Digital Commons Network^™

How Early Modern English Pedagogy Shaped The Gendered And Racialized Use Of Magic In William Shakespeare’S The Tempest, Erin Lindsay Faya

Graduate Thesis Collection

Magical usage plays a significant role in William Shakespeare’s play The Tempest. However, who gets to use magic and in what ways? Why is Prospero painted the protagonist while Sycorax gets labeled a witch though both use magic? This thesis looks at how early modern English pedagogy shapes the use of magic in The Tempest. When magic is read as knowledge, then the pedagogy influencing early modern education dictates whose knowledge counts and is seen as correct and whose is erased and vilified. The epistemological formation happening in early modern England is apparent in The Tempest as Prospero uses magic …

What We Need: A Poetic Study In Struggle And Self-Healing, Grace Anne Calabria

Undergraduate Honors Thesis Collection

In many ways, this thesis examines the eternal, repetitive inevitabilities of life. In a collection of poems, these inevitabilities are examined through the eyes of an observant and omniscient narrator: a girl, long in love with a boy, facing the struggles and rewards of learning to be alone in various ways after the 2020 pandemic. Because this thesis provides an examination of struggles and self-healing alongside its creative centerpiece of the collection, the poems are accompanied by a compilation of memoiristic reflections. This thesis contributes to conversations of mental health, love, growth, and finding legitimacy and value in creative work, …

Reshaping The Canon: How “Insta-Poets” Are Creating A New Literary Space For Readers Using Social Media, Hannah Salsbery

Undergraduate Honors Thesis Collection

Reading and analyzing poetry can be an equally beautiful and frustrating experience. Interacting with a poem allows a reader to access untapped emotions through the words on the page; yet, when not given the tools to understand canonical poetry, young readers are often left at a loss. The rise of “Insta-poetry” gives younger generations of readers access to poems that are both relatable in experience and language. Using Rupi Kaur as a vehicle towards unmasking the importance of the rise of poetry on Instagram, this thesis highlights the importance of reshaping the literary canon to become a more inclusive, diverse, …

Subversion Of Form: Mixing Poetry And Prose, Darby Alexandria Brown

Undergraduate Honors Thesis Collection

My honors thesis project is called Subversion of Form: Mixing Poetry and Prose. The purpose has been to research how writers have interwoven poetry and prose, to write a creative nonfiction piece that uses both genres, and to improve as a writer through committing myself to this piece and solidifying writing as a daily practice. In my introduction, I outline the research I conducted on poetry and prose and my takeaways from the writers I read. I conclude that the purpose of prose is to tell, while the purpose of poetry is to search.

The piece that I have worked …

Primrose And Other Stories, Demetra Koras

Graduate Thesis Collection

Primrose and Other Stories is a short story collection that explores themes of family, loss, and legacy.

Terrible Am I, Child?, Camille Arnett

Undergraduate Honors Thesis Collection

The modern period of intergenerational strife between the aging-out Baby Boomers and the Millennials who have come forth to replace them in an infrastructure that cannot support them is a struggle that carries with it unique psychological implications ripe for literary exploration. Understanding these conflicts in a profound way is an important challenge to take on, and one which can, in my belief, be best achieved through literature. My work, a draft of a novel entitled Terrible Am I, Child?, is a family drama which takes the symbolic generational divide and uses it as a framework for exploring issues of …

A New Happiness?: Reading Literature With Deleuze And Guattari In 2020, Fiona Connolly

Undergraduate Honors Thesis Collection

Gilles Deleuze is one of the most influential French philosophers of the twentieth century. He collaborated with political activist and radical psychoanalyst, Felix Guattari to create Anti-Oedipus (1972), A Thousand Plateaus (1980), and What is Philosophy ? (1991), among other works. At the center of Deleuze and Guattari’s thought was the belief that philosophy is the production of concepts, such as territorialization/deterritorialization, lines of flight, and rhizomes. In this thesis, I will use Deleuze and Guattari to examine three seemingly unrelated literary texts: Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s White Nights, Lucy Maud Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables, and John Green’s Paper Towns. By …

Only One Went Through The Green Door, Rachel Sahaidachny

Graduate Thesis Collection

Written in three parts, Only One Went through the Green Door, explores abandonment, homelessness, childhood, womanhood, and choices made or unmade that create the complicated and winding path of life. The poems use narrative and lyric to examine the effects of childhood trauma on the development of a persona, and its shadow. Emotional realities explored through natural landscapes, and at times through child-like language, create an unsettled speaker who quests for some final understanding that might lead to peace.

Basement Heart, Samantha Constance Tkac

Graduate Thesis Collection

Basement Heart is a collection of short stories with a goal of documenting the manifestations of rage and how it evolves throughout a woman’s life. In these stories, femininity is explored through the aesthetics of the grotesque. Female protagonists seek to inhabit new definitions of female sexuality that combat tired expectations made by society’s misogynistic and objectifying culture. Often, their feelings of unprovoked grief manifest themselves as pursuits of the flesh, which becomes the underlying heartbeat of each story; themes revolve around sex and obsession and explore what happens when sexual fantasies are realized and lived out in the real …

Unmournable Bodies: Gothic Postcolonialism And The Spectre Of Loss In Arundhati Roy's The God Of Small Things And Anuradha Roy's Sleeping On Jupiter, Sitara Kannan

Graduate Thesis Collection

"My thesis compares Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things and Anuradha Roy’s Sleeping on Jupiter in order to demonstrate how a) each text is a product of its moment and a reflection of corresponding critical thought and b) how an inversion of gothic tropes in Sleeping reflects a changed world dynamic, a melancholic exploration of epistemological and traumatic loss that can be seen not only as a recognition of the continued power of oppressive systems but a reflection on the failure of cosmopolitanism to “rescue” the global subject from her own isolation and recolonization. I claim that this is …

A Glimpse Of Casual Queerness: The Radical Progress Of Queer Visibility In Weimar Film And The Inevitable Backlash That Followed, Claire Colburn

Undergraduate Honors Thesis Collection

In looking back at German history, the Weimar Era and the 1920s, in particular, are often regarded as a time of unrestricted frivolity and the catharsis of post-war anxiety. In retrospect, it can be temptingly easy to credit the changing political landscape and liberalization of German society between 1918 and 1933 as a brief but inherently doomed moment of progressivism that necessarily would give way to a strident, reactionary backlash. Often, the increased visibility and acceptance of LGBTQ individuals during this time is regarded as a symptom of the “anything goes” attitude for which the Weimar Era has been famous. …

Invisible Minds: Marginalizing Minority Women In The American Academy Of Higher Education, Gianna Kujawski

Undergraduate Honors Thesis Collection

"The year 2018 witnessed the evolution of the #MeToo movement, which spurred more women to run for U.S. political office than ever before and women to ascend to the position of CEO in male-dominated fields. The representation of female voices has grown with the times, but there is one institution that continues to silence women: the American Academy of Higher Education. The world of academia remains a male-dominated field which marginalizes women and people of color, and thus leaves little to no room for women of color. Unfortunately, the problem is deep-seated within the academy, and is continuously perpetuated by …

Fans And Adaptation: An Analysis Of The Use Of Interactive Storytelling In The Lizzie Bennet Diaries, Margaret Brodbeck

Undergraduate Honors Thesis Collection

By using adaptations of Jane Austen’s classic novel Pride and Prejudice (1813) as a frame of reference, my thesis will demonstrate that transmedia narratives are most effective in tandem with original texts that have a history of successful adaptations due to the perpetual audience of fans and their previous knowledge of the story to meaningfully, as well as canonically, interact with the narrative. This thesis will first introduce theories surrounding adaptations and look at previous Pride and Prejudice adaptations in light of a devoted fan base. It will then introduce the concept of transmedia narratives and examine the culture of …

Flash As Fiction: Exploring Jennifer Egan’S Nuanced Portrayal Of Photography, Matthew Del Busto

Undergraduate Honors Thesis Collection

Photographs are everywhere. They’re blown up on billboards, airdropped via iPhones, and slapped on the sides of semis, telling stories of war, politics, sport, and most everything in between. Yet, how much credence should we allow photographs, which display not reality itself but a two-dimensional abstraction of a single moment’s reality? As the ubiquitousness of images continues to increase, it is more critical now than ever to understand photography as a cultural force having measurable influence on both society as a whole and the individuals within it. In the writing of Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jennifer Egan, ideas about photography and …

One Hundred Books: A Journey Through A Century Of John Newbery Award Books, Tyler Sassaman

Graduate Thesis Collection

"On a quest to read all of the existing Newbery award-winning books (est. 1921), a reading specialist examines the history of the books and the award itself. Considered the “most distinguished contribution to children’s literature,” the John Newbery gold medal, awarded by the American Library Association, is a high-water mark for upper elementary-aged children across the United States. The author’s two decades of teaching experience provide the analytical perspective and memoir-style investigation. Interviews with a book buyer for the Scholastic publisher, children’s librarians, former Newbery committee members, and a visit to the famed Kerlan Collection of Children’s Literature, frame the …

Useless, Seth Stone

Graduate Thesis Collection

Useless is a short story collection about people who feel lost in the world and go searching for fulfillment. Six disconnected stories about six disconnected people. The collection deals with themes of loss, identity, loneliness and the exploration of niche subcultures.

Narrators Of Change: A Contemporary Study Of Patrisse Khan-Cullors, Malala Yousafzai, And Emma Watson, Evan Davis

Undergraduate Honors Thesis Collection

Though they champion different social movements—race discrimination, gender inequality, and girls’ education—Patrisse Cullors, Emma Watson, and Malala Yousafzai are each extremely effective activists. Patrisse Cullors is a self defined Artist, Organizer, and Freedom Fighter, but most importantly Cullors is a theatre artist. Cullors uses her agency as an artist to give theatrical life to issues of race discrimination, creating a virtual reality in which her audience can see and understand issues that are new to them. Malala Yousafzai shares her story because such stories of girls being denied their basic right to education are ubiquitous in third world countries and …

“While The Imagination Strains / After Deer”: William Carlos Williams’S Interrogations Of The American Transcendental Imagination And The Proto-Suburban Scene, Tyler Wagner

Undergraduate Honors Thesis Collection

Oftentimes the American suburbs are considered through the lens of architecture, economics, fiction, and visual media. And, typically, the conversation centers on their cultural zenith in the 1950s. One literary form is neglected in this conversation: poetry. This omission is peculiar, as a fascination with the vastness of the continent’s landscape—and its significance—pervades the history of the American verse. For Ralph Waldo Emerson, the apparently endless expanses of space and rejuvenative qualities of the American landscape provide the poet’s ideal inspiration, and Walt Whitman, in perhaps the most important collection of poetry of the nineteenth century, Leaves of Grass, is …

Dr. Mengelt, Marc Allan

Graduate Thesis Collection

An obstetrician implants microchips in the babies he delivers so he can track their movements when they get older. The doctor is a white supremacist and determined to find evidence that supports his twisted vision of racial distinction. Eighteen years after his first implantations, two of the children he worked with commit a particularly brutal murder. The doctor turns them in anonymously and quickly becomes a kind of folk hero. But after a relentless New York Daily News reporter finds out how the murderers were identified, the doctor becomes a man on the run.

Narrative Technique In The Works Of The Pearl Poet, Karl Agger

Undergraduate Honors Thesis Collection

In the fourteenth century, the so-called Pearl Poet created such masterpieces as Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Pearl. Though his surviving body of work comprises only four poems, these are enough to have him considered among the greatest medieval English writers. Much scholarship has focused on the poems’ sources, style, symbolism, and thematic content, but comparatively little has approached these works as narratives. The Pearl Poet was a masterful storyteller who employed a consistent yet flexible set of narrative techniques. Borrowing the theories developed by Wayne C. Booth in The Rhetoric of Fiction, I present an analysis of …

Speculative Literature In Modern Society: Octavia Butler And The Tragedy Of The Commons, Katherine Elyse Miller

Undergraduate Honors Thesis Collection

What leads to peaceful prosperity and what leads to destructive collapse in any society? While it may seem daunting or overwhelming to dissect the success or collapse of a multi-faceted society, there are lenses and tools through which we are able to do so, such as political theory and speculative dystopian fiction. By using lenses to analyze the society in which we live, we are able to recognize the seeds of both prosperity and destruction in our society that may otherwise be overlooked or ignored. The speculative dystopian fiction of Octavia Butler may be considered as building upon the political …

Superfriends For Life: An Analysis Of The Relantionship Between The Dc Comics "Trinity" In The "New 52" Justice League, Justin Welty

Graduate Thesis Collection

The focus of this thesis is to look at Geoff John's Justice League in the "New 52" universe. More specifically, the research concentrates on the relationship of the members of DC Comics "Trinity," Batman, Superman, and Wonder Woman. The three heroes have a special relationship that spans over 75 years, and now, with the "New 52," there is an opportunity to examine the relationship from its beginning to its end in the modern era of comic book history. The scope of this project will span eight graphic novels and five years of storytelling. To properly evaluate the relationship of "The …

The Sketcher: Reverend John Eagles, His Poetical Shelter From The World And The 1812 Collection, Ashley C. Schalk

Graduate Thesis Collection

...Since identifying Eagles as at least one of the artists of the 1812 Collection, I have discovered that his specific tour of the Lakes, the route he followed and the scenery conveyed in his images, deviated from the conventional tours in that Eagles was in search of what he regarded as a poetical landscape rather than a traditionally picturesque one. In other words, Eagles sought to capture more than an aesthetically pleasing scene as a picturesque image would, he endeavored to capture the soul of the scene and the 1812 Collection is evidence that Eagles practiced the artistic principles he …

Angel Outside The House: The New Woman In Brittish Periodicals 1890-1910, Lindsay Rosa

Graduate Thesis Collection

The New Woman described in short fiction and editorial articles in British periodicals not only presented the ideal New Woman to readers, but served to shape the perceptions of the reader depending on the demographic of the targeted reading audience for that specific periodical. The audience for specific British periodicals featuring the New Woman included conservative families whose youth saw the New Woman figure as a role model. The New Woman figure easily connected to readers, particularly young, female middle-class readers, who easily identified with her because she possessed similar socioeconomic characteristics. Just as there were many New Women characters …

Blended Learning, Blended Lives: School One-To-One Programs, Control Societies, And Late Capitalist Subjectivity, Sarah Nolan

Graduate Thesis Collection

In his 2011 article "Florida Reformers Got It Right," William Mattox uses his son Richard as an example of the benefits of hybrid education, or blended learning, which allows students to combine traditional classroom-based instruction with online schooling. Mattox only briefly praises the benefits of his son's opportunity for customized instruction, and he never tells his reader about the types of classes his son took, or how those classes helped his son reach greater achievements in co llege. Instead, he focuses his attention and (and about half his word count) on the network of acquaintances his son was able to …

White Shadows: Perception And Imagination In Poetry, Madison Chartier

Undergraduate Honors Thesis Collection

In the spring of my sophomore year, I enrolled in the introductory course to writing poetry here at Butler University. I am not naturally a poet, but I have an appreciation for reading poetry and, at the time of the course, was curious to try my hand at the craft, despite having had little experience prior to the collegiate level. As may be expected, I ran into obstacles.

I enjoyed playing with language in experiments of sound and rhythm, but, despite the vast array of assonance, consonance, enjambment, and every other technique I employed, the poems I created throughout the …

Revisiting Modernism And The Ballets Russes: What Contemporary Choreography Can Learn From Diaghilev, Kelly Oden

Undergraduate Honors Thesis Collection

In order to discover some of the features of what contemporary choreographers, dancers, artists, and musicians can learn from the Ballets Russes and the defining artistic movement of which they were a part-modernism-we must first take a journey back to Paris in the early twentieth century and work to unravel modernism's meaning in relation to different artistic media. We must ask complicated questions: What is modernism? What defines artistic success? What does it take to make something truly new? By asking such questions we can come to a deeper understanding of the conditions necessary to create a thriving artistic environment …

Witnesses To Trauma: Kakfa's Trauma Victims And The Working Through Process, Emily Allison Kile

Undergraduate Honors Thesis Collection

In "The Metamorphosis" and "The Hunger Artist," Kafka has gifted us with two characters who, in Kafkaesque fashion, "pay a terrible price when, willingly or not, [they go] against 'nature, '" as Joachim Neugroschel writes in the introduction to his translation of The Metamorphosis, In the Penal Colony, and Other Stories (Kafka xix). Gregor awakes one morning to discover that he has been turned into a giant vermin, and the hunger artist attempts to cope with his tragedy of not enjoying the taste of food by putting himself on public display, likening his role in society to that of a …

Modernist Women In Three Acts: The Stage For Political Protest, Jennifer B. Redmond

Undergraduate Honors Thesis Collection

In this essay, I will draw upon Katherine Mansfield's New Zealand Sh011stories, "Bliss" (1918), "The Woman at the Store" (1912), "Je Ne Parle Pas Francais" (1918), George Bernard Shaw's play Mrs. Warren's Profession (1893), and Virginia Woolf's extended essay A Room of One 's Own (1929), to defend Jeffreys's idea that "lesbianism" was, in many cases, nothing more than a bond of friendship between two women - a private experience that took on a different meaning in the public eye.

Additionally, I wish to support Gubar's notion that gender norms frequently existed secondarily to the importance of women gaining more …

The Stage Is The Court And All The Players Merely Copies: Shakespeare's Antony And Cleopatra As Propaganda, Ginnye Cubel

Undergraduate Honors Thesis Collection

In 1603 the world as England knew it changed. After forty-five years Elizabeth I, Queen of England, and last surviving Tudor was dead and James VI of Scotland was ascending the throne. Despite several differences between the new king and the old queen, there were similarities in their patronage of the arts. Enthralled by theatrical performances, one of James' first acts as king was to offer royal patronage to William Shakespeare's theatre company and give them the title, The King's Men. But it is likely that James' love of the theatre wasn't his only reason for patronizing Shakespeare's theatre troupe. …