No man is an island: dethinking island methodologies

Hellens, A. L. (2024) No man is an island: dethinking island methodologies. PhD thesis, University of Reading. doi: 10.48683/1926.00118800

Abstract/Summary

This thesis provides readings of identity and/as islands in a range of disciplines from the perspective of Jacques Derrida’s The Beast and the Sovereign (2010) in which he states repeatedly: ‘What is an island?’, to consider how perspective matters in the formation of identifications. I begin by reading a key work in critical psychology, Changing the Subject (Henriques, et al., 1984), on educational pedagogies, to illustrate a parallel issue between the analysis of certain problems in education, which are still current, and the rethinking that has taken place with relation to island studies. For me, in spite of the copious amounts of ‘rethinking’ that have taken place in various related discourses, ‘dethinking’ is very much about a deconstruction of the claim to ‘rethink’ what island studies are. ‘(Not) In the Land of Israel’ is a play on the title of the first chapter in Jacqueline Rose’s States of Fantasy (1994), in which I read the claims to various states: ‘belonging’, ‘travelling’ and ‘returning’ and the politics of representation(s). ‘Little petri dishes floating in a saltwater medium’ is a reading of how ‘islands’, ‘brain’, and the ‘antipodes’ are constructed with respect to a number of texts, including a mappamundi from a twelfth-century encyclopaedia. Following this, ‘The desert of the real’ addresses maps. I read the construction of maps in relation to J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan (1911) and the mapping of authority in two iterations of Captain James Cook’s Endeavour journals. An interlude punctuates the first half of the thesis and serves as a segue between my previous readings of authority and my subsequent readings of metaphor as, in my reading, both are relevant to constructions of the island. I then return to readings about island(s) and constructions of suppression, supplement, and transgression in the diaries of Joseph Banks (1768-1771) and, finally, a range of children’s literature, including: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (Lewis, 1950), The Blue Lotus (Hérge, 1935), The Adventures of Tupaia (Meredith & Tait, 2019), The House That Jack Built (Bishop, 1999), and Winnie-the-Pooh (Milne, 1926).

Item Type	Thesis (PhD)
URI	https://reading-clone.eprints-hosting.org/id/eprint/118800
Identification Number/DOI	10.48683/1926.00118800
Divisions	Arts, Humanities and Social Science > School of Literature and Languages > English Literature
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