Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Comparative Studies Of Cross-Cultural Poetics: Robin Coste Lewis And Timothy Yu, Lili Xu

Lawrence University Honors Projects

My use of the term cross-cultural refers to poetry that arises from cultures and ideologies other than the hegemonic ones, which in this paper means African American poet Robin Coste Lewis’s 79-page long narrative poem “Voyage of the Sable Venus,” and Asian American poet Timothy Yu’s collection of parody poems—100 Chinese Silences. Inspired by Jahan Ramazani’s book about transnational poetics, this paper aims to challenge a mononationalist way of reading cross-cultural poetry by suggesting new approaches to do so. A mononationalist way of reading cross-cultural poetry has been influenced by the residues of a literary paradigm that assumes the …

Sonali Fernando's Mary Seacole: The Real Angel Of The Crimea As Successful Cinematic Adaptation Of Post-Colonial Voices, Louric Rankine

Lawrence University Honors Projects

This honors thesis will explore the thematic relationship between Jamaican-British pioneer Mary Seacole’s autobiography, The Wonderful Adventures of Mary Seacole in Many Lands (1857) and the BBC docudrama Mary Seacole: The Real Angel of Crimea (2005) directed by Sonali Fernando. In this paper, critical conversations around race, gender, class, and citizenship in both literature and cinema will contextually add to the dynamic between literature and film adaptations, while contextually contributing to the lack thereof for intersectional experiences in narrative media. Moreover, the paper will consult both literary and film theorists such as Homi Bhabha and bell hooks to understand postcolonial …

A Revolution In Gothic Manners: The Rise Of Sentiment From Walpole To Radcliffe, Katherine E. Stein

Lawrence University Honors Projects

In this study, I assert that prior to the French Revolution, early eighteenth-century Gothic works such as Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto and Clara Reeve’s The Old English Baron attempt to understand the potential consequences revolution could have on British society and that both texts conclude that society can only be maintained by upholding behavioral expectations through proper manners. However, the French Revolution acted as an inflection point within the genre, and—through the analysis of the polemic texts Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France and Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman—I argue that the …

The Maternal Body Of James Joyce's Ulysses: The Subversive Molly Bloom, Arthur Moore

Lawrence University Honors Projects

This paper provides a feminist criticism of Ulysses in an attempt to understand the relevance of Joyce and this novel today, as academia is experiencing a welcome pressure to move away from the study of ‘old white men.’ The interest of this paper is an interest in the alterity of the bodies of Ulysses. While once these bodies challenged the common discourse because they were ruled obscene, the bodies of the text continue to challenge both critics and a male literary tradition. As Joyce said about Ulysses, “my book is the epic of the human body.” Ulysses itself …

Janeites And Their Benefactors: The Heritage Industry And The Commodification Of Nostalgia, Emma Swidler

Lawrence University Honors Projects

This project sets out to understand how Jane Austen's House Museum and Chawton House have told the stories of Jane Austen and British heritage over the course of the past 72 years. The two houses are nine minutes apart by foot, a walk taken regularly by Austen herself from her home at Chawton Cottage (now the Museum) to her brother’s home down the road (Chawton House). However, since the Museum’s establishment in 1947 and the House’s founding in 2003, the two houses have remained separate nonprofit cultural institutions with distinct purposes: the Museum preserves Austen’s home and legacy, and the …

Fashioning A Feeble Mind: Cognitive Disability In American Fiction, 1830-1940, Lucy Wallitsch

Lawrence University Honors Projects

Between 1830 and 1940, American fiction is populated by an increasing number of cognitively disabled characters. I explore the relationships between these cognitively disabled characters and the rapidly changing scientific and political environments in which they were created. Drawing on a variety of regionally specific primary sources, I analyze the influences of medical and social conceptions of cognitive disability on works of American fiction containing characters which fit historical labels for cognitive disability such as The Deerslayer, “Life in the Iron Mills,” the short stories of Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, The Sound and the Fury, and Of …

Daniel Defoe’S Literary Economies: The Shifting Role Of Narrative Uncertainty, Speculation, And Providence In Robinson Crusoe And Roxana., Terese J. Swords

Lawrence University Honors Projects

In my honors project, I analyze how Daniel Defoe’s first novel, Robinson Crusoe (1719), and his last, Roxana (1724), offer shifting economic commentary regarding England’s emerging 18^th century credit economy. This shift does not come as too much of a surprise, as his first and last novel straddle the historic moment of the South Sea Bubble’s burst. Therefore, Defoe’s works, when analyzed sequentially, capture the evolving attitude towards value and credit that was occurring throughout all of England.

In my first chapter, “Crusoe’s Post Facto Journal Editing: ‘How wonderfully we are delivered when we are aware of it,’” I …

Jane Austen's Liminal Heroines: Rituals Of Personal And Social Growth, Allison V. Juda

Lawrence University Honors Projects

Jane Austen’s six novels all follow a liminal heroine through her journey of personal growth, ultimately concluding with the success of the heroine and her society. In my project I examine how this liminal plot structure works, combining anthropological theories of liminality (most prominently those of Arnold van Gennep and Victor Turner) with the narrative structure of Austen’s novels. The growth of the heroine through the phases of liminality and eventual reintegration into society is marked by several challenges to the morality of the heroine. Yet, these challenges are, in fact, tests for the society just as much as they …

"The Sister Was Not A Mister": Gender And Sexuality In The Writings Of Gertrude Stein And Virginia Woolf, Jillian P. Fischer

Lawrence University Honors Projects

This thesis explores the topics of gender and sexuality within Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons and Virginia Woolf’s Orlando by analyzing the texts through the lens of early twentieth-century sexologists and twentieth and twenty first century gender theorists. Both works reveal a common critique of the heteronormativity present within early twentieth-century understandings of sexuality and propose alternative spheres of sexuality and gender identity. Stein creates an alternative sphere in which desire is expanded. Beginning with an exploration of consumerist desire, Stein ultimately reveals a utopian vision of lesbian sexuality and the foregrounding of female desire, sexuality, and pleasure. Woolf’s alternative consists …

A Seat At The Table: William Lisle Bowles And The Development Of Romanticism, Jeremy B. Savage

Lawrence University Honors Projects

A study of the Romantic poet William Lisle Bowles. I challenge the modern critical perception of Bowles in order to argue that his place in the study of Romanticism has been drastically understated. It is my assertion that by reading Bowles thoroughly, paying specific attention to his influence on the beginnings of Romanticism, to his particular influence on Coleridge and to the critical advancements represented by the amalgamation of his actual poetry with his later critical reflections, affords us not only an understanding of Bowles’s active role in the development of Romanticism as it has traditionally been understood, but also …

Remembering As A Source Of Creation In The Poetry Of Ezra Pound And H.D. And The Musical Representations Of The Holocaust By Arnold Schoenberg And Steve Reich, Ruth J. Jacobs

Lawrence University Honors Projects

This project explores the complex relationship between language and violence. Many theorists, such as Elaine Scarry, argue that language is silenced by violence and that extreme trauma inherently defies representation. Despite the impossibility of representing trauma, its preservation is a cultural and historical necessity. I am going to examine the different ways extreme violence is depicted in both poetry and music and the complex moral issues that are raised by these representations. Ezra Pound wrote The Pisan Cantos while imprisoned in a cage at the DTC in Pisa. I plan on exploring the role of personal and cultural memory in …

Whence Comes Black Art?: The Construction And Application Of “Black Motivation”, Derrell Acon

Lawrence University Honors Projects

George Schuyler, in his tragically misguided 1926 essay for The Nation magazine, “The Negro-Art Hokum,” suggests that the only difference between Blacks and Whites is the color of skin, and that both races experience the same social, psychological and educational forces in America. He blatantly disregards American racism and inequality, and in his attempt to put forth his advocacy of color-blindness he merely projects and perpetuates the most racist of ideals within our country. Schuyler views the concept of Black Art very narrowly and insists on the impossibility of such an idea because of the supposed Americanness of the art. …

Water-Babies, White Rabbits And Lost Boys: Examining The Victorian Age Through The Lens Of Children's Literature, Elizabeth Carpenter

Lawrence University Honors Projects

Children’s literature has been studied throughout its existence, and is a valuable tool for examining the issues of the time periods in which they are written, however they can also be used as lenses through which to critique the societies in which they exist. My project examines Charles Kingsley’s Water-Babies, Lewis Carrol’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There and J.M Barrie’s Peter Pan as vehicles of social critique and commentary. All three stories present interesting main characters who act as foils for the issues their authors deal with, from the debate over evolution, …

What You Can See From The Top, Alicia Bones

Lawrence University Honors Projects

A series of interrelated vignettes about a family of circus people and a sixteen-year-old girl who becomes involved with them in strange ways.