Máster en Estudos Ingleses Avanzados e a súas Aplicacións

Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://hdl.handle.net/10347/11527

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Posthumanism in the Fashion industry: on human animals and cyborgs
(2022) Egea Castañeda, Samuel; Universidade de Santiago de Compostela. Facultade de Filoloxía; ESTÉVEZ-SAÁ, MARGARITA; Pereira-Ares, Noemí
Since the second half of the twentieth century, disciplines as varied as cultural studies, anthropology, sociology psychology or gender studies have considered fashion as worthy of academic pursuit. Particularly important for the purpose of the present study are those perspectives which, grounded on a sociological approach to fashion and dress, examine the tripartite interconnectedness between dress, body and identity (Entwistle 2000). This study does not simply focus on dress as an individual practice; it also addresses the critical and creative discourses presentedby fashion designers in their runway shows, which are widely spread through social media in a cyber-mediated reality. In fact, as this study contends, inasmuch as it represents a system defined by incessant renewal, fashion is now echoing current ontological debates that call into question the barrier between the human and the nonhuman, and contemporary fashion designers are engaging creatively in the (re)creation of bodies that subvert dominant figurations of the human body. Among the designers that have challenged said barrier, Alexander McQueen (1969–2010) stands out for arousing raging controversies, which led the press to recognize him as the enfant terrible of the fashion industry. The present dissertation seeks to analyze the posthuman turn registered in Alexander McQueen’s fashion shows, where dominant figurations of the human body were often challenged through creations that hybridized, in an explicit and controversial manner, the human body with parts of nonhuman animals as well as with technological artefacts. InThis study intends to shed light on two different tropes crucial throughout McQueen’s career, and which destabilize the above-mentioned binary opposites: first, the feral woman archetype, which challenges the barrier between human animals and nonhuman animals; and second, the (re)creation of the cyborg, which defies the divide between human and machine. The study is divided into two main sections, with the first one aiming at laying bare the methodological apparatus on which the study is grounded –namely, posthumanism and fashion theory– and the second one being devoted to analyzing a selection of McQueen’s fashion shows.
Changing Skins and Blurring Borders: Woman-Animal Metamorphosis and the Posthuman in Sarah Hall’s “Mrs Fox”
(2021) Macías Alonso, Lara; Universidade de Santiago de Compostela. Facultade de Filoloxía; Lojo Rodríguez, Laura María
In current times, as defined by the connecting waves of technologically mediated globalisation and the intensification of threats to ecological and social stability, human impact on the other inhabitants on Earth and on the planet itself is not only undeniable, but also irremediable and significantly damaging. Hence, it is of utmost urgency to engage in sustainable practices that meet the social and environmental needs of the contemporary world ― an endeavour which requires the radical decentring and redefinition of the human subject in ethically accountable ways. In a critical and theoretical effort to deconstruct obsolete, unproductive conceptions of subjectivity, thinkers in the fields of Posthumanism and Animal Studies have resorted to the exploration of human-animal interactions as a fundamental gesture towards the invalidation of hegemonic ontological categories and the eventual consolidation of new, generative identitarian alternatives. It is on the basis of such considerations that this dissertation aims to analyse the negotiations of identity that emerge from the logic-defying encounter between human and non-human animals in “Mrs Fox”, a short story written by the extensively recognised contemporary British author Sarah Hall. A creative, textual articulation of posthuman becomings, this narrative exploits the inherent liminality of the short story genre as a site of dissidence and diversity as well as the remarkable effectiveness of the literary trope of human-animal metamorphosis to blur the species divide. As such, Hall’s “Mrs Fox” ultimately brings to the fore the affirmative approach to difference and the constitutive embodied and embedded inter-relationality that characterise posthuman, post-anthropocentric configurations of subjectivity.
An Ecocritical Study of Sarah Orne Jewett’s The Country of the Pointed Firs
(2020) Lorenzo Rial, Inés; Universidade de Santiago de Compostela. Facultade de Filoloxía; Jiménez Placer, Susana María
The main purpose of this thesis is to analyze whether the way of living depicted by Jewett was realistic or rather an idealization of life in rural areas and, also, which factors contribute to it being sustainable. Moreover, I aim at clarifying the role of women and the community in protecting and perpetuating this lifestyle, since a good, equitable relationship among the members of the community seems to be key to its survival, for care, cooperation, and a fair distribution of resources depend on it. In the first section –“The Author and her Time”– I introduce the writer and her work, focusing on the characteristic traits of the genre she cultivated, local color. The second section –“Communion with Nature”– starts the literary analysis of the work. It deals with the importance of communion with nature in Country, for the survival of this community seems to depend on its ability to adapt to the land. In the third section –“Women and Community in The Country of the Pointed Firs”– I analyze the connection between women, nature, and community in Country. First, I delve on the reasons why this small town is constituted predominantly by women and how these characters challenge the dominant gender constructs. Then, I analyze the connection between women and the making of this community, as well as the importance with which community life is infused
“Not evil or irredeemable”: Women, Bodies and Sorority in Donal Ryan’s All We Shall Know
(2020) Santos Barral, María Olalla; Universidade de Santiago de Compostela. Facultade de Filoloxía; ESTÉVEZ-SAÁ, MARGARITA
It is my intention to provide an analysis of Donal Ryan’s novel All We Shall Know (2016) whose themes include an insight into the culture of the Irish Travellers, the complexity mother-daughter relationships, the burden of guilt and the possibility of redemption, among others. My aim is to analyse the intersections of gender and ethnicity in Donal Ryan’s work, applying concepts related to the female body and motherhood. In the first chapter I will provide a summary of Donal Ryan’s novel, as well as a general commentary on the representation of the Irish Travellers in the novel, focusing on their status as the ‘other’. In the second section of the dissertation, first, I will offer some context for the situation of Traveller women, both in their culture and in the settled community. I will reflect, as well, on the experiences of the protagonist as a pregnant woman, connecting it with other issues such as abortion, infertility and sexuality, offering different accounts from the novel’s characters. In the last chapter, I set out to analyse relationships between the female characters, focusing on the topics of motherhood and sisterhood
From Virginia Ambler to Dorinda Oakley: A Comparative Study of Femininity Models in Ellen Glasgow’s Novels
(2019) Lado Pazos, Vanesa; Universidade de Santiago de Compostela. Facultade de Filoloxía; González Groba, Constante
The reading that I propose in this study examines the role of Glasgow as a feminist writer and tries to contribute to the process of re-reading this author initiated by critics in the last decade of the past century and to remark her contribution to this movement. This author grew up with a divided heritage between the tradition of the Old South and the contemporary changes of the New South which resulted in her ambivalent attitude regarding topics such as race or even gender. However, in this study I argue that Glasgow sketches in her early phase two opposing models of femininity that are developed in her later works according to a transition from the conservative model of the southern lady to a more progressive one embodied in the new woman. In this manner the author would complete her initial project of revolt at two different levels: against women’s oppression and against the tyranny of the sentimental novel in the South by providing a realistic portrait of women since the ante-bellum period to the beginning of the twentieth century. The corpus selected is formed by three novels that belong to different stages of Glasgow’s production, covering three decades. The Battle-Ground, one of the author’s early novels, was published in 1902 and here she introduces two opposing models of 2 femininity through the Ambler sisters. The exploration of their development as well as their outcome in the story will result in the outline of future models of womanhood. Virginia (1913), the second of the novels studied, has consolidated as one of the major studies of the southern lady. The last one, Barren Ground (1925), is Glasgow’s most acclaimed and studied work. The election of this third novel as part of the corpus intends to link the new type of woman depicted here with the previous antecedents both in terms of similarity and difference thus highlighting the evolution of the author.
The fantasy of the female : gender construction in the fantasy genre
(2018) González Bernárdez, Sara; Universidade de Santiago de Compostela. Facultade de Filoloxía; Lojo Rodríguez, Laura María
I have always been an avid reader of fantasy fiction. I enjoyed, and still do, the infinite possibilities which its created worlds offered to explore and discover a new, different reality. However, as I grew older, I began to notice that the possibilities for female characters within these worlds were not as infinite as they initially appeared – perhaps because the fantasy worlds were not, themselves, so separate from reality as they appeared. While fantasy offers the possibility to create worlds where the rules of our own do not apply, no world of fantasy offered a world free of patriarchal rule: while I was asked to suspend my disbelief in order to enter this new, imaginary world, the female characters within it suffered experiences of abuse and discrimination which I recognized as all too real. This realization, brought on partly thanks to my background in literary studies, made me interested in analyzing the particularities of female representation within the fantasy genre – and hence the idea for this dissertation. My choice of narratives for this study was influenced not only by what I had read and loved before, but also by my intention to fill what appeared to me as a void within literary criticism – the analysis of fantasy fiction in contemporary literature. Throughout my years of dedication to literary analysis, it stood out to me how focused literary criticism was in works from the twentieth century backwards, which of course makes sense: the twenty-first century has only just begun, and a measure of critical distance towards one’s object of study undeniably helps perceive it with better clarity.
A preliminary corpus-based diachronic analysis of the behavioral profile of a set of near-synonyms in American English
(2015) Pettersson-Traba, Daniela; Universidade de Santiago de Compostela. Departamento de Filoloxía Inglesa e Alemá; López Couso, María José
The present master dissertation, which is a preliminary corpus-based behavioral profile (henceforth BP) study examines the competition and usage patterns of the attributive uses of the following set of adjective near-synonyms in American English from a diachronic perspective with data from the Corpus of Historical American English (henceforth COHA): perfumed, fragrant, scented, and sweet-smelling.2 My main objective is to analyze the lexical items’ collocational behavior throughout the history of American English. This is done with the intention of unfolding their distributional patterns and fine-grained aspects of meaning, information which is indispensable in order to establish differences between the near-synonyms, but which is not provided in dictionaries of synonyms and thesauri.
Changes in argument structure: developments in impersonal constructions since late middle English. A preliminary corpus-based study
(2015) Castro Chao, Noelia; Universidade de Santiago de Compostela. Departamento de Filoloxía Inglesa e Alemá; Fanego Lema, Teresa
This MA thesis is an investigation into the so-called impersonal construction (e.g. Me liketh nat to lye ‘I do not like to lie’), with a focus on the Late Middle English and Early Modern English periods. Morphosyntactically, impersonal constructions share the characteristic that they contain a finite verb inflected for the third person singular, but lack a subject marked for the nominative case controlling verbal agreement. In English, the impersonal construction has been lost, being replaced by personal patterns (e.g. ME hym nedde ‘[there] was need [to] them’ > ModE they needed) or by syntactic patterns with an expletive non-referential subject (‘dummy it’): OE sniwde ‘snowed’ > ModE it snowed, among others. The purpose of the thesis is: 1) to examine the frequency of the different syntactic patterns that came to replace the impersonal construction in the period of time from Late Middle English onwards; 2) to look into the different stylistic and discoursive factors involved in the change, as well as into the pace of the process of replacement; and 3) to explore the hypothesis posited in recent research on impersonals that the loss of the impersonal construction is connected with a large-scale readjustment of the taxonomy of transitive constructions. To achieve these goals, a corpus-based study was carried out, focusing on a selection of formerly impersonal verbs comprised in the semantic domain of emotion.

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