Arts and Humanities Commons^™

A Man Not A Monster : Reimagining Disability In Hollow Crown's Richard Iii, Taylor E. Uphus

Honors Theses

Traditional portrayals of William Shakespeare’s Richard III (1592) in film interpret Richard’s physical disability as an outward reflection of his evil. In recent years, disabilities studies scholars have reconsidered the historic association of Richard’s physical deformity with immorality. Unlike previous Richard III films, the BBC’s Hollow Crown: Richard III (Dominic Cooke, 2016) highlights Richard’s mental abuse and trauma. While the film does not shy away from Richard’s villainy, its more empathic depiction of Richard contests the one-dimensional stage and film representation of him as a conniving monster. Ultimately, this film presents Richard III to critique society’s treatment of disabled individuals.

Review Of Exploring Othello 2020, Vanessa I. Corredera

Faculty Publications

Presented by Red Bull Theater. 7, 14, 21, and 28 October 2020. Broadcast via Zoom and YouTube. Hosted and moderated by Ayanna Thompson. With Keith Hamilton Cobb, Franchelle Stewart Dorn, Jennifer Ikeda, Anchuli Felicia King, Peter Macon, Alfredo Narciso, DeAris Rhymes, Madeline Sayet, Jessika D. Williams, and Dawn Monique Williams.

Vocabulary Learning Strategies Used By Esl Saudi Students In The United States, Alya Abdullah K. Suliman

Dissertations

Problem

The purpose of this study was to discover the preferred and used English vocabulary learning strategies of Saudi Arabic-speaking English as a Second Language (ESL) learners. In the light insufficient empirical and theoretical studies exploring the complex structure of vocabulary learning by Arabic-speaking ESL learners, this study investigated which strategies students viewed as significant in assisting them in learning new English vocabulary. Finally, the study sought to identify Saudi Arabic-speaking student attitudes toward and motivations for learning English as a second language; and whether these attitudes influenced which vocabulary learning strategies they preferred and used commonly.

Method

The research …

Get Out And The Remediation Of Othello's Sunken Place: Beholding White Supremacy's Coagula, Vanessa I. Corredera

Faculty Publications

As a result of director and writer Jordan Peele's remediation of the horror genre to create a racially polemic film, breakout horror-thriller Get Out (2017) has achieved critical and commercial success while substantially affecting how Americans think about and approach race. As stories about a black man amidst an all-white community who ultimately strangles his white female lover, Get Out and Shakespeare's Othello share obvious narrative overlaps. Othello, however, maintains a more tenuous status regarding race and its function within the storyline than does Get Out. Othello remains a play mired in questions about how or even whether …

Too Soon Forgot: The Ethics Of Remembering In Richard Iii, Now, And House Of Cards, L Monique Pittman

Faculty Publications

Three interconnected performances of Shakespeare's Richard III display the extreme hermeneutical volatility of representation when remediated through a celebrity's personal history. The film NOW: In the Wings on a World Stage (dir. Jeremy Whelehan, 2014) documents the Bridge Project Company's Richard III directed by Sam Mendes and starring Kevin Spacey (2011-12), a production launched at London's Old Vic and transferred to twelve cities across the globe. Just prior to the distribution of NOW, Netflix released its first season of House of Cards (2013) with Spacey as the politician, Francis Underwood, at the center of its seamy landscape. Spacey insists …

"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 …

A Comparative Analysis Of National Identity Construction And Rhetorization In William Shakespeare's King Henry V And Aphra Behn' Oroonoko; Or, The Royal Slave, David Forner

Honors Theses

Positioned at the climax of both William Shakespeare’s King Henry V (1600) and Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko; or, The Royal Slave (1688) are dynamic calls for battle. While King Henry rallies his forces against the French, Oroonoko—an enslaved African prince—ignites a slave revolt against English colonial masters. This comparative analysis of the speeches’ rhetoric identifies three sets of similar appeals: to martial masculinity, honor as a moral code, and collective political identities. From Behn’s application of Shakespeare’s canonical rhetoric derives commentary on each rhetor’s ability to construct and rhetorize his national identity. Importantly, analysis reveals the impact of racialized difference on …

The Blame Game : Complicity And Rape Culture In Margaret Atwood's Novel And Hulu's Adapted Series The Handmaid's Tale, Hannah Gallant

Honors Theses

Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) and the Hulu award-winning televisual adaptation (2017-Present) portray a dystopic, theocratic regime known as Gilead. The regime’s focus on female bodies and reproduction exemplifies what feminist theorists call rape culture, a culture Gilead perpetuates through sexual violence, rape, and surveillance. Using critical race theory, media and close-textual analysis this project examines both works, arguing that complicity within the novel must be discussed in relation to rape culture and that while the series accounts for rape culture, it problematically manifests a type of feminism that privileges white women over women of color.

Ever With Thee: A Vespers In Music And Poetry, Department Of Music

Concerts and Event Programs 2019-2020

Presented as a joint effort by the Department of English and Department of Music, Ever With Thee is an evening of music and poetry, including poetic works by Shauna Niequist, Denise Levertov, Dana Faulds, and others, as well as musical pieces by Scarlatti, Tchaikovsky, Haydn, and others.

Where Was I Going? What Was The Point? Archetypes, Frame, And Social Transgressions In Ovid And Twain, Jessica Bates

Honors Theses

The sound of a narrator telling a story can be difficult to depict in written prose, and yet both Ovid and Twain capture the effect of an old man telling a story; Ovid through Nestor's Story in The Metamorphoses and Twain in "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County." They both use this framework to discuss the theme of social transgressions. I maintain that both Twain and Ovid use a variation on the wise-mentor archetype as a frame to discuss, through the use of satire, social transgressions which neither of their narrators condemn. I aim to explore Ovid and Twain's …

Dramatizing The Void: Crime Fiction's Journey To Forgetting, Kylene N. Cave

Andrews Research Conference

Scholars often cite the transition from the golden age to the hardboiled tradition in the 1920s and 1930s as the most radical shift in crime fiction. By 1945, crime stories regularly exhibited destabilized language, increased interest in psychology of the mind, and a blatant rejection of conclusive endings as a means of exploring the unreliable nature of memory and eye-witness testimony. Whereas the crime fiction narratives preceding 1945 embodied a clear sense of logic and order, and established hermeneutics and signifying practices as the keys to unlocking the mysteries behind human behavior; post-45 crime fiction not only rejects these notions, …

"The Beauty! The Beauty!": Colonial Literary Legacies And Conquering The Female Body In Junot Diaz's The Brief Wondrous Life Of Oscar Wao, Alexi Decker

Honors Theses

Junot Diaz's The Brief Wondrous Ufa of Oscar Wao includes a plethora of references to everything from classic literature to modem pop culture. However, Diaz ends his novel with a reference to Joseph Conrad's colonial novella Heart of Darkness, therefore inviting readers to view Oscar Wao through a lens of colonial literature. This in turn results in a reconsideration of the current critical consensus surrounding the text's treatment of sexuality and masculinity in the modern Dominican diaspora, specifically that of Oscar, the novel's titular character.

Inconnecting Oscar Wao to Heart of Darkness, I analyze the text's and characters's violence against …

Go Into All The World, Meredith Jones-Gray

Lake Union Herald

No abstract provided.

Hollywood Dreams: Postcolonial Nationalism And Gender Oppression In Jessica Hagedorn's Dogeatersp, Andrei Wayne Kyrk Defino

Honors Theses

This paper addresses how gender, sexuality, and resistance affect personal and national identity construction in Dogeaters. This 1990 novel traces the lives of Filipino characters during President Ferdinand Marcos's dictatorial regime--a period that reshaped the Philippines' national identity. Using gender theory and nationhood studies, I highlight how women and queer individuals who challenge masculine norms attempt subversion by creating communities outside of patriarchal constructs but ultimately fail. Specifically, I read Joey Sands's and Daisy Avila's marginality and failure to comply with societal expectations as futile pushbacks against the larger system. Furthermore, their embrace and use of violence as a means …

Iago As Moral Other In Jonathan Munby's Production Of Othello (2016), Emma Magbanua

Honors Theses

Jonathan Munby produced a contemporary adaptation of Shakespeare's Othello at the Chicago Shakespeare Theatre in Spring of 2016. While continuing to utilize Shakespeare's language, Munby modernized Othello through the use of contemporary military costumes, props, accents, music, and dance. Munby did not limit his adaptation to solely visual and auditory aspects of Othello, but also took the liberty of contemporizing the principle of "otherness" in the play. This research explores the identification of Munby's character as Iago as "Moral Other," whose actions lead to the fall of his wife, Emilia, a fellow officer, Roderigo, Desdemona, and the protagonist, Othello.

In The House Of God: Divine Authority And The Collectivity Of Spiritual Experience In George Herbert's The Temple And Ralph Vaughan Williams' Five Mystical Songs, Nicole M. Hwang

Honors Theses

George Herbert's collection of poems, The Temple (1633), portrays a reciprocal relationship between the human and divine, suggesting that humans are to house the glory of God and abide in Him. He seeks to portray the soul's internal architecture, with an allusion to the human heart as God's dwelling place. He uses his poetry to explore this relationship to a coexisting God, and through the framework of human-as-temple, the theme of habitation becomes prominent in his work. In "Love (III)" from The Temple, Herbert illustrates this, showing that just as God dwells in our hearts, we also receive sustenance and …

You Tell The Tale: Interactive Retellings Of The Myth Of Orpheus, Christopher Mclean-Wheeler

Honors Theses

The thesis retells the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice in an interactive narrative style. The interactive medium encourages readers to take an active role in storytelling by deciding what the protagonist does at key moments in the plot; each decision branches out into alternate story paths, allowing the adaptation to draw from multiple versions of the myth, particularly Ovid's The Metamormopheses and Virgil's The Georgics. The content chosen for inspiration is based on how it can offer new interpretations of and insight into this retelling of the familiar story.

Look At That Little Macho: Surveillance And Hegemonic Masculinity In Junot DíAz's The Brief Wondrous Life Of Oscar Wao, Ludanne Francis

Honors Theses

No abstract available.

Of Mermaids, Metal, And Maine: An Illustrated Memoir, Mercedes Mclean-Wheeler

Honors Theses

This creative literary thesis consists of the first chapters of a memoir, offering readers a glimpse of my childhood world and self in rural Maine. The memoir's overarching theme is the interplay between person and place. The work also explores the ability of memory and imagination to shape perception. Included are several of my own drawings to help illuminate my imaginative and lived experiences, evoking the odd but artful whimsy of childhood. While still rooted firmly in memoir, the project draws from fantasy, magical realism, and graphica, reflecting modern literature's inclination to transcend traditional boundaries of genre and style.

Certain Kinds Of Understanding: English Professors Win Award For Article On Teaching Fiction And Film, Danni Francis

Andrews Agenda: Campus News

No abstract provided.

A Door Into Ocean’S Nonviolent Resistance As Pragmatic Social Vision, Melodie A. Roschman

Andrews Research Conference

In this essay, I examine how Joan Slonczewski’s 1986 feminist science fiction novel A Door into Ocean outlines a practical program of nonviolent resistance to oppression. Unlike many dystopian and utopian novels, which provide social commentary and offer up ideals but not practical solutions, A Door into Ocean depicts the citizens of a peaceful alien nation, Shora, using various practical tactics of resistance against invading Valan forces that can be applied to contemporary protest and political action. I begin my study by examining the threefold influences on the Shoran’s philosophy of resistance: postcolonial resistance, ecofeminism, and Quaker theology. I then …

If Somebody Knows About That Nose, It’S Not The Forgetful Maid: False Memory And The Environment Of Recall In Tristram Shandy, Kylene Cave

Andrews Research Conference

In his seven-volume novel, In Search of Lost Time (1913-1927), Marcel Proust explores the depths and limitations of involuntary memory and argues that remembrance of the past is inherently altered and unreliable. Referred to by many scholars as Proustian Memory, this theory explicates both the revision that takes place in the act of remembering as well as the inherent fictionality of these recollections. Written, however, nearly two-hundred years earlier, Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1759-64) hints at some of the same claims regarding the reconstruction of the past through the act of remembering. Deeply concerned with how and to what extent …

Shakespeare And The Cultural Olympiad: Contesting Gender And The British Nation In The Bbc’S Hollow Crown, L Monique Pittman

Faculty Publications

As part of the 2012 Cultural Olympiad celebrating both the Queen's Diamond Jubilee and the London Olympics, the BBC launched a season of programs, entitled Shakespeare Unlocked, most notably presenting the plays of the second tetralogy in four feature-length adaptations released under the unifying title The Hollow Crown. These plays so obviously engaged with the question of English nationalism suited a year in which the United Kingdom wrestled with British identity in a post-colonial and post-Great Recession world. Through its adaptative and filmic vocabularies, however, The Hollow Crown advances a British nationalism unresponsive to the casualties — often women and …

Language As Leadership, Shirley Freed

Journal of Applied Christian Leadership

"Human beings have a fundamental connection to “home.” Christian leaders all have the underlying goal of leading the way home. We speak of heaven as home; we use phrases like, “home is where the heart is,” and “home Sweet home.” When circumstances are difficult, when we are worn and discouraged, we lean on life’s tired dreams and murmur, “i just want to go home.” home means many things to each of us, but i think that language is one of the vehicles that takes us home. For example, i always jump when i hear a Canadian accent, and i say …

Gender, Family, And Morality In Ben Jonson’S Volpone, Shanelle Kim

Posters, Presentations, and Papers

During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in England, the transformation in categories of value resulting from a money economy clashed with older forms of institutionalized values. Ben Jonson’s dramatic satire Volpone (1606) diagnoses social ills arising from the emerging proto-capitalist culture of his time. Though Jonson critiques the corrosive impact of a money culture, the two distinct embodiments of moral good in Jonson’s play, Celia and Bonario, prove ineffective in battling the creeping value transformations associated with money. In part, their failure derives from systemic fissures in Early Modern understandings of the family unit and gendered roles within such a …

P-05 A Study In Red: The Codification And Practical Application Of A Copyediting Procedure, Nathan Berglund

Honors Scholars & Undergraduate Research Poster Symposium Programs

Editing is an integral part of publishing professional-level writing, but editing—specifically copyediting—can be very subjective, relying on the copyeditor’s best judgment. For novice editors such as myself, this responsibility can be intimidating. For this research project, I formulated and tested a step-by-step copyediting procedure aimed at alleviating these jitters. By reading copyediting guides and interviewing four active copyeditors, I developed a procedure. I then tested that procedure on Timothy Huck’s 115-page manuscript, The Lights of the Arno: A Novel. I conclude that even with a standardized editing methodology, editors will always need to rely on their subjective judgment.

P-14 Discourse And Narrative: Creating Gender Control In Junot Diaz’S The Brief Wondrous Life Of Oscar Wao, Charles Lee

Honors Scholars & Undergraduate Research Poster Symposium Programs

Junot Diaz’s Pulitzer-Prize-Winning 2007 novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao explores Dominican masculinity through narrator Yunior de Las Casas’s portrayal of protagonist Oscar de León’s family history. Yunior’s perceived virility shapes his understanding of masculinity, which he stresses through the novel’s plot and structure. This analysis considers how Yunior constructs Dominican masculinity through his narrative by marginalizing and emasculating passive characters such as Oscar. I argue that Yunior’s narrative closely links definitions of masculinity and power as he strives to dominate passive characters in order to assert his virility as the “best” method for being a Dominican man.

P-20 “The Story Which He Never Stops Telling Himself”: Autobiography, Narrative Community, And The Deconstruction Of Selfhood In Virginia Woolf’S The Waves, Melodie Roschman

Honors Scholars & Undergraduate Research Poster Symposium Programs

This paper examines narrative, biography, and selfhood in Virginia Woolf’s The Waves (1931). The novel, a “play-poem,” follows six friends’ monologues from childhood to death. I analyze aspiring writer Bernard from his childhood of telling stories about companions to his inability to narrate his autobiography, arguing that he fails because he has no self to narrate. Referencing Jacques Derrida’s Of Grammatology’s (1974) theory of the deconstructed self identifiable only in conversation, I argue that Bernard destroys his identity by silencing his friends and becoming the sole speaker; Woolf’s biographical theory thereby establishes the communal self, prefiguring tenets of postmodern …

Faces And Figures Of Fortune: Astrological Physiognomy In Tamburlaine Part 1., Vanessa I. Corredera

Faculty Publications

When articulating the relationship between man and the world around him (or her), George Peele imagines man as a canvas, a 'picture' of the universe, a microcosm whose makeup carries the 'face' or the viewable surface of the macrocosm. Peele's statement perfectly encapsulates the early modern belief in signatures and correspondences, in which 'Individual objects on earth...contain the signature of the heavenly bodies to which they supposedly correspond'. By envisioning man as a 'picture', Peele conceives of the universe as readily legible upon the human body. In his discussion of the history of signatures and correspondences in The Order of …

The Derivation Of Identity: Gender, Masculinity, And Sexuality In Coriolanus, Matthew Chacko, L. Monique Pittman Ph.D.

Posters, Presentations, and Papers

William Shakespeare wrote Coriolanus (1608) when two epistemological modes, empiricism and theater, asserted competing constructions of selfhood. As Renaissance anatomical texts imply, empiricism voiced an increasingly stable and innate subjectivity. In contrast, theater imagined identity as fluid and subject to external manipulation by exposure to the stage. Coriolanus faces a dilemma of selfhood reflecting those conflicting epistemological modes. Outside agents attempt to change his subjectivity, mirroring the theater, while Coriolanus asserts his immutable identity, paralleling empirical understandings. Coriolanus’s concerns of selfhood echo Renaissance subjective anxieties during a changing period as different epistemologies, empiricism and theater, launched rival notions of identity. …