This essay – Discourse and Dissonance – deals with Mary Shelley’s gothic novel Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus (1818). The focal point is the construction of “Them and Us”, as defined by scholars such as Stuart Hall, viewed in terms of the following categories: race, gender and family, class, and sexuality. Rather than applying an outside perspective, e.g. a feminist or Marxist one, to the text, I use Cultural Criticism as described by Arthur Asa Berger in order to deconstruct and reconstruct the discourse, as explained by Michel Foucault, within Shelley’s work. In doing so, I view the hermeneutics of suspicion as the starting point due to its recognition of every text’s hidden truth. Stephen Greenblatt’s term dissonance is useful for the study’s aim of finding the differences and similarities in the voices of the novel’s characters. Intersectionality functions as the tool with which I intertwine the above categories in my analysis.     In conclusion Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus does not convey a message of conformity. Its class-, race- and gender-bound discourse is reproduced in the text, but simultaneously challenged. The dissonant voices of the novel show the discourse from different perspectives and make it obvious that there are cracks on the surface of the discourse, which Shelley deepens by putting it into writing – whether she was aware of it or not.

This master’s thesis suggests that Oi! - lyrically – gives voice to a youth community whose identity lies in everyday working class life. The identity in question is based upon class, gender, sexuality, nationality, and community awareness. As these are intertwined, the thesis shows a more complex genre than that of Matthew Worley’s “Oi! Oi! Oi!: Class, Locality, and British punk”.   On the other hand, using the above categories - derived from the studies of Kathryn Woodward – allows this essay to detect a genre identity made from a distinct “the Same” and “the Other” – us and them, as described by Stuart Hall. The latter consists of members of the middle and upper classes along with all kinds of intellectuals. “The Same” is based upon a common belonging to the working class and its local communities, but also on nationhood. On the contrary, the male gender in general and the male sexuality in particular adds to the idea of Oi!´s “the Same”. In contrast to the idea of “the Same”, Stephen Greenblatt’s idea of dissonance works to explain cracks in the façade of Oi! as explained in the spatiotemporal discourse.  Moreover, Oi!’s “the Same” is quite alike the subaltern of Antonio Gramsci. This concept suggests that the members of the proletariat are too unaware to be ideologically enlightened and therefore their culture expresses the way of working class life as it is, complete with eventual moral flaws. Whereas Gramsci uses the subaltern as a description of the rural proletariat of southern Italy and suggests folklore as the cultural outcome of that particular discourse, this essay aims to use it similarly but with Britain of the 1980’s and Oi! at its focal point.  Furthermore, this essay describes the “Circuit of Culture” - as explained by Woodward - and puts Oi! into that model, which enables an understanding of the genre as an expression of produced, consumed, regulated, and represented identity.  In conclusion, this master’s thesis do not refute Worley´s description of Oi! as a socioeconomic product, but rather adds to that by intertwining Woodward´s categories. The intersectional understanding of Oi! states that class, gender, community, sex, and nationality work together to create a genre, which represents a Gramscian subalternative proletariat. However, Hall’s “the Other” makes it perfectly clear that there is a distinct gap between Oi! and white power-music, which is also proved - throughout the essay -  by the two genres regard to whiteness studies.