Att hitta hopp, egenmakt och tillhörighet bland Syskonen Baudelaires olycksaliga liv

This thesis explores the themes of hope, empowerment, and belonging in Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events. Using three different frameworks, I analyze the portrayal of interconnected senses of hope, empowerment, and belonging in the texts through the Baudelaire orphans, and their promotion of the same in the child reader. C.R. Snyder’s psychological hope theory is used to analyze how hope is created in the child protagonists and encouraged in the child reader, through finding pathways to their goals and the will to utilize them. Eliza T. Dresang’s Radical Change theory provides a framework for exploring how child empowerment functions in the texts, which is largely connected to the pursuit of knowledge and autodidacticism. Lastly, I use the role of literary orphanhood, changing concepts of family, and sociological frameworks for belonging to address how the Baudelaire orphans, and the child reader, find home and belonging outside of the idealized nuclear family—namely through shared social locations, social solidarities, and a symbolic reunification of the Baudelaire family. Moreover, I analyze the role of the Gothic and what MariaNikolajeva calls aetonormativity—adult normativity that Others children—in creating the hopeless and disempowering conditions that paradoxically make way for the development of hope, empowerment, and belonging

“People, Corrupted”: Monstruösa förvandlingar i “The Whistlers” och “Whitefall”

This essay explores monstrosity in two contemporary horror stories: “The Whistlers” by Amity Argot, and “Whitefall” by C.K. Walker, focusing on how the humans in these texts are monstrously transformed. The monsters and monstrosity present in the texts are read against some of the cultural anxieties of postmodernity, and against various monstrous frameworks such as that of the zombie, the terrorist, and the monstrous space and nature. Both texts present monstrous spaces intent on perverting humans by eroding them physically until they reach a state of bare life that mimics zombification and may allegorize socioeconomic inequality, displacement, and the effects of capitalism; as well as by enticing them to commit atrocities against each other and transgress the very moral boundaries that defined them as human, up to and including cannibalism. In this way, these monsters reveal humans as their own annihilators, laying bare an innate human monstrosity that emerges from the traumatic conditions of postmodernity

“People, Corrupted”: Monstruösa förvandlingar i “The Whistlers” och “Whitefall”

This essay explores monstrosity in two contemporary horror stories: “The Whistlers” by Amity Argot, and “Whitefall” by C.K. Walker, focusing on how the humans in these texts are monstrously transformed. The monsters and monstrosity present in the texts are read against some of the cultural anxieties of postmodernity, and against various monstrous frameworks such as that of the zombie, the terrorist, and the monstrous space and nature. Both texts present monstrous spaces intent on perverting humans by eroding them physically until they reach a state of bare life that mimics zombification and may allegorize socioeconomic inequality, displacement, and the effects of capitalism; as well as by enticing them to commit atrocities against each other and transgress the very moral boundaries that defined them as human, up to and including cannibalism. In this way, these monsters reveal humans as their own annihilators, laying bare an innate human monstrosity that emerges from the traumatic conditions of postmodernity

"A Morbid Longing for the Picturesque" : The Pursuit of Beauty in Donna Tartt's The Secret History

This essay analyzes the theme of the pursuit of beauty in The Secret History. It analyzes the main characters’ concept of beauty, their manner of seeking beauty, as well as the result of this search. For this analysis, I use Friedrich Nietzsche’s theories of the Apollonian and the Dionysian as outlined in The Birth of Tragedy and in scholarly texts that analyze TBT— which describe the Apollonian/Dionysian dichotomy as the opposed worlds of order and madness— to define the main characters’ concept of beauty. The narrator of the novel once says that “beauty is terror” (Tartt 45), a statement which paints beauty as harsh and shocking, and potentially destructive. Likewise, in this essay I argue that for these characters beauty is created through the interplay between the Apollonian and the Dionysian, and that its pursuit leads to destruction. I analyze this through the characters of Richard Papen, Henry Winter, and Bunny Corcoran. Richard and Henry pursue beauty in that the actions they take are aimed at embodying an aesthetic ideal. In Richard’s case, it is his longing for beauty which leads him to imitate and join the classicists— particularly by mimicking their socio-economic class— and which eventually places him in a disordered Dionysian world of madness and murder. Henry, on the other hand, is the embodiment of Apollonian order, and it is his search for beauty through a bacchanal which leads him to commit murder twice and, eventually, to take his own life. Lastly, Bunny is different in that he is neither beautiful nor interested in beauty as his peers define it. It is because of this that he is excluded from the others’ pursuit of beauty, that he is murdered, and that his murder is justifiable in the eyes of his murderers. This study finds that, in The Secret History, where beauty is defined as the dance between Apollonian order and Dionysian madness, the Dionysian ends up as the victorious half of the dichotomy, causing the loss of reason and the triumph of destruction and disaster. This portrayal of beauty as destruction and vice versa, rather than serving as the vehicle for a moral indictment, is instead the very purpose of the novel