This thesis aims to explore the recent depictions of robots through the close reading of two science fiction works published within the last few years, in order to unveil the shifting,...Show moreThis thesis aims to explore the recent depictions of robots through the close reading of two science fiction works published within the last few years, in order to unveil the shifting, contradictory attitudes society has with regards to the artificial companions which continue to grow increasingly prevalent in our present-day lives. Both literary case studies exhibit the challenges of navigating a balanced hierarchy of power relations between robots and humans, because despite the mental and physical superiority of human replicas, their status as machines means robots are decidedly treated like slaves. Moreover, the thesis aims to demonstrate how both novels raise thought-provoking questions about humans' moral shortcomings in the face of their law-abiding and potentially messianic robot counterparts.Show less
This BA thesis analyses female figures in Irish fairy tales and folklore as collected by W.B. Yeats to establish how women were represented in these stories. By analysing Carl Gustav Jung’s...Show moreThis BA thesis analyses female figures in Irish fairy tales and folklore as collected by W.B. Yeats to establish how women were represented in these stories. By analysing Carl Gustav Jung’s archetypal literary criticism, this thesis explores archetypes with the focus on the Mother and the Maiden. This thesis gives close readings of several Irish fairy tales that were selected from Yeats’s anthologies with the purpose of examining figures of the Maiden and the Mother that can be found within fairy tales more closely. Both archetypes can be chiefly be found in the passive figures of the daughter and mother, and it is this passivity that makes them into ‘good’ women. Whereas the figure of the stepmother is far from passive, but her aspirations are always associated with her malevolent nature. The passivity of these female characters is not just unique to Yeats’s fairy tales, but can be generally found in other fairy tales and folklore.Show less
This thesis offers an explanation of Katherine Mansfield’s sterile depiction of colonial life by employing the postcolonial concept of displacement. It examines four of Mansfield’s New Zealand...Show moreThis thesis offers an explanation of Katherine Mansfield’s sterile depiction of colonial life by employing the postcolonial concept of displacement. It examines four of Mansfield’s New Zealand stories, namely “The Woman at the Store” (1912), “Prelude” (1918), “At the Bay” (1922), and “The Garden Party” (1922), and argues that the characters of the woman at the store, Linda Burnell, Beryl Fairfield and Laura Sheridan are displaced postcolonial subjects in the New Zealand landscape. The thesis also demonstrates that these four stories represent the settler existence as imbued with loneliness, alienation and identity crises, and that the protagonists are unable to lead meaningful lives due to the psychological consequences of displacement.Show less
Research master thesis | Literary Studies (research) (MA)
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This thesis explores Woolf’s relationship with eugenics, illness, and disability, a relationship that is characterized by ambiguity and contradictions, and has divided the critics in their...Show moreThis thesis explores Woolf’s relationship with eugenics, illness, and disability, a relationship that is characterized by ambiguity and contradictions, and has divided the critics in their assessment of Woolf’s work in relation to disability and illness. This thesis is an intervention in this debate by analyzing how Woolf conceives of and conceptualizes notions of illness and disability. This thesis further aims to investigate whether she can be considered a proto-crip theorist. It argues that Woolf’s ambiguity and contradiction in her attitudes towards disability allow for and encourage a crip theoretical reading, and that ultimately, Woolf can certainly be called a nascent crip theorist in her rejection of bodily normativity and in her celebration of non-normative bodyminds, as well as in the ways in which she deconstructs ableist ideologies. The result is a thesis that offers us significant insights into how Woolf in particular and modernist art, literature, and culture in general, conceived of disability, but it also allows us to trace the continuities and differences between attitudes toward disability during the early twentieth century and these attitudes in the present day.Show less
This thesis offers an analysis of the development of Salman's Rushdie's work through a close reading of two early novels (Midnight's Children and The Satanic Verses) and two most recent novels (The...Show moreThis thesis offers an analysis of the development of Salman's Rushdie's work through a close reading of two early novels (Midnight's Children and The Satanic Verses) and two most recent novels (The Golden House and Quichotte). The research question is to establish whether a major change in style has taken place. The premise is that a shift seems to have taken place from what Brian McHale calls the ontological dominant in postmodernism to an ethical and moral dominant. This thesis focuses particularly on typical postmodern topics such as the questioning of the ontological relationship between reality and truth, since Rushdie’s style of fantastical writing invites such a focus.Show less
Through a close reading and historical-biographical contextualisation of two eclogues and the introductory poem, “At Toombridge”, in Electric Light concerning poems by W.B. Yeats, I would like to...Show moreThrough a close reading and historical-biographical contextualisation of two eclogues and the introductory poem, “At Toombridge”, in Electric Light concerning poems by W.B. Yeats, I would like to explore Heaney’s and Yeats's opposed responses to violence. I will claim that this response is due to contemporary Irish political upheaval and that both Heaney and Yeats appropriate Eclogue IV by the Roman Poet Virgil to broaden the scope of their claims. This thesis links the marked contrast between Yeats's and Heaney's response to political violence in an Irish context to their interconnected yet very different backgrounds and times. While the selected poems by Heaney and Yeats are imbued with violence, the contrast lies in both poets' treatment of this theme. The chosen poems from Yeats's middle period (the 1910s – 1920s) seem to condone political violence whereas the selected poems by Seamus Heaney published after the 1998 Peace Treaty in Northern Ireland seems to condemn it.Show less
This thesis is an analysis of two modernist texts, Virginia Woolf’s 'Mrs. Dalloway' and Jean Rhys’ 'Good Morning, Midnight', as a means of exploring how the contrasting states of solitude and...Show moreThis thesis is an analysis of two modernist texts, Virginia Woolf’s 'Mrs. Dalloway' and Jean Rhys’ 'Good Morning, Midnight', as a means of exploring how the contrasting states of solitude and sociality influence self-concept. As both of these texts engage with concepts of selfhood amid themes of social engagement and social isolation, they make ideal candidates for an investigation of this kind. The intentions of this thesis are, firstly, to show how the texts reveal that perceptions of self can be moulded by these contrasting states of sociality and solitude, and, secondly, to highlight the novels’ depictions of the consequences of each state. Because the perceptions of self these states generate manifest themselves in real-world behaviour and essentially influence self-creation, it is worth considering these consequences as represented by a literary movement which so carefully scrutinised the dichotomies of perception and reality, and self and other. By employing a psychological approach to character analyses of selected figures in the texts, this research will cast light on these characters’ personal relationships with sociality and solitude, consequently revealing how their lives, and their understandings of themselves, are positively and negatively influenced by each.Show less
