/library/oar/handle/123456789/82112 2025-12-26T16:01:32Z 2025-12-26T16:01:32Z /library/oar/handle/123456789/121814 2024-05-10T05:59:32Z 2021-01-01T00:00:00Z

Title: Exploring the epistolary form through the framing and embedded narrative in walking simulators and Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy Abstract: The development in technology has expanded the creative possibilities for storytelling in different mediums. Because of this constant development, research and theories become outdated since they cannot account for future mediums that would not have been used at the time. In this study, past theories centred around framing and embedded narratives and the epistolary genre are applied to the Fullbright games Tacoma and Gone Home. Gary Saul Morson’s and Mikhail Bakhtin’s theories on the polyphonic novel will be re-evaluated to fit the framing and embedded narrative technique used in the aforementioned games. The epistolary genre will also be examined in a similar fashion. The argument brought by Laurent Versini that the epistolary novel is flawed will be applied to the Fullbright games to provide a better solution for the epistolary genre through the newer medium of walking simulators. All the theories discussed will be applied to Tacoma and Gone Home using close reference in the form of in-game screenshots. The pinnacle of this study will be in connecting the findings of the videogame case studies to Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy. The novel acts as a unique example for creative ways of using techniques in framing and embedded narratives and the epistolary genre in novels. Therefore, it is not the aim of this study to show that the videogame medium is better at using these techniques than the novel. Instead, Tristram Shandy is studied to show how these techniques are applied when used in different mediums which are both worthy of holding their own merit Description: B.A. (Hons)(Melit.)

2021-01-01T00:00:00Z /library/oar/handle/123456789/121813 2024-05-10T05:57:30Z 2021-01-01T00:00:00Z

Title: Orpheus in literature : different interpretations and adaptations of the myth in literature from the mid-19th century to contemporary times Abstract: The myth of Orpheus has been influencing artists ever since it was conceived. Despite how old the myth is, it still survives and exists in various forms of literature. Myths survive through their ability to change according to the times, yet the myth of Orpheus holds a particular place among these myths as having become a symbol of many things. It has come to symbolise pain, love, muse, art, and even as a form of validation for the feminist movement. In this dissertation I will be looking at this myth, and trying to understand the different interpretations some of the modern works of literature have given this myth, and why. This dissertation will by no means be an exhaustive view into this world of literary adaptations, as there are simply too many. However, it will give a small view into this intricate and challenging world that is Orpheus in literature. This dissertation will look at some literatures that have adapted the myth of Orpheus for some purpose or other, be it as a tool to push a narrative forward, or used for its symbolic value to further emphasise the narrative’s message. It will attempt to delve into the meanings behind the literature, and determine what the author is trying to do or say by adapting the myth of Orpheus. The first chapter will serve as the introduction, in which I will explain why I chose to write this dissertation, as well as provide a background on what an adaptation is. I will also be discussing the elements of the myth of Orpheus that might make it so attractive to authors, such as Orpheus being the perfect image of a man whose art holds tremendous power and influence. In the second chapter, I will be giving a brief explanation as to the figure of Orpheus as a myth, the philosophy of the movement which the ancient Greeks believed he started and is known as Orphism, and the cult that followed the teachings of Orpheus. It will also offer some basic background regarding how the myth of Orpheus has been interpreted. In the third chapter I will give a short description about written prose, and discuss why it is important. I will then look at the way the myth was adapted for three novels and two short narratives. In the fourth chapter I will provide a brief explanation of theatre and drama, as well as discuss the importance of this form of literature. I will also attempt to discuss three plays and determine why they adapted the myth of Orpheus. I will analyse how the myth was adapted and applied in these three plays, and what message these plays could be trying to convey. The fifth chapter will serve to give some background information on poetry, but it will also serve to give a glimpse at how some modern poetry treats the myth of Orpheus. Description: B.A. (Hons)(Melit.)

2021-01-01T00:00:00Z /library/oar/handle/123456789/107542 2023-03-21T15:04:19Z 2021-01-01T00:00:00Z

Title: From goddess to cyborg : considerations on the fate of beauty in posthumanism Abstract: The concluding words of Donna J. Haraway’s essay, ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’, first published in 1985, read, ‘I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess’. My thesis aims to determine the extent to which that declaration implicates the question of beauty — specifically the fate of beauty in posthumanism. Building on existing work that examines Haraway’s Manifesto in relation to questions of cybernetics, the nature/culture binarism as well as gender, my thesis ponders on the possibility of assigning an identity to the goddess that Haraway chooses the cyborg over — specifically Venus, the mythological goddess of love and beauty. My thesis contains three parts, which are further divided into chapters, as well as an introduction and a conclusion. Part I tackles various definitions of both the cyborg and the goddess, alongside discourses concerning technology, ontology and materialisms, in order to investigate the possibility of a materialised goddess. In Part II, the collaborative exchange between Haraway and Lynn Randolph is examined, especially with regard to their treatment of the figure of Venus. Venus is further read as a recurring figure in the history of Western art and culture, in the context of a philosophy of aesthetics that controls and contains the female body in representation. Part III focuses on Pygmalion’s ivory girl, indicating that, as a type of unruly cybergoddess, she finds her beauty fetishised and exploited by the posthuman(ist) gaze. On this basis, my thesis finally suggests that the fate of beauty in posthumanism is one that sees the female body fragmented and, eventually, erased. The conclusion calls for a reconsideration of the origins of our histories and understanding of beauty. Description: Ph.D.(Melit.)

2021-01-01T00:00:00Z /library/oar/handle/123456789/107540 2024-04-16T06:33:24Z 2021-01-01T00:00:00Z

Title: Electronic literature : genealogies, analogies, singularities Abstract: This dissertation is premised on the idea that genealogies are drawn in literary studies as part of a critical move to purchase cultural capital from the literary canon in order to validate newness. The study of emergent electronic literature, which defines itself as born-digital and reliant on computation for its genesis, visualisation, transformation, and transmission, perpetuates this move. As such, electronic literature is habitually aligned with: figured and Concrete poetry, proto-Modernist, Modernist and avant-garde traditions, spanning millennia from ancient Hellenic examples of technopaegnia through to seventeenth-century English metaphysical poetry and the nineteenth-century French poème and thence into the earliest experiments with linguistic simplification and mathematisation, cybernetics and computation in the 1960s. So oft-repeated is this move that electronic literature’s relationships with various precursor texts have been reduced to a set of unexamined analogies the basis for which — as this project hopes to show — is often a passing or moderate resemblance combined with a suppression of those aspects that make electronic literature a truly singular development. Since examining the analogies requires a prior understanding of genre and other basic questions of literature such as what the acts of writing and reading entail in electronic literature, the first step will be to discuss the awkwardness of the epithet ‘electronic’ and the quandaries stemming from the broad strokes drawn by the term. Next, precursors representing five generations on the genealogical line (Simmias of Rhodes, George Herbert, Stéphane Mallarmé, the Noigandres, and the Ouvroir de littérature potentielle) will be identified with a view to initiating a comparative analysis between their staple texts and electronic literature texts that display ostensible amenability to the comparison. Subjected to the kind of sustained side-by-side close readings in the absence of which passing or moderate resemblances were allowed to become definite genetic traits, the analogies will prove most vulnerable upon the following points: the Concrete poetry/digital kinetic poetry analogy upon the crucial difference between ideogrammatic and calligrammatic practices, the Mallarmé/prehistoric digital and later non-interactive Flash poetry analogy upon the fundamental disconnection between white space as an illuminator of significance and whiteouts as part of a poetics of concealment, and the Oulipo/generative electronic literature analogy upon the unbridgeable gaps between constraint and code and between the clinamen and the glitch. A number of arguments will need to be rehearsed before it becomes clear why these specific vulnerabilities also represent the breaking points of the analogies. The common thread binding all of these arguments together will be electronic literature’s dual nature. As a consequence, the electronic literature discussed in Part I will be seen to subscribe at once to representative — even naïve — literalness and sophisticated abstractness, that of Part II to conceal the programming that guarantees its functioning only later to reveal an aestheticised version of its code, and that of Part III to minimise the traditional roles of author-genius and ordinary reader while asserting those of assiduous programmer-designer and actively creating reader. By the start of the concluding movement, a single-minded focus on electronic literature’s singularities will have engendered a number of doubts about whether electronic literature’s demonstrably multifarious nature and its resistance to being aligned with unorthodox, even traditionally ‘fringe’ literatures actually disqualifies it from the category ‘literature’. This is where a reconsideration of the literary framed by a particular strain of critical discourse concerning the ‘post-literary’ may point the way if not to an absolute answer to the question, ‘But is it literary?’, then to a partial answer concerning the new whereabouts of the literary. Description: Ph.D.(Melit.)

2021-01-01T00:00:00Z