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
In this thesis I will discuss the notion of unreliability in the narratological environment of Ian McEwan’s novels Enduring Love and Atonement, in relation with the formalism theory and a cognitive...Show moreIn this thesis I will discuss the notion of unreliability in the narratological environment of Ian McEwan’s novels Enduring Love and Atonement, in relation with the formalism theory and a cognitive approach, respectively. The effects of traumatic experiences along with the concept of memory as an unreliable narrator will be considered as focal points in my analysis. In McEwan’s novels what constitute an unreliable narrator are his specific characteristics derived from the personality of the fictional character/narrator and the narratological setting. The research questions examined are how narrative is used as a way of making sense of the world, which narratological techniques in the aforementioned novels result in unreliability, and what the effects of unreliability are for the characters and the reader.Show less
Because contemporary network science is predicated on the assumption that similarity breeds connection, it transforms what seems to be an open web into poorly gated communities that propagate...Show moreBecause contemporary network science is predicated on the assumption that similarity breeds connection, it transforms what seems to be an open web into poorly gated communities that propagate already-existing forms of prejudice and discrimination. If the algorithmic fabric of social media platforms pushes people with the same views and interests towards each other, what does this mean for queer individuals in Beirut inhabiting a city whose very urban fabric segregates and limits their interaction in public space? What possibilities can the digital realm provide queer lives in a cyberspace unhinged by the geography of residence and the materiality of the body? I attempt to answer those research questions by relying on Sara Ahmed’s Queer phenomenology (2006) and on Wendy Hui Kyong Chun’s (2016) concept of “homophily”. Those theoretical lenses will guide my use of auto-ethnography and close visual analysis to explore the outputs and social media strategies of two case studies of visual activism in Lebanon: Beirut By Dyke and Kikafilmadina. My personal experience as a member of civil society groups in Beirut and my positionality as the creator of Beirut By Dyke orient me, to borrow Sara Ahmed’s term, towards these pages as cultural objects. The concept of the social media accounts, which revolves around the narrativization of queer inhabitance in space, propels me toward Sara Ahmed’s theory around sexuality as residence. Conversely, the social impact generated by both social media accounts on collective imaginations and social participation in cyber and physical space leads to me to question how “homophily” (Chun 2016) can be used to challenge the neoliberal assumptions it was built on. My aim is to counter existing literature around gender and digital culture whose understandable focus on the capitalistic and behaviorally predictive valence of social platforms is grim and dystopic (Goldberg 2016). Instead, I suggest that the study of platforms like Instagram offers a resource for queer studies insofar as it “emphasizes the importance of lived experience, the intentionality of consciousness, the significance of newness, or the role of repeated habitual action in shaping bodies and the world” (Ahmed 57). It is specifically the power of repeated habitual actions that I want to focus on in exploring digital possibilities. In a context where systemic oppression is difficult to dismantle and social change impossible to imagine, the creation of new paths is, after all, a labor of repetition.Show less
In the last few decades, there has been an emergence of feminist texts that relate themselves to Homer’s renowned myths, The Iliad and The Odyssey. Inspired by these feminist narratives that...Show moreIn the last few decades, there has been an emergence of feminist texts that relate themselves to Homer’s renowned myths, The Iliad and The Odyssey. Inspired by these feminist narratives that revolve around the centring of the female characters within a myth, this thesis poses an analysis of the emergence and importance of mythmaking by women writers. In my research, I have focused on Pat Barker’s The Silence of the Girls Madeline Miller’s Circe, two of the most recent examples of feminist mythmaking. Both Barker and Miller are able to give a voice to women that have often been silenced in ‘classic’ myths: Briseis and Circe. The texts foreground the complexity of their female protagonists by relating their stories to the patriarchal world surrounding them. Building onto this, both texts reflect on mythmaking and storytelling on an overarching level, thereby offering us a subtle critique on the way myths have been written and read in the past. Strikingly, scholars have recently studied these feminist mythmakings as mere ‘rewritings’ or ‘fictionalisations’ of Homer’s ‘classics’. The effect is a limiting analysis in which the true intertextuality of the stories gets lost in a restricting methodology. In this thesis, I propose a new way to analyze these mythmakings in an appropriate and respectful way, by using the concept of ‘mosaic mythmaking’.Show less
