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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities

Understanding The American Subaltern: An Exploration Of Complex Literary Characters Through Socio-Cultural Lenses, Sophie Gioffre Jul 2018

Understanding The American Subaltern: An Exploration Of Complex Literary Characters Through Socio-Cultural Lenses, Sophie Gioffre

English Summer Fellows

This project involves the analysis of three novels — Stephen Crane’s Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, Ann Petry’s The Street, and Toni Morrison’s Sula — featuring main characters who are forced to navigate realistic socio-economic environments rooted in racist, sexist, and classist systems of oppression in the United States of America. Through the process of completing close-readings of the novels, conducting extensive secondary research on historical contexts, and examining other scholarly criticisms and interpretations of these novels, I develop new insights into the main characters’ plights. To transfer this conceptual understanding into a more personal and empathetic …


Complete Bosoms, Incomplete Men: Reading Abstinence In Measure For Measure, Joseph Makuc Jul 2018

Complete Bosoms, Incomplete Men: Reading Abstinence In Measure For Measure, Joseph Makuc

English Summer Fellows

Measure for Measure has often been called one of Shakespeare’s problem plays, and as recent productions show, Measure’s problems — including sexual coercion and governmental corruption — resonate with readers and audiences today. Recent scholarship has examined sexual abstinence in Measure for Measure in terms of its historical economic and religious context, arguing that protagonist Isabella represents a radical break from merchant economics by opting out of the sexual economy. However, Angelo and the Duke, the play's other central characters, also make claims about the values of abstinence, and those claims are at odds with Isabella's claims. My research will …


Seasoned Antisemitism: Cannibalism In The Destruction Of Jerusalem, Bailey Ludwig Jul 2018

Seasoned Antisemitism: Cannibalism In The Destruction Of Jerusalem, Bailey Ludwig

English Summer Fellows

My project examines an episode of maternal cannibalism within the medieval poem The Destruction of Jerusalem. Several variations of the story of the 70 AD Roman siege of Jerusalem that include this particular episode exist; the story even has roots in the bible. I am looking at the poem within this context and noting its differences in order to best determine its intentions. This version, more so than any other I have encountered, eliminates complicating factors, such as the murder of the child or presence of male figures, in order to make its antisemitic message as direct as possible. The …


Literary Beasts: Use Of Animal Imagery In The Canterbury Tales, Morgan Kentsbeer May 2018

Literary Beasts: Use Of Animal Imagery In The Canterbury Tales, Morgan Kentsbeer

English Independent Study Projects

Through this paper I am going to argue that animals from the Middle Ages held more worth and were often considered to be more important than their modern counterparts. This gets shown through the three types of ways that animals are used within The Canterbury Tales. First, they are used as allegorical shorthands that imply more meaning with a fewer amount of words; this concept is primarily shown in “The Miller’s Tale” and “The Wife of Bath’s Tale.” Secondly, animals are crafted into characters but still end up being used as tools by other characters or Chaucer himself. For this, …


Maybe She Found Me In A Poem, Robin Gow Apr 2018

Maybe She Found Me In A Poem, Robin Gow

English Honors Papers

Maybe She Found Me in a Poem explores my own family relationship and family stories through a variety of poetic forms, persona poetry, and prose pieces centered on an imagined relationship with my grandmother who died before I was born. The collection asks, “How much are our family stories our own?” and “Can we create memory?” Themes of haunting, ghosts, queerness, shared memory, death, and burial are carried throughout the collection and brought forward in their respective sections. Images are placed throughout as part of the collection to amplify the “haunting” power of the text.


The Bird That Flew Backwards, Robin Gow Apr 2018

The Bird That Flew Backwards, Robin Gow

English Honors Papers

The Bird that Flew Backwards examines women poets from literary Modernism in the 1910s and Beat culture in the 1950s. Analyzing these eras in tandem reveals contrasting historical constructions of American womanhood and how sociocultural trends influenced how the “poetess” constructed herself and her work and illustrates the retrograde nature of women’s rights in the 1950s. Through close reading, digital mapping, and historical background, The Bird that Flew Backwards establishes a new critical perspective by linking the more well-known Modernists with lesser-known women in 1910s Greenwich Village Bohemia. This linkage between eras branches off to explore themes of formation of …