisms that underlie utopian world-making and rest on grammatical structures, identified as ‘grammars of utopia’. Examining case studies from modern and...Show moreThis thesis explores the conceptual mechanisms that underlie utopian world-making and rest on grammatical structures, identified as ‘grammars of utopia’. Examining case studies from modern and contemporary English and Greek literature, the thesis shows utopia to be both beyond and within grammatical limits: the conception of an ideal society, which a utopia is, is a gesture away from a given reality – its limitations, more precisely – as well as towards an alternative one, and this latter is the one drawing limits to the utopian thought anew. Herbert George Wells’ A Modern Utopia (1905), James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), Aldous Huxley’s Island (1962), and Sotiris Dimitriou’s The Silence of the Dry Weed (2011) map five categories without which we cannot make sense of or construe utopian narratives: modality, polarity, conditionality, subjectivity, and mood. Therefore, close reading these works provides a first grammatical ‘study of Utopian fantasy mechanics’, as proposed by Fredric Jameson (2005, xiii). Αt the same time, all texts try (and more or less succeed) to remap these five configurations and invite possibilities of alternative grammars of utopia that are yet to come.Show less
In this typological survey, I study the distribution of irrealis markers in a sample of nine South American indigenous languages. I do this to assess the typological validity of Reality Status, a...Show moreIn this typological survey, I study the distribution of irrealis markers in a sample of nine South American indigenous languages. I do this to assess the typological validity of Reality Status, a crosslinguistic grammatical category defined by Elliott (2000) about which there is much debate. This category assumes that a notional distinction of realized and unrealized events underlies the formal marking of the irrealis. Based on Elliott’s notional definition, and inspired by Michael (2014), I set out a group of irrealis parameters, grammatical categories which are expected to be marked for irrealis in a language which makes an RS distinction, and study which of these parameters are marked for the irrealis. I argue that assuming RS is often not adequate in explaining the distribution of irrealis markers and that this distribution should instead be explained by assuming a focal meaning of future prediction, which shows interaction with either degree of assertion or metaphorical inference from markers of deictic space. Together, these factors can account for the distribution of the irrealis markers in this sample.Show less
A stylistic analysis of the stylistic devices/features that contribute to the perceived anti-/ and pro-European attitudes of Nigel Farage and Guy Verhofstadt, respectively. The research also...Show moreA stylistic analysis of the stylistic devices/features that contribute to the perceived anti-/ and pro-European attitudes of Nigel Farage and Guy Verhofstadt, respectively. The research also demonstrates the value of using a stylistic checklist for identifying relevant stylistic features.Show less
