Avhandlingen
Modern understandings of the child generally emphasize its innocence. Yet from the 1950s onwards we see a proliferation of stories about malevolent children in literature and film. This dissertation examines one strand of these narratives: novels about murderous children.
Through close readings of five British and American novels – William March’s The Bad Seed (1954), William Golding’s Lord of the Flies (1954), Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962), Iain Banks’s The Wasp Factory (1984) and Lionel Shriver’s We Need to Talk About Kevin (2003) – the dissertation shows the tensions that arise when the child is represented as a killer in non-supernatural literary narratives.
Young highlights what she calls the unaccountable nature of the murderous child. That is, these characters remain unknowable, and they are neither punished nor redeemed when the novels end. This distinguishes these stories from supernatural narratives about malevolent children, which tend to offer paranormal explanations, and endings in which the child is destroyed or “cured”. The murderous child novel can therefore be understood as a particularly subversive type of narrative. By representing the dangerous child as an unsolvable problem, these novels underscore the ways in which the child more generally is constructed as familiar and obvious, but also as alien and inscrutable. Furthermore, by destabilizing our image of the child, the novels also disturb the things that the child has come to represent, such as reproduction, growth, and futurity.
Tid og sted for prøveforelesning
Fredag 24. mars kl. 10:15 Sophus Bugges hus, auditorium 2.
Tildelt tema er: "Choose one or two literary texts to consider that the question of the child is also a question of the adult: how has the twentieth-century use of the child served to define adulthood—its self-knowledge, its sense of sexuality, its understanding of self-determination and ethics?"
Bedømmelseskomité
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Dr. Jen Baker, University of Warwick
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Professor Kevin Ohi, Boston College
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Professor Rebecca Lynne Scherr, Universitetet i Oslo
Leder av disputas
Professor Atle L. Wold
Veileder
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Dr. Monica Pearl, University of Manchester
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Professor Nils Axel Nissen, Universitetet i Oslo
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Professor Emerita Harriet Bjerrum Nielsen, Universitetet i Oslo
For mer informasjon
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Disputas og prøveforelesning gjennomføres på engelsk
Anna Young gjennomførte arbeidet med avhandlingen med stipend fra STK.