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 the course of the last decade, the previously confident notion that European integration is a one-way street has been shattered. The successive and concurrent Eurozone, Schengen and Brexit...Show moreIn the course of the last decade, the previously confident notion that European integration is a one-way street has been shattered. The successive and concurrent Eurozone, Schengen and Brexit crises have rocked the landscape of European integration discourse. The nature and impact of this “age of crisis” has seen the near collapse of the European Union’s common currency, a migration crisis that caused the temporary suspension of the Schengen agreement and the first case of a European Member State in the history of modern European integration. Since the “original six” members consisting of France, West Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg signed the Treaty of Paris in 1952 the European integration process has never faced such a rapid development of crises before. The resulting flurry of academic discourse has led to a renewed focus on European integration theory and questioned the ability of the three “grand” European integration theories of Liberal Intergovernmentalism, Neofunctionalism and Postfunctionalism to explain this rapid succession of crises. This thesis argues that rather than being in a single state of integrational stability or instability there are in fact “two Europes” at play. Economic Europe is a stable integration process with a strong base and steady support from its Member States. Political Europe, on the other hand, is only marginally integrated, lacking in support, and in constant danger of being either abandoned or “put on the back burner”.Show less