This book contains 30 accessible essays dealing with a broad range of subjects; from philology to linguistics, and from literature to films. The essays were written by Bötticher and Visser during their three year Bachelor study of English Language and Culture at the University of Leiden. As the authors grow more, and more comfortable with writing arguments, the essays become increasingly convincing, witty, inventive, and above all entertaining. This bundle invites you into the world of student scholarship: a world of reason, knowledge, imagination and discovery...
Over de auteur
Edwin Visser: "I was born in 1989 in Rotterdam. During my study at Leiden University, I developed a specific interest in philology which I combined with my love for films in my bachelor thesis."
Thomas Bötticher: "I was born in 1986 in Beverwijk, reside in Uitgeest, and studied at Leiden University where I gained further knowledge of literature, films, and mythology and came in contact with philology. These topics are found in my essays."
Some parts of the text lashes out against men, both in what is said and in the actions of men. One should not forget that the text is written by a woman and that, although all the narrators are male, "the woman writer is given the opportunity to intervene from within" which is "entwining the differently gendered primary and secondary voices of female author and male character" (Schoene-Harwood 9) and therefore "[t]he voices of the Monster, Victor and Walton are not male, but ‘male’" (Schoene-Harwood 10). It could very well be that when Victor says that "misery has come home, and men appear to me as monsters thirsting for each other’s blood" (Shelley 71), it is actually Shelley who complains about the behaviour of men. The Monster, who specifically chooses man instead of mankind like he does in other speeches, says the following:
[T]ell me why I should pity man more than he pities me? You would not call it murder, if you could precipitate me into one of those ice-rifts, and destroy my frame, the work of your own hands. Shall I respect man, when he contemns me? Let him live with me in the interchange of kindness, and, instead of injury, I would bestow every benefit upon him with tears of gratitude at his acceptance. But that cannot be; the human senses are insurmountable barriers to our union. Yet mine shall not be the submission of abject slavery. (Shelley 119)