Doctor of Philosophy / In this thesis I discuss feminist science fiction as a literature that explores a variety of alternative social realities. This provides the site to explore alternative notions of the heroic inspired by feminist critiques of the traditional heroic, which come from feminist philosophical, as well as literary critical sources. Alternative notions of the heroic offer a shift in perspective from a specific heroic identity to the events the characters are involved in. The shift to events is made precisely because that is where the temporal is located and dynamic change occurs. Events are where 'becoming' alternatively heroic occurs: in the interaction between a character and the environment.

Doctor of Philosophy / In this thesis I discuss feminist science fiction as a literature that explores a variety of alternative social realities. This provides the site to explore alternative notions of the heroic inspired by feminist critiques of the traditional heroic, which come from feminist philosophical, as well as literary critical sources. Alternative notions of the heroic offer a shift in perspective from a specific heroic identity to the events the characters are involved in. The shift to events is made precisely because that is where the temporal is located and dynamic change occurs. Events are where 'becoming' alternatively heroic occurs: in the interaction between a character and the environment.

An examination of contemporary feminist literary theory reveals that man's traditional association with culture has created a position of privilege from which men are encouraged to write, while women have been denied access to language and, therefore, must escape imprisoning conceptions of femininity before they are able to envision themselves as creators of culture. In Alice Munro's Lives of Girls and Women (1971), Del Jordan is a young woman and developing artist who struggles against objectification to achieve a sense of her own creative autonomy. Del's quest for authorial power effectively marginalizes her in Jubilee. However, she welcomes the freedom implied by this marginalization and encourages it through acts of social indiscretion and, later, through sexuality. Del's quest for freedom through sexuality ultimately parallels her quest for a language, or narrative voice, which challenges the confines of masculine discourse. As Del matures beyond the illusions generated by fantasy and love, she realizes that her own sense of identity and her creativity are the only true sources of salvation. The creative vision that Del fosters throughout the novel acknowledges and reconciles paradoxes, and, thereby, rejects the binary schemes and imprisoning labels that patriarchy has traditionally used to limit and contain female identity. / Thesis / Master of Arts (MA)

This thesis aims to position Circe by Madeline Miller as an example of feminist revisionist mythmaking and investigate some of the novel’s revisionary practices. I thus begin by introducing the project of feminist revisionism, as conceptualized by several different feminist thinkers. I then move on to describe two methods by which Circe reimagines the stories of the Epic Cycle. I argue that the first method, in the analysis of which I primarily use the work of the formalist Caroline Levine on hierarchies, is to subvert gender and immortality – two world-organizing binaries of Greek myth. I then make the argument that Circe also revises myth on the level of narrative, which I support with Teresa de Lauretis’ work on narrative morphology. The study concludes that both these methods are being employed in Circe and are successful in reimagining myth from a feminist perspective. My thesis results in a better understanding of the ways in which Greek myth is being rewritten by contemporary feminists in popular literature.

This essay will discuss gender in Pride and Prejudice, the timeless work by Jane Austen. It also discusses how a teacher might approach the subject of gender roles in a classroom environment based on a reading project featuring Pride and Prejudice. The different theories will include theories regarding gender as a social concept, gender roles and pedagogical implications. This essay argues that the gender roles in Pride and Prejudice can be used in an EFL classroom to increase students' awareness of gender and gender roles.

The subject of this thesis (Images of femininity and masculinity in Ještěd novels by Karolína Světlá) is a gender analysis of selected prose of Karolína Světlá, focused specifically on the works such as Vesnický román, Kříž u potoka, Frantina, Kantůrčice and Nemodlenec. The theoretical part presents basic principles, approaches and methods of the feminist literary theory including concepts focused on analyses of power and domination out of which I mostly use the work by Pierre Bourdieu. The theoretical part also contains positioning the writer's work within the literary-historical context and introducing source texts. The core of the thesis is a gender analysis based on my interpretation of texts and the method of resistant reading that concentrates on specific gender aspects in the entire series of works - the subject of my interest is creating masculinity and femininity (including gender attributes and roles or myths and archetypes), narration of the story from a gender perspective, forms of motherhood and fatherhood, topics of power, violence and sexuality. Attention is also paid to the motives of a victim or romantic love. Not only was this part greatly inspired by the work of foreign authors (Bourdieu, Beauvoir, Pratt), but also by many Czech studies and books applying approaches of the...

[pt] A tese busca reunir um corpus de reflexão sobre a experiência da escrita pensada por escritoras mulheres. A escolha das autoras se estabeleceu através do nosso interesse em pensar a relação entre as experiências do escrever e a da loucura para mulheres que escrevem. Escritoras como Alfonsina Storni e Marguerite Duras figuram na base reflexiva da questão que aqui buscará se desenvolver a partir dos seguintes eixos: (a) no esforço de uma releitura crítica de Silvia Federici que pense sobre a opressão que o estabelecimento do capitalismo exerceu sobre as mulheres, unindo a opressão socioeconômica à opressão subjetiva e corporal (técnicas de reprodução e direito à sexualidade e ao uso do próprio corpo); e seus efeitos sobre a experiência da escrita, sua impossibilidade, estrangulamento e loucura; (b) uma releitura da psicanálise pelo feminismo contemporâneo, onde se buscará pensar como o constructo loucura feminina está relacionado diretamente à necessidade dessa exclusão; (c) como elaborações teóricas da crítica literária feminista pensam as especificidades da escrita de mulheres, tanto pelo viés das condições materiais da escrita quanto pelo próprio fazer literário, que convoca um corpo que escreve / um corpo-de-mulher que escreve. A partir dessa empreitada, busca-se elaborar a leitura de algumas obras da argentina Alejandra Pizarnik e da brasileira Maura Lopes Cançado, em suas fulgurações de indomabilidade da língua/corpo, na força que faz escapar a normatividade da escrita, seu território da Lei, em direção (ou em devir) a uma performatividade da língua indomável: trata-se não de escrever sobre a loucura mas sim de fazer enlouquecer a Letra. / [en] This thesis seeks to gather a corpus of thoughts about writing experiences from women writers. The choice of authors was established through our interest in the relationship between the experiences of writing and of madness for women who write. Writers such as Alfonsina Storni and Marguerite Duras figure at the basis of these reflexions, sought to be developed from the following axes: (a) in an effort toward a critical reading of Silvia Federici, to think the essential role that oppression of women had on the establishment of capitalism, linking socioeconomic oppression to subjective and corporal oppression (reproduction techniques, the right to sexuality and the use of one s own body); and its effects on the experience of writing, its impossibility, strangulation and madness; (b) a rereading of psychoanalysis by contemporary feminism, through which we will try to think how the construct feminine madness is directly related to the necessity of this exclusion; (c) how certain feminist literary theory thinks the specificities of women s writing, both from the bias of the material conditions of writing and from the literary work itself, which summons a body that writes / a woman s body that writes. From then, we try to elaborate a reading of some of the Argentinean Alejandra Pizarnik s and the Brazilian Maura Lopes Cançado s works, their indomability fulgurating on language / body, the force that helps writing s normativity escape its territory of the Law, towards (or becoming) a tameless language and its performativity: it matters not writing about madness but driving crazy the Letter.

Recent empirical evidence supports the theoretical stance that fiction provides vicarious experiences of imagined spaces and situations that can help shape our perceptions of the real world, our social others, and the self. The implications for this are especially interesting for adolescents, as their brains undergo a restructuring during puberty, making them more responsive to change in executive function and social cognition. Few scholars have yet addressed how texts instruct young readers in how to use their developing cognition to assess characters' emotions and behavior, and how fiction can potentially affect these readers' cognitive and emotional development. This thesis analyzes the concept that potential adolescent readers can engage with a novel's characters' thoughts and behaviors by using their improving cognitive abilities to transmute what is on the page into real-life coping strategies. This phenomenon is especially compelling when considering the potential impact empowered female characters could have on adolescent girl readers, since their malleable brain around puberty makes them more receptive to accepting ideas - such as a person's gender not being a limitation. I examine what the primary texts themselves offer to potential readers, and analyze certain aspects of the texts that could be linked to potential readers' cognitive and affective engagement. The primary texts I have chosen are Tamora Pierce's two narrative quartets (The Song of the Lioness and Protector of the Small) that deal with characters from the fictional land of Tortall, as they focus closely on female characters in fantasy realms who are breaking gendered stereotypes by training to become knights. Pierce's books are representative of this adolescent feminist fantasy. I extrapolate that findings from this thesis will be applicable to other kinds of adolescent feminist fantasy texts; namely, that adolescent feminist fantasy fiction can beneficially change potential readers behavior and cognition.

This essay examines the subject-object dichotomy between men and women in Toni Morrison’s Jazz and the thesis of the essay is that this dichotomy develops into subject-object harmony. Through Simone de Beauvoir’s theory regarding the subject-object dichotomy and a close reading of the novel, this essay concludes that Jazz shows the possibility of reciprocal relationships built on friendship. In other words, the dichotomy changes into harmony, which makes it possible for both men and women to reach freedom and fulfilment in transcendence.

The topic of this master's thesis is the representation of women in the selected works of Finnish male authors from the perspective of the feminist literary criticism. The thesis examines the selected prose works of Kari Hotakainen (novel Na domácí frontě, orig. title 2002), Hannu Raittila (novel Canal Grande, orig. title 2001) and Juha Seppälä (novel Švihadlo, orig. title 1990), as these three writers form an element opposite to a strong generation of Finnish female writers of the 1980s. I will analyse how these selected authors portray women in their works and how the position of female characters in comparison to male ones can be characterized. The aim is to describe the problematics regarding the portrayal of women in modern Finnish literature from the male perspective. The basis originating from the first, theoretical part, which focuses particularly on feminism and its manifestation in literary criticism, will serve as a stepping-stone for the following feminist research in the practical part of the thesis.