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Making It Through The Wilderness: Trees As Markers Of Gendered Identities In Sir Orfeo, Danielle Howarth
Making It Through The Wilderness: Trees As Markers Of Gendered Identities In Sir Orfeo, Danielle Howarth
Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality
Wood was an essential material in the Middle Ages, but trees – and human relationships with them – are too often ignored. Using trees as a lens through which to view medieval romance can provide us with a new perspective on the genre, on medieval gender norms, and on human relationships with the material non-human. This article focusses on the trees in the Middle English Sir Orfeo in order to interrogate how Orfeo’s identity is linked to trees and wooden objects. Although Orfeo’s harp is the most obvious wooden marker of his identity, the ympe-tree in Orfeo and Herodis’s orchard, …
Whose Sword? Materiality, Gender Subversion And The Fairy Women Of Middle English Romance, Jane Bonsall
Whose Sword? Materiality, Gender Subversion And The Fairy Women Of Middle English Romance, Jane Bonsall
Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality
Though frequently steeped in elements of fantasy and featuring idealised or supernatural characters, Middle English romances are, at their core, concerned with the practicalities of material wealth and status among the gentry and aristocracy. This persistent concern with wealth and materiality is manifested in dramatic ways in some of the Middle English romances figuring magical women. In Melusine, Sir Launfal, and Partonope of Blois, the control of masculine-gendered objects of material wealth – and signifiers of chivalric identity – is given to the fairy ladies, rather than their knightly paramours. In their manipulation and control of these material symbols of …
Relationship Counseling For The U.S.: Understanding White America's Role In Asian American Experiences, Alison N. Lawrence
Relationship Counseling For The U.S.: Understanding White America's Role In Asian American Experiences, Alison N. Lawrence
Tredway Library Prize for First-Year Research
This paper explores the relationship between White Americans and Asian Americans in an effort to discover the root of the difficulties that first and second generation Asian Americans experience while attempting to integrate into American society. Through an analysis of perspectives from Asian American literature as well as historical and current events, it highlights the racist systems that are ingrained in our everyday lives, continuously reminding Asian Americans that they are out of place in their own country. It concludes with a discussion of White America's necessary role in dismantling these systems, and offers strategies to create a more welcoming …
Journey Into The Self: Essays On Biculturalism, Heidi Moe Graviet
Journey Into The Self: Essays On Biculturalism, Heidi Moe Graviet
Undergraduate Honors Theses
This thesis examines what it means to exist as a bicultural being and how one approaches creating and negotiating a multicultural identity in terms of names, war, religion, belonging, and loss. In Narrow Road to the Interior, Matsuo Bashō embarks upon a journey of transcendence and self-discovery into the interior regions of Japan. In doing so, he establishes a Japanese writing tradition that centers around introspective journey-taking and writing oneself into truth and being. This thesis examines, participates in, and expands upon this writing tradition as it follows one Japanese American woman’s attempts to selfhood. Ultimately, it proposes the idea …
Within A Farewell, Elsa Schollmaier
Within A Farewell, Elsa Schollmaier
English Honors Theses
This lyric nonfiction capstone grapples with identity, loss, innocence, love, and the ways of the world (much like all other literary works). I see the influences on my mind without judgement, feigning to understand where exactly the ideas originate. I realize no story can be just mine, so I live within the area of uncertainty, or, may I say, the farewell to certainty.
Self · Ish: Examining And Reshaping Filipino & Filipinx Identities Within The Continental United States And Hawai’I Via Post-Colonial Literature, Kiana Anderson
Self · Ish: Examining And Reshaping Filipino & Filipinx Identities Within The Continental United States And Hawai’I Via Post-Colonial Literature, Kiana Anderson
Senior Theses
This thesis explores a conversation between the “self” and Filipino culture to examine the ways the Filipino diaspora exists in literature amongst colonization and trauma. Through literary texts spanning across time and geographical locations, like Elaine Castillo’s America Is Not the Heart and Jessica Hagedorn's Dogeaters, I interrogate the cultural and psychic meanings associated with the concept of home within the context of these hybrid histories. By examining the neo-canonical literature of some of these authors, I interrogate their sense of self, voices and visions via the languages, symbols, cultural frameworks and emotions that are prevalent within the literary …
The Prodigy Of Existence: An Essay On Identity And Its Constraints With Original Poems, Azariah Butler Ruthford
The Prodigy Of Existence: An Essay On Identity And Its Constraints With Original Poems, Azariah Butler Ruthford
Capstone Projects and Master's Theses
This research essay and collection of poems will highlight key moments in coming to terms with identity. For myself, these identities include race, sexuality, and gender. I have found an expressive outlet through poetry in which I can deduce experiences and make them more approachable for the audience from the perspective of a black, homosexual man. Similarly, Toni Morrison tasks the readers to understand the ways in which identities propose limitations on individuals in her novel, Beloved .The pieces included in this selection will illustrate how life experiences often dictate ones’ identity, and how exploring these differences can inspire both …
"They Called Me Kimchi Breath" And Other Short Narrative Essays: A Study In Composing Asian-American Identity In Short Nonfictional Essays, Teddy Kim
Honors Theses
The heterogenous lifestyle of Asian-Americans is one of duality. For this ethnic group, personal identity is a mix between American standard practices and inherited Asian traditions. However, even if their cultural practices are primarily American, Asian-Americans are often “Otherized” and outcast when claiming an American identity, forcing them to be regarded as “just Asian.” As such, they are Americans being rejected by America, and as a result have no other place to call home . In this project, I seek to heal the strife this rejection creates, attempting to confront these tensions and resolve them. As a hyphenated American, I …
An Architectural Reading Of Kristeva, Woolf, And Shakespeare, Bailey M. Graham
An Architectural Reading Of Kristeva, Woolf, And Shakespeare, Bailey M. Graham
English Literature Student Projects and Publications
Julia Kristeva’s seminal theories of the signifying process and the abject illuminate texts that challenge readers’ expectations. Kristeva’s psychoanalytic and linguistic ideas build analytic links between texts as seemingly disparate as Virginia Woolf’s 1928 novel Orlando and William Shakespeare’s late 1590s play Titus Andronicus. In this portfolio, I will apply Kristeva’s distinction between the semiotic and the symbolic to elucidate the multiple meanings of nature in Woolf’s Orlando, as well as utilize Kristeva’s notion of the abject to analyze the narrative breakdown of Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus. In doing so, I will trace the development of Kristeva’s ideas …
After The Golem: Teaching Golems, Kabbalah, Exile, Imagination, And Technological Takeover., Temma F. Berg
After The Golem: Teaching Golems, Kabbalah, Exile, Imagination, And Technological Takeover., Temma F. Berg
English Faculty Publications
The golem is an elusive creature. From a religious perspective it enacts spirit entering matter, a creation story of potential salvation crossed with reprehensible arrogance. As a historical narrative, the golem story becomes a tale of Jewish powerlessness and oppression, of pogroms and ghettoization, of assimilation and exile, and sometimes, of renewal. As the subject of a course in women, gender and sexuality studies, the golem narrative can be seen as a relentless questioning of otherness and identity and as a revelation of the complex intersectionalities of gender, class, sexuality, race, disability, and ethnicity. As a philosophical motif, the ambiguous …
The Process Of Cultural Appropriation In Literature And How It Can Be Changed, Wendy Meza
The Process Of Cultural Appropriation In Literature And How It Can Be Changed, Wendy Meza
Dissertations and Theses
This paper explores the ways cultural appropriation has existed in literature from the time of Sylvia Plath's poem "Daddy" to the present, with the publication of Jeanine Cummins's novel American Dirt. After dissecting the motives behind the exploitation of traumatic events and acknowledging the consequences appropriation has on the individuals it is portraying, the inclusion of NoViolet Bulawayo's novel We Need New Names proposes a way for contemporary literature to revolve around cultures without silencing voices and allowing individual identities to shine in the texts.