Centre for Advanced Studies in Languages & Literatures - Doctoral Theses
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Item Transgenerational trauma and the gendered body in postcolonial women's writing in Italy(University College Cork, 2025-11-17) Kane, Noreen; Giuliani, Chiara; Ross, Silvia; Research Ireland; National University of IrelandOver the past three decades, numerous literary texts have been published by women writers with origins in Italy’s former colonies in the Horn of Africa. These narratives provide a gendered perspective on Italian colonial violence and its legacy, challenging hegemonic Italian collective memory, which minimises Italy’s colonial endeavours. Simultaneously, the texts confront omissions in nationalist memories, which often erase women’s involvement in anticolonial struggles. This thesis explores the representation of transgenerational trauma in ten novels and memoirs, written in Italian and English, by women of Somali and Ethiopian descent. Though the writers come from various backgrounds, with differing relationships to Italy, each of the narratives in question foregrounds the trauma of Italian colonialism and its negotiation through the female body. The authors in question are Somali-born Shirin Ramzanali Fazel, Somali Italian writers Ubah Cristina Ali-Farah and Igiaba Scego, Ethiopian Italian Gabriella Ghermandi, and Ethiopian American Maaza Mengiste. While this literary corpus has received well-deserved scholarly attention, much analysis assumes a Western or African American theoretical lens. My thesis adds insight into the representation of trauma and resistance in these works by interpreting them through both traditional trauma theories and memory studies, and Afro-feminist theories that foreground the Ubuntu worldview, emphasising interconnectedness. In three sections, I explore how trauma is transmitted within the family, through educational institutions, and how literature may intervene positively in the transmission of trauma. I contend that the narratives analysed, in both form and content, provide significant insight into the crucial role communities play in the negotiation of trauma. Whether through connection with ancestors, the more-thanhuman, or with readers, these narratives show that to break the chain of generational trauma, it is imperative to recognise our inherent relationality, which may involve, for many readers, an acknowledgement of our implication in the colonial past.Item Unpacking social network dynamics among Chinese sojourners in Ireland: an ecological perspective on group and individual experiences(University College Cork, 2025-12-30) Xiao, Yuyao; Siller, Barbara; Devlin, Anne Marie; China Scholarship CouncilThe present study investigates the study abroad (SA) experiences of Chinese university-level sojourners in Ireland, focusing on their trajectories of social network construction and the language learning affordances (LLAs) that emerged throughout their stay, as well as the impact of these experiences on their self-perceived English ability. While previous research has primarily explored how individual factors shape international students’ experiences and outcomes, an ecological perspective highlights that SA experiences are shaped by a complex interplay of diverse and interconnected elements. Grounded in this perspective, which foregrounds affordances, agency, and space, and incorporates the concept of habitus, this study examines the intricate interactions between Chinese international students and the various contexts they inhabited across their stay abroad, such as classrooms, accommodations, and social media platforms. A longitudinal ethnographic-informed case study was conducted with two groups of Chinese sojourners in Ireland: group-based diploma-seeking undergraduates (n=5) and individual-based diploma-seeking postgraduates (n=3). Data were generated using a triad of methods: 1. group observations and shadowing throughout the academic year; 2. individual social network surveys carried out at four points during the SA; 3. three follow-up semi-structured individual interviews conducted after the surveys. The data subsequently underwent analysis utilising a number of different tools. In terms of participants’ social networks, two analytic procedures were adopted: ranking the closeness and frequency of interactions between participants and their social actors, and visualising the overall network structures at four time points using social network analysis software Gephi. Longitudinal reflexive thematic analysis (RTA) was employed for the analysis of observations/shadowing and the interview. Regarding findings, the social network surveys indicate that, contrary to participants’ initial expectations of forming friendships with many non-Chinese peers while limiting interactions with co-nationals, undergraduate participants demonstrated highly enclosed networks centred almost exclusively on fellow Chinese classmates within their programme. Postgraduate participants also maintained networks centred around Chinese peers within the Taught Postgraduate programme, but also expanded peripheral connections to non-Chinese classmates and other friends they newly encountered in the host country. Longitudinal RTA identified six recurring themes influencing social network development across all interview rounds: language barrier, cultural gap, patterns of social engagement, attachment to home and familiar networks, social media practices, and opportunities for cross-cultural engagement. In addition, three further themes emerged in one or two interview rounds: goals for study abroad, pandemic-related actions and adaptations, and academic responsibilities. Collectively, these interrelated factors shaped the ways participants built and maintained their social networks throughout the SA experience. During social interactions, some participants engaged with non-Chinese peers but did not always perceive these interactions as LLAs; factors such as language barrier sometimes led them to perceive these interactions as rejected affordances. Beyond cross-cultural interpersonal interactions, participants also perceived and utilised language learning affordances through engagement in various everyday contexts and activities. However, participants’ engagement with LLAs in everyday contexts was also selective. Limited utilisation of LLAs during SA meant participants reported modest gains in self-perceived English ability, although they developed greater awareness of the distinctions between academic and everyday English and enhanced confidence in informal English use. Overall, participants’ patterns of social network development and engagement with LLAs during SA were shaped by their habitus, itself formed through prior socio-cultural and educational experiences. This highlights the importance of considering participants’ home-country-formed dispositions and socio-cultural contexts when supporting international students’ engagement with practical language opportunities abroad. The study is limited by its small-scale, context-specific design, which may not generalise to Chinese students with different backgrounds studying in other countries.Item A convergence of bodies in the Anthropocene: post-dictatorship memory in Patricio Guzmán’s triptych (2010-2020)(University College Cork, 2024) Helin-Long, Sara; Levey, Cara; Broderick, Ceire; Irish Research CouncilThis thesis focuses on the most recent filmic triptych (Chauvin and Wilson, 2020) by Chilean documentarist Patricio Guzmán: Nostalgia de la luz (2010), El botón de nácar (2015), and La cordillera de los sueños (2020). The three documentaries engage with the intentional acts of violence committed during the Pinochet dictatorship on three natural landscapes (the Atacama Desert, the Patagonian waterways, and the Andes mountains). It argues that, when read together, the documentaries lend themselves to an interdisciplinary analysis of how we might remember state violence committed during the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet in natural landscapes. It develops a filmic analysis that argues for the dictatorship memories as remembered in/by these landscapes by contextualizing the documentaries with recent Chilean socio-political history (Chapter 1) and establishing a framework of the convergence of Environmental Humanities – specifically in relation to its current interest in the Anthropocene - and Memory Studies (Chapter 2). For now, I note an understanding of the Anthropocene as a geological and social time where human actions have irrevocably altered and affected the earth’s composition. In Chapter 3 (Nostalgia de la luz), Chapter 4 (El botón de nácar), and Chapter 5 (La cordillera de los sueños), The thesis situates Guzmán’s reflections on the dictatorship within the deeper ecological and cultural histories of the three natural landscapes within three core tenants of anthropogenic readings on Memory Studies: the body, time, and space. The chapters include ethnographic research- carried out between February and March 2023- of the three landscapes to provide a bridge between the visual/narrative landscapes found in the documentaries and those encountered by the researcher. The thesis grounds the filmic analysis of the documentaries’ visual, textual, and cinematographic aspects in the three landscapes’ additional past and present violent environmental and social realities, therefore calling on an anthropogenic reading of memory in the filmic and non-filmic landscapes. Thus, it offers a new way to conceptualize the relationship between filmic bodies (human and non-human) and contends that this is only possible through the deep consideration of natural landscapes found in Guzmán’s work, which expands the bodily, spatial, and temporal boundaries of who and where remembers.Item Voices from the outside: Homeric exiles in twentieth-century French writing(University College Cork, 2020) Burke, Catherine; Noonan, Mary P.; Irish Research Council; Fulbright AssociationThis thesis explores the twentieth-century trope of the outsider but from a modern and Homeric perspective. The corpus of artists under review each develop a symbiotic relationship with Homer and his epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey. It is an encounter that repositions the outsider, shifting our gaze from the pitiable, shunned ‘étranger’ to the creative, empowered, and vocal other. The position of the exile is recast as a Homeric exile of possibility. I begin the discussion with Marcel Proust, one of the cornerstones of French literary and cultural history. Through his masterful work A la recherche du temps perdu, Proust fashions a French epic deeply indebted to Homer, exploiting the figure of the Homeric bard to craft his modern response to the contemporary notion of the twentieth-century French outsider. The second chapter follows on from this, with Jean Giono and Naissance de l’Odyssée building on this idea of the storyteller and in particular the self-referential and metanarrative nature of the role, and how this impacts upon and advances the French Homeric exile. The result is an intricate exploration of the relationship with literary predecessors, one that oscillates from parasitism to symbiosis, with the identity of the artist moulded by the encounter. The third chapter moves to a comparative study of two French women, Simone Weil and Rachel Bespaloff and their respective engagement with Homer’s Iliad. This chapter explores a notable development in the Homeric reconfiguration of the twentieth-century modern French exile. The chapter provides evidence of female artists engaging with Homer, where the female response is not determined by gender and where the playfulness discernible in the previous artists is in stark contrast to the grim and gritty Homeric rewritings of these women. Both Weil and Bespaloff are at pains to reveal that the creative and powerful position of the reconfigured outsider is one hard fought. Chapter Four deals with the inimitable Claude Cahun, an artist who embodies the twentieth-century French Homeric outsider. In both her visual artwork and her literary work Héroïnes, Cahun represents a significant iteration of the French Homeric outsider. Throughout her work, she explores many of the themes of the thesis, interrogating the nature of art and the artist, the fluidity of the self, the metamorphosis of the artist, the performative aspect of identity and the role of the other. Chapter Five brings us to Monique Wittig, one of the most influential voices in the feminist movement in France. Her Homeric reworking of the Iliad, Les Guérillères, is in marked contrast to that of Weil and Bespaloff. Wittig wears her gender very much on her sleeve: this is a feminist revision of the Homeric Iliad and stamps a female voice on the figure of the Homeric exile in twentieth-century France. The thesis ends with a conclusion that ties the disparate strands together in a coherent illustration of the twentieth-century French encounter with Homer. The encounter is an intertextual exchange that saw the emergence of a distinct Homeric voice of exile, one that articulated a unique moment in France’s cultural history. From this fertile engagement avenues of possibility spring forth for the future Homer, the quintessential voice of exile.Item Mapping the works of Manuel de Pedrolo in relation to the post-civil war Catalan landscape(University College Cork, 2019) Nilsson-Fernàndez, Pedro; Buffery, Helena; Murphy, Orla; Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social SciencesPolygraph author Manuel de Pedrolo stands as one of the most prolific Catalan writers in the twentieth century. Furthermore, he is a figure unquestionably associated with Catalan identity and the region’s struggle for self-determination. His corpus comprises over one hundred and twenty titles – poetry, drama, short stories and novels, as well as a number of political articles, mostly written for Catalan newspapers during the 1980s, and later collected in volumes. In spite of the recent revival of interest in his figure and his work, coinciding with the commemoration in Catalonia of the centenary of his birth, there has still not been an attempt to systematically measure his impact, nor even the kind of diachronic mapping of his legacy I propose here. This study will address a representative selection of thirteen short stories and twenty-one novels written by the author between 1938 and 1976 – in the genres of Sci-Fi and fantasy, crime fiction and realism – from a spatial point of view. Through a painstaking charting of the spaces represented by the author in his texts, this thesis maps Pedrolo’s contribution to the (re)construction of the twentieth-century Catalan literary landscape and visualises the scope of his overarching literary project. In order to aid in the deciphering of such a wide and heterogeneous corpus as that of Pedrolo, this study combines a critical approach that draws on a cultural studies toolkit (cultural geography, urban studies, postcolonial approaches) with distant-readings provided by the use of GIS and a text-mining script, benaura.py, specifically created for this project.