School of English
http://hdl.handle.net/2262/1783
School of English2024-03-19T11:52:12Z"Welcome to the Good Life!" Neoliberalism(s) and Contemporary Irish Women's Short Fiction
http://hdl.handle.net/2262/106338
"Welcome to the Good Life!" Neoliberalism(s) and Contemporary Irish Women's Short Fiction
Darling, Orlaith Marie
This thesis examines the ways in which neoliberalism as a pervasive economic, political, and cultural discourse is represented, recreated, and subverted in contemporary short fiction by Claire Keegan, Nicole Flattery, Lucy Sweeney Byrne, Wendy Erskine, Danielle McLaughlin, Cathy Sweeney, Louise Kennedy, Claire-Louise Bennett, June Caldwell, and Niamh Mulvey. My concerns in this thesis are: firstly, the implications of the neoliberal phase of late capitalist development for everyday life; secondly, how everyday life might be involved in (re)producing neoliberal norms; thirdly, the role of literature in subverting or reproducing neoliberalism as a ?common sense? structuring principle for individuals and the collective in contemporary Ireland. Over five chapters ? on the body, the home, the land, the city, and history ? I address these issues with regard to neoliberalism as a global and globalising stage of capitalist development, and to its Irish geographic and historical specificities. By taking a broad swathe of writers, and collections published in the last fifteen years, I establish that neoliberalism is both a key concern in contemporary Irish fiction and a central pillar in establishing what the contemporary is. Neoliberalism is the backdrop of everyday life in these texts, not because it is a neutral reality, but because it is recreated and reaffirmed by everyday suspension of disbelief and everyday routine. Here, I follow Lauren Berlant and others in theorising the contemporary in terms of aesthetics and affect (rather than, say, chronology or events), where neoliberalism?s administrative influence both creates and forecloses on the possibility of future lives and narratives. By examining short fiction, I focalise marginality, snapshots, and snippets, and thus highlight fragments which at once (re)produce the neoliberal everyday and which might puncture its narrative totality.
APPROVED
2024-01-01T00:00:00ZThat awful secret of the wood' : the forest and the EcoGothic
http://hdl.handle.net/2262/105576
That awful secret of the wood' : the forest and the EcoGothic
Parker, Elizabeth
When we imagine the forest, we tend towards extremes. It is commonly read as a binary space: as either ‘good’ or ‘bad’. When it is ‘good’, it is a remedial setting of wonder and enchantment; when it is ‘bad’, it is a dangerous and terrifying wilderness. It is with its fearsome associations
that this thesis is concerned. Sarah Maitland, in her book Gossip From the Forest (2012), argues that ‘inside most of post-enlightenment and would-be rational adults, there is a child who is terrified by the wild wood’.1 The implication in her wording is that the modern adult who fears the forest does so despite the fact that he or she is ‘post-enlightenment’ and ‘would-be rational’. It is suggested, therefore, that such fears are today not only unfounded, but regressive and irrational.
Nonetheless, as she continues, there is much evidence to suggest that we continue to be ‘terrified by the wild wood’. Popular culture abounds with seemingly infinite examples of the foreboding forest. It is, as a site of trial, trepidation, and terror, one of the most enduring and
pervasive in our fictions. The central question of this thesis, therefore, is why do we continue to find this landscape so frightening? This thesis seeks to answer this question by examining a range of twentieth and twenty-first century Gothic texts, each of which features a fearsome forest.
Embargo End Date: 2022-01-01
2016-01-01T00:00:00ZApologising for the inconvenience : defamiliarisation and displacement in landscapes in The Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy
http://hdl.handle.net/2262/105571
Apologising for the inconvenience : defamiliarisation and displacement in landscapes in The Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Harwood-Smith, Jennifer
This thesis sought to examine worldbuilding in science fiction, and to establish whether a single driving force, named a strange attractor could be identified in an author's constructed secondary world. A theory of worldbuilding was constructed from the existing theory and applied to Douglas Adams's The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy in the following media: Radio, Book, Television, Film, Illustrated Book, and Game. Worldbuilding is the central theme of Hitchhiker's, making the series perfect for studying worldbuilding, particularly through the landscapes of Earth, spaceships, and alien worlds. The strange attractor identified in Hitchhiker's was determined to be a particular joke: namely that life is meaningless, and any search for meaning will ultimately end in farce. Hitchhiker's is a series which revels in demonstrating its constructedness, and it is this authorial focus on worldbuilding which was used to understand Adam's subcreation.
Embargo End Date: 2022-10-01
2016-01-01T00:00:00Z`There's A Terrible Difference': Bodies of Knowledge in Shirley Jackson's America
http://hdl.handle.net/2262/105557
`There's A Terrible Difference': Bodies of Knowledge in Shirley Jackson's America
Deitner, Janice Lynne
This thesis explores the interaction of bodies and minds in the work of American author Shirley Jackson (1916-1965) through the investigation of Jackson's historical contexts. I frame my exploration on the work of Jackson's mentor Leonard Brown, drawing from a variety of historical, theoretical, and sociological perspectives to situate Jackson as an important American writer. Foregrounding the idea of 'bodies of knowledge,' I first explore changing perceptions of both physical and communal bodies in Jackson's formative years during the interwar period (1918-1939), a time of growing boundaries between community bodies and a narrowing of norms for physical bodies. I then examine Jackson's adult years in the postwar period (1945-1965), an era increasingly concerned with the mind and 'normality,' yet plagued with anxieties about expertise and intellectualism. I then apply these contexts to three areas of Jackson's work. First, I explore how Jackson uses knowledge and contagion to construct community boundaries in small, working-class towns. Next, I investigate how Jackson's rewriting of Christian Science results in absent female bodies, allowing for a liberation from embodied containment for Jackson's adolescent girls, usually through imagery of sickness or disgust. Finally, I explore postwar anxieties about masculinity and how Jackson employs them to undermine discourses of hegemonic male knowledge. Investigating bodies of knowledge in these various interactions reveals how Jackson embraces an undecidability that must be acknowledged.
APPROVED
2024-01-01T00:00:00Z