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The Imperial Gothic: Contact Tracing Narratives Of Disease, Disorder, And Race In Global American Literature, Emma Brownstein

Honors Papers

This thesis examines the intersections among gothic literature, empire, and contagion, and traces the emergence and evolution of a yet unexplored subgenre: the Imperial Gothic. Where early American Gothic narratives express anxieties about national stability and the republican subject, the Imperial Gothic explores anxieties that emerge when imperialism brings white Americans into contact with foreign commodities, environments, and bodies, ranging from foreign nationals, immigrants, and enslaved peoples, to Martians. It demonstrates how viral threats to the body correspond to the nationalist conception of foreign threats against the imagined white body politic. What emerges from this body of global and interplanetary …

Representation, Narrative, And “Truth”: Literary And Historical Epistemology In 19th-Century France, Samuel A. Schuman

Honors Papers

My thesis examines the fluid boundaries between French historical and literary writing in the 19th century, and the shifts in “historical consciousness” that occurred in both fields as the century progressed. I examine three exemplary French writers—Jules Michelet, a historian, and Honore de Balzac and Emile Zola, both novelists—considering each primarily as a historical thinker, regardless of whether they considered themselves to be one. I argue that as the 19th century progressed, the broad shift in French institutions towards positivist epistemological and explanatory frameworks was reflected in literature, as well as in history. Both disciplines, one increasingly academic and one …

Meaning In Apocalypse, Alexander Johan Metz

Honors Papers

Modernity has always contained the threat of destruction. Mostly, the threat has been shapeless. It has manifested itself in the collective psyche as a vague fear of a far-off wasteland: an unknown apocalypse. The more tense moments of history have sometimes lent the fear real shape. For many years, it seemed as if atomic destruction was just over the horizon. Indeed, the early years of atomic testing wrought significant ecological damage. In the post-Cold War era, the fear of atomic destruction, at least by full nuclear exchange between the superpowers, has receded, but the apocalyptic threat has not. Climate change, …

La Guerra Civil Española En La Memoria Histórica: Una Conversación Continua Con El Pasado, Jordan C. Hensley

Honors Papers

Este ensayo enfoca en una variedad de obras españoles de cine y literatura contemporanea, incluidos novelas, documentales, peliculas y una novela grafica, que narran las historias de españoles que experimentaron la epoca de la Guerra Civil Española, la represion nacionalista durante la dictadura de Francisco Franco y el proceso de transmitir los recuerdos de aquellas epocas a una generacion mas joven que no las vivio. Investiga los papeles que desempeñan estas obras en el proyecto de narrativizar eventos centrales de la memoria historica de una epoca que sigue siendo importante en el presente.

Dubbin' The Literary Canon: Writin' And Soundin' A Transnational Caribbean Experience, Warren Harding

Honors Papers

In the mid-1970s, a collective of Jamaican poets from Kingston to London began to use reggae as a foundational aesthetic to their poetry. Inspired by the rise of reggae music and the work of the Caribbean Artists Movement based London from 1966 to 1972, these artists took it upon themselves to continue the dialogue on Caribbean cultural production. This research will explore the ways in which dub poetry created an expressive space for Jamaican artists to complicate discussions of migration and colonialism in the transnational Caribbean experience.

In order to do so, this research engages historical, ethnomusicological, and literary theories …

Man Thinking About Nature: The Evolution Of The Poet's Form And Function In The Journal Of Henry David Thoreau 1837-1852, Sh Bagley

Honors Papers

The real question at hand with the study of any work of prose literature is not related at all to the textual contents-the who, the what and the how that comprise its narrative-but the why. The attempt to understand the reasons behind the events described is often undergone in conjunction with a degree of considering the author's own role or purpose in the given written endeavor. These considerations are framed in their relationship to the reader, forcing the reader to become an active participant in something which amounts to an interaction with a text. This three-step process is, at bottom, …

Reading And Teaching Third World Women's Literature In The First World: Colonialism And Feminism In Crick Crack, Monkey And Nervous Conditions, Elvie Miller

Honors Papers

In this essay, I examine two novels by Third World women writers, with a view to exploring how to read and teach Third World texts in a First World context. Teaching these (and other Third World texts), I contend, must entail negotiating their status as "other" to First-World, Western texts and must include recognizing this status as imposed by the First World readership and as a heuristic to develop an understanding and a pedagogy that is able critically to examine the First World or West's naturalizations of its own pedagogical and knowledge-based claims. To do this, I focus specifically on …

Word Is Born: Critical Gaps And The Poetics Of Hip-Hop, Kabir Hamid

Honors Papers

I grew up listening to hip-hop music. Although I lived across the country from its birthplace, I would immerse myself in its sounds during the day and especially at night when my brother would play tapes before we fell asleep in our bunk beds. At a certain point in high school, I became obsessed with the music's lyrics. I was continually astonished by the cleverness, rhyme ability and edginess of the emcees I listened to. My admiration for hip-hop music developed alongside my admiration for the great authors I was reading at that time: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Herman Hesse and …

A Moment Of Transcendence: Encountering Each Other In And Beyond The Fiction Of Raymond Carver, Amy Lynn Leo

Honors Papers

This is an essay about reading Raymond Carver. It deals mostly with his work in general rather than with what individual stories mean or exemplify. My aim is to describe and understand the experience of Carver that I had upon my first reading. I will show how reading Raymond Carver can be a spiritual experience, and, in fact, was for me. The reading experience becomes spiritual when readers exchange meaning with the characters through identification and by doing so consider themselves in such a way that they fully embrace the patterns of their lives and manage to transcend them. Because …

Metametascience Towards Reconciliation, John P. Kennedy

Honors Papers

The ideal of consilience - the inductive concurrence of seemingly disparate ways of thinking into a single, unified, all-encompassing intellectual system - or more simply put, "unified learning" - has been largely set aside since the rise of the industrial age and the championing of the industrious, better-be it individualized mind of the enlightenment. The Catholic Church was the last western world-dominant institution to actively perpetuate and work according to the rubric of a unified field of knowledge. Our thoughts and everything else were under God and indivisible: our ethics and our physics alike were the immaterial idea-stuff of the …

"As If I Could Do Anything Except Just Sit And Stare": A Gaze Of A Viewer/Reader In Psycho And To The Lighthouse, Stephanie Hunt Hegstad

Honors Papers

At the end of Alfred Hitchcock's film Psycho, the figure of Norman Bates (or maybe the figure of his mother--at this point, the distinction is fogged) hugs a blanket around him as he sits in his prison cell, staring, perfectly still except for the movements of his eyes, the expressions on his face, the slight movement of his head. He stares directly at the camera, the audience, while the phantom voice of Mother explains her trouble with her son ("he was always--bad"). The camera does not shift angles during this scene to relieve us of this penetrating gaze, but …

Nothing More Real Than Nothing: The Unnamable As Self-Annihilating Fiction, Shawn Rosenheim

Honors Papers

Nature abhors nothing; it is the mind which cannot bear to live in a state of suspension, in absence, in a vacuum. The very existence of fiction testifies to man's need for intricate models through which he may fashion and explore his life. In the last eighty years, a great deal of research has been devoted to discovering the ways in which fictions are structured; the ways, that is, in which literature replaces chaos not with content, but with form; with elaborate verbal webs that hold in abeyance the hollow of life without language. Russian formalism, mythcriticism like Northrop Frye's, …

Called Back, Patricia Y. Ikeda

Honors Papers

Settling: They left Japan and came to Colorado, got land. Typhoid came down the mountain stream, they drove a truck to Indiana, the black cast-iron pans swinging from the sides. A stillborn child, a hard winter. And the house so cold the water froze in the pitchers at night. Sunlight in the catalpa leaves, breeze through the asparagus fronds. My grandmother puts on her bonnet, in the garden the heat rises around her. I stand by the window, waiting for the hummingbird, looking through a stack of brittle yellow magazines that open from the back. A heavy maroon bathrobe, stiff …

The Group Theatre: A Reflection Of The Theatre In The Thirties, Abby Eiferman Schor

Honors Papers

Sing us a song of social significance Or you can sing until you're blue Let meaning shine in every line Or we won't love you. This snatch of lyrics, sung in the International Ladies Garment Workers. Union revue Pins and Needles of 1937 captures an important aspect of the literary spirit of the 1930's. This decade was marked by a tendency of artists towards political and social commitment, a time when the reconstruction of American society and the menace of Fascism was a cause celebre to which artists could rally. American artists had always been interested in changing society, or …

The Comic Elements In Jane Austen's Works, Thomas Chuan Chen

Honors Papers

Examines comedy in Jane Austen's writing.