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Verity, Olivia Sun

English Honors Theses

A divorced, despondent middle school science teacher joins a secret society and helps them get to the bottom of a Galapagos tortoise government conspiracy.

Finding Tomahna: Myst As 1990s Time Capsule And Community, Maxx Hirsch

English Honors Theses

The original Myst took the 1990’s by storm, quickly becoming the best-selling games in the world after its initial release in 1993. Many gamers and reviewers look back now, accustomed to lightning-fast loading speeds and razor-sharp graphics, ask why? I believe that Myst was able to find such wild popularity because it was a relevant reflection of its time period. In all of its oddity and solitude, Myst is an excellent representation of the feelings of American adults in the 1990’s. This thesis examines Myst as a product of wartime, new technology, and of community.

Another Perspective: Telling The Hero’S Story Without The Hero, Renee Hopper

Honors Projects

Can a YA story be effectively told through the lenses of side characters that typically exist to further the main character’s plot? What gives a side character agency? How do you make a hero without ever getting close to them through the narrator? This Honors Project seeks to answer those questions through a YA-style novella in which four different "side characters" tell their stories, and the hero's point of view is never followed.

Salt In The Deep Marine, Rachel Bollinger

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

ABSTRACT

Rachel Allison Bollinger: Salt in the Deep Marine

(Under the direction of Dr. Christine Butterworth-McDermott and Dr. John McDermott)

The surface tension present between liquid and air is due to the fact that liquid molecules are highly attractive to one another. Because of this, the surface of water acts like an elastic membrane, allowing human hands or light insects to sit or slide on its surface. For a moment or two, the hand or the insect seems to occupy both the water and the air simultaneously. This commonplace phenomenon is explored in the poetry collection, Salt in the Deep …

“Plough Up Some Literary”: Signifying On “Ole Massa” And White Authority Through Oral Space In Zora Neale Hurston’S Mules And Men And Eudora Welty’S “Powerhouse”, James Vaughan

Student Research Submissions

This essay compares representative methods of black storytelling and signifying that overcome white authority in Hurston’s Mules and Men and Welty’s “Powerhouse.” Though many critics disagree with Mules and Men’s ambivalent structural frame, this essay defends Hurston’s subversive use of anthropological features and humanization of the storytellers as an act of authority over the white-dominated genre of anthropology she portrays. Likewise, the “Ole Massa” tales the workmen tell in Mules and Men signify on or subvert the legacy of slavery by depicting the slave-owner as a man easily and consistently fooled by John the slave. In using oral space, the …

The Queer Literature Club, Olivia Behm

Honors Projects

The Queer Literature Club was established August 30, 2018 with the purpose of distributing young adult literature with LGBTQ+ characters and themes as well as providing a space space for LGBTQ+ students. The QLC spent the 2018-2019 academic year establishing itself as a thriving community and has gained standing as an officially recognized campus organization. The club is open to students who want to see themselves reflected in the literature they read - literature meant for an age that is particularly difficult for LGBTQ+ youth - and allies. Through the progression of the year, it was found that the QLC …

John Milton’S Orphic Dependency, Magenta S. Reynolds

Undergraduate Honors Theses

The 17th-century poet John Milton invokes Ovid’s Orpheus as a source of strength and security in overcoming barriers of instability and insecurity, ultimately enabling Milton to claim his own authority as both a prophesizing poet and a bounds-breaking seeker of Classical knowledge. It is my argument that Milton’s dependency on Orpheus has been overlooked, and that it is only through an Orphic foundation that Milton is able to reach beyond artistic creativity, into higher registers of inspiration.

Milton repeatedly invokes the Orpheus in both his prose and poetry, including: Paradise Lost, Ad Patrem, Lycidas, and various sonnets and elegies. These …

Image Selling: How Depictions Of Power Relations, Plasticity, And Abjection In High-Fashion Advertisements Construct Terrifying Social Narratives, Jennifer Lee Litton

Masters Theses and Doctoral Dissertations

This paper examines how high-fashion advertisements use visual rhetoric in order to construct social narratives related to power struggles, plasticity, and abjection. In creating these types of images, high-fashion advertisers send explicit messages to their viewers regarding the ways they should engage with the depicted social narratives, ranging from objectification to violence to death. Through a close rhetorical analysis and observational study of high-fashion advertisements, this paper discusses the problematic nature of the marketing techniques and how they skew interpretations of social issues.