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
(Domesticated) animals play a remarkable role alongside human characters in the novel 'De geluiden van de eerste dag' (1975), by Dutch author Anton Koolhaas. In dominant anthropocentric discourses...Show more(Domesticated) animals play a remarkable role alongside human characters in the novel 'De geluiden van de eerste dag' (1975), by Dutch author Anton Koolhaas. In dominant anthropocentric discourses subjectivity (the active, desire driven perception and experience of reality) and individuality of non-human animals often get erased. However, this doesn't seem to be the case in 'De geluiden van de eerste dag'. In this thesis, I aim to formulate an answer to the question: 'Does the novel 'De geluiden van de eerste dag', by Anton Koolhaas, represent and thematize an anti-anthropocentric human-animal-relationship?' This study shows that the novel attributes agency and subjectivity to non-human animals, while (to a certain extent) respecting their species-specific susceptibilities, modes of communication and behavior. Overall the novel takes an ethical stance against mechanical animal exploitation and promotes an empathic relationship to other animals. I draw specific attention to the way aggression is connected to agency, the constitution of the subject and to the creative act of taking up space (Umwelt). I also emphasize how language and anthropomorphism (in and via literature) contribute to the constitution of subjectivity, agency and individuality of non-human and human animals.Show less
In this thesis, I take up Kierkegaard’s religious theory and, more specifically, his notion of religiousness. I argue that this notion, along with his overall system, carries significant value for...Show moreIn this thesis, I take up Kierkegaard’s religious theory and, more specifically, his notion of religiousness. I argue that this notion, along with his overall system, carries significant value for non-religious individuals. In Kierkegaardian scholarship, there are two series of interpreters. Firstly, there are those who treat his work in a strictly religious fashion and who judge its concepts strictly for their content. Secondly, there are those scholars who pursue less strict theological readings and argue for the revival of its broader existential relevance. It is to this school of thought this thesis wishes to contribute. In the first chapter, I aim to show that Kierkegaard’s understanding of religiousness can hardly be grasped if we do not highlight his commitments to subjectivity. Religiousness, in the Climacus writings, is in the first place a highly subjective affair. In the second chapter, I continue by exploring the category of religiousness to see where – despite building upon – it differs from mere subjectivity. In this way, the first two chapters are more descriptive than argumentative. In a final chapter, I consider the works of Michael O’neill Burns and Andrew Torrance, who both pertain to the series of scholars who treat Kierkegaardian philosophy in a strict religious fashion. I counter both of their claims in order to substantiate my own reading of Kierkegaardian thought, stressing its secular validity. For this, I draw upon the work of Merold Westphal and Mariana Alessandri, as well as my own reading of the Postscript, to argue that Kierkegaard’s system, despite having deeply theological grounds, offers an extraordinary foundation for all human beings to build their life-attitude on.Show less
Elaine Scarry’s The Body in Pain: the Making and Unmaking of the World (1985) proposed an analysis of pain and the concepts of language, imagination, subjectivity, social isolation. This thesis...Show moreElaine Scarry’s The Body in Pain: the Making and Unmaking of the World (1985) proposed an analysis of pain and the concepts of language, imagination, subjectivity, social isolation. This thesis examines the link between language and pain in relation to Scarry’s assumption that it is extremely hard to accurately describe sentient pain in verbal and written forms of expression. Despite pain’s resistance to language, language holds the healing potential of softening pain. The process of “externalization” (the act of externalizing one’s pain into the material world outside the painful inner existence) is a starting point from which the treatment of pain can begin. However, in order to carry out the externalization, one has to express pain in language. I employ three case studies in order to determine whether Scarry’s assumption about pain’s resistance to language can be overcome: Leo Tolstoy’s novel The Death of Ivan Ilyich, Alphonse Daudet’s collection of personal notes In the Land of Pain and a scientific instrument– the McGill Pain Questionnaire. The thesis employs a multidisciplinary approach to pain in which cultural, social and biological aspects are taken into account. It also seeks to re-evaluate the single label of ‘pain’ and proposes to view pain as a multitude of experiences.Show less
Research master thesis | Arts and Culture (research) (MA)
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This thesis examines what insights the photography series Blue Sky Days (2012-) by Tomas Van Houtryve provides into concepts as vision, subjectivity and representation, which means that the series...Show moreThis thesis examines what insights the photography series Blue Sky Days (2012-) by Tomas Van Houtryve provides into concepts as vision, subjectivity and representation, which means that the series functions as a case study, a common thread. The drone as imaging technology challenges the traditional relation between image and vision. The remarkable visuality of the series, the vertical perspective, distorts our sense of spatial and temporal orientation. It differs from the visuality that long dominated our vision, the paradigm of the linear perspective. I argue that drone vision is a collaborative vision by a human-drone assemblage that should be understood as an embodied vision. Blue Sky Days problematizes the effect of the vertical perspective and the necropolitical logic to which it invites. In contemporary warfare, the digital drone image is no longer treated as a passive representation, but as an active entity, being part of a process. Blue Sky Days as a series of static photographic images emphasizes ambiguity and undecidibility, which contrasts the visuality of certainty employed by synthetic vision systems. Van Houtryve uses a strategy of anthropomorphism, a strategy that raises awareness for the fact that agency is distributed by human and nonhuman forces. His series humanizes the other, encourages empathy for the people living under the drone, which contrast the current of anthropophobia in synthetic imagery. In the last chapter, I discuss the series in relation to the debates around representation that troubled documentary photography, war photojournalism and art. Now hypermediacy and immediacy seem both a strategy by the military to create a civic weaponized eye, Van Houtryve’s drone photography is an interesting alternative gesture by emphasizing the process of remediation.Show less
Bachelor thesis | Film- en literatuurwetenschap (BA)
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Interiority has long been seen as the domain of literature. While there has been research into the way cinema uses visual means to represent interiority or subjectivity, similar analyses of other...Show moreInteriority has long been seen as the domain of literature. While there has been research into the way cinema uses visual means to represent interiority or subjectivity, similar analyses of other media seem to be lacking. This thesis looks into how interiority and subjectivity are represented in narrative television shows, video games and comics or graphic novels.Show less
The thesis argues that the concept of landscape fails to do justice to the experience of it. Through an analysis of the concept and of its origins, it locates the presuppositions of the concept in...Show moreThe thesis argues that the concept of landscape fails to do justice to the experience of it. Through an analysis of the concept and of its origins, it locates the presuppositions of the concept in its understanding of self and world. A phenomenological approach reveals that current understanding of landscape perpetuates the distinction of subject and object, disabling the experience of being in a landscape. Drawing on the later works of Husserl and Heidegger, the concluding chapters works towards an understanding of landscape as awareness of earth.Show less
Research master thesis | Literary Studies (research) (MA)
open access
Digital games provide a fruitful comparison to ideologies due to their resemblance to ideologies as an organizing structures entered into; as well as due to their serving as a systematic test case...Show moreDigital games provide a fruitful comparison to ideologies due to their resemblance to ideologies as an organizing structures entered into; as well as due to their serving as a systematic test case for alternatively organized (ideological) worlds. They do so perhaps more than linear narrative media, as game-play presents both fictional worlds, systems and spect-actors whom are present as participatory agents. By addressing the structural parallels between ideology and digital games as organizations of quasi-natural conventions, I argue in this thesis that games have the capacity to model, propose and reflect on ideologies. Comparing roughly twenty years of scholarship on ideological play, ludology, narratology, game design, proceduralism and play-centred studies, I argue that games dynamically present stylized simulations of a possible world, occurring to the subject of play in a here-and-now that at once grants autonomy while doing so in a paradoxically rigid structure of affordances, constraints and desires. That subject of play, meanwhile, is split between played subject (the presented avatar and the game’s content); the playing subject as demanded by the ludic power structure of rules; and the interpreting subject that is tasked to understand and inform the process of game-play. Through close analyses of Cart Life, the Stanley Parable and Spec Ops: the Line I argue for game-play as a dialectical process, beyond academic scholarship that posits either games as procedural systems of interpellation or play as mythical unrestrained creativity. An understanding of game-play as dialectical process akin to the relation between subjects and ideological power structures furthermore demands a recognition of the critical potential of game-play. Through theatrical techniques of enstrangement, game-play may reveal uncritical familiarity with the quasi-natural conventions of ideology – be they generic, social or political.Show less
