This thesis examines the identities and experiences of second-generation British Muslim women in Nida Manzoor’s We Are Lady Parts (2021). Despite the proliferation of scholarship about the...Show moreThis thesis examines the identities and experiences of second-generation British Muslim women in Nida Manzoor’s We Are Lady Parts (2021). Despite the proliferation of scholarship about the complexity of Islamic practices and experiences of Muslims in the West, (immigrant) Muslim women are still plagued with homogenizing assumptions that relegate them to the realm of the passive or the dangerous. We Are Lady Parts demonstrates these realities while also offering alternative ways of understanding Muslim women by centering universal issues of faith, friendship, love and belonging. Using postcolonial and feminist theoretical frameworks, I aim to understand how unconventional representations of punk Muslim women undermine current patriarchal and colonial discourses both in Muslim and non-Muslim communities. I pay special attention to the women’s gender performativity and the ways in which it enables performative agency in their musical performances. I then address the heterogeneity of the characters’ identities by analyzing how they navigate their desires, romantic relationships, and religion. Finally, I examine the ways in which the women are excluded from embracing a British identity and how they form alternative paths to belonging via sisterhood and a decolonial worldview.Show less
A throrough analysis of Madeline Miller’s The Song of Achilles (2011), Pat Barker’s The Silence of the Girls (2018) and Nathalie Haynes’ A Thousand Ships (2019) as rewritings of Homer's Iliad, in...Show moreA throrough analysis of Madeline Miller’s The Song of Achilles (2011), Pat Barker’s The Silence of the Girls (2018) and Nathalie Haynes’ A Thousand Ships (2019) as rewritings of Homer's Iliad, in order to establish their influence as contemporary rewritings on our (newfound) interpretation of Homer's Iliad.Show less
In this thesis I analyse T. S. Eliot's ""The Waste Land"" in an ecocritical manner. By making use of contemporary theory on the relation between human and environment I shed new light on the...Show moreIn this thesis I analyse T. S. Eliot's ""The Waste Land"" in an ecocritical manner. By making use of contemporary theory on the relation between human and environment I shed new light on the conceptualization and representation of the environment in ""The Waste Land."" I do this by close reading descriptions of the environment in the poem, analyzing the struggle between the material and the spiritual, and analyzing language and agency.Show less
A theoretical debate between three thinkers on the future of literature in the age of new media shows there is dissent regarding whether literature’s narrative and new media’s database forms can...Show moreA theoretical debate between three thinkers on the future of literature in the age of new media shows there is dissent regarding whether literature’s narrative and new media’s database forms can productively coexist or that the latter will supplant the former. To make sense of these different views, this thesis will consider the question of how reading skills change on the basis of interrelations between literature and new media. The case-study, David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, seems to have a proto-database form while being essentially narrative. It may, therefore, be considered a hybrid between old and new media as well as a reflection of media-literature evolution itself. The novel builds a signification structure into the text that directs the reading direction nonlinearly, allowing for a plurality of voices and ways of looking at the world. Interpreted nonlinearly, Infinite Jest offers an allegory not for reading but precisely for the impossibility thereof. It self-consciously reflects on postmodernism and, specifically, its central thematic of illegibility: it is a novel self-aware of its own impossibility. Infinite Jest diagnoses the illegibility of texts in the age of postmodernism, where one can no longer rely on clear-cut strategies for reading but must employ a creativity in learning how to read as a production rather than a discovery of meaning. Novels like Infinite Jest, it appears, serve as mental practice for new media reading, which requires the reader to switch between reading strategies, or what I coin the modulation proposal, to deal with the phenomenon of ‘information overload.’ Infinite Jest shows that hybridization of narrative and database, or of literature and new media, is a viable – and, hopefully, long-term – possibility for the literature of the future. Literature is right now in the process of adapting itself by borrowing elements from new, digital media, and, re-inventing itself as a form of art that transcends the medium of the book, i.e., literature becomes transmedial. To stay relevant in the age of digital media, literature needs to reinvent itself time and again.Show less
This thesis focuses on African American hip-hop music. How does this music form produce a connection between black people and how does it create a community? Hip-hop music has a performative...Show moreThis thesis focuses on African American hip-hop music. How does this music form produce a connection between black people and how does it create a community? Hip-hop music has a performative function in producing a collective identity based on race, and now that new generations of African Americans are growing up in a world steeped in hip-hop culture, it is important to try and understand this performativity. How does hip-hop music produce a construct of blackness? And how is this performative function complicated by the many contradictions in hip-hop: commercial hip-hop balances on a fine line between emancipating African Americans and reproducing negative stereotypes of African Americans.Show less
This paper facilitates a conversation between a classical Chinese Zen Buddhist story and contemporary French feminist theory. Hélène Cixous' work is used as a mirror to explore the significance of...Show moreThis paper facilitates a conversation between a classical Chinese Zen Buddhist story and contemporary French feminist theory. Hélène Cixous' work is used as a mirror to explore the significance of the exceptional appearance of a nude female body and a celebrated vagina in this Zen text.Show less
In this thesis I will give a reading of the films Big Eyes (Tim Burton, 2014) and Bright Star (Jane Campion, 2009), in which authorship is addressed or at stake. Burton’s film is about the female...Show moreIn this thesis I will give a reading of the films Big Eyes (Tim Burton, 2014) and Bright Star (Jane Campion, 2009), in which authorship is addressed or at stake. Burton’s film is about the female painter Margaret Keane and Campion’s film is about the last three years of the life of the poet John Keats (1795-1821) For my analyses I will use Foucault and Barthes’ theories of the author as starting point because their theories are, especially in certain circumstances, such as in the case of female authorship, still relevant today. The overall research question of my thesis is: ‘when or in what circumstances are the theories of Foucault and Barthes relevant, and when are they not relevant?’Show less
