Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Execution By Alien (A Collection Of Poetry), Sara Emma Kahane

Honors Theses

The following is a collection of poems narratively depicting the childhood, adolescence, adulthood, and death of a woman and her memories. I will analyze the poetry in meaning and form as well.

Empower! A Poetry Curriculum For The 21st Century Learner, Misty Maina

Honors Theses

By providing today’s high school students with a multimodal curriculum centered around critical inquiry, worldview, personal relevance, and by providing students will many opportunities to respond to these principles with their own writings, students will be empowered to engage with their learning and the world in meaningful and intentional ways. Empower! poetry curriculum is designed to help students ask questions about themselves, their immediate surroundings and influences, and about the world around them. Students will be encouraged to take the time and energy for deeper thinking and reflection as they engage with the activities of Empower! While there will be …

The Poetry Of Revolution: The Legacy Of A Written Rebellion, Eva Erickson

Honors Theses

In Solmaz Sharif’s debut poetry collection Look, she incorporates United States Department of Defense terminology in order to simultaneously revolt against forced erasure and reclaim words that were once used for violent and oppressive purposes. This thesis argues that poetry is an inherently politicized, revolutionary tool that possesses the ability to radicalize and incite rebellion against silencing, dismissive power structures. Sharif’s identity, as an Iranian-American immigrant woman, is omnipresent in her own interpretation of familial trauma at the hands of American imperialist forces. In addition, the events of the late twentieth-century Iranian revolution that resulted in the deaths of many …

The Hair You Wished To Comb, Sarah Barch

Honors Theses

This thesis is a collection of poems exploring gender and trauma in Greek mythology by retelling classical stories in a female voice.

The Typewriter And The Literary Sphere: An Analysis Of Turn-Of-The-Century Literature, Emma K. Holdbrooks

Honors Theses

My thesis explores the typewriter’s impact on early 20^th century American literature. By providing authors with the means to produce work accurately and effectively, the typewriter changed the process of writing. Typewriters also created job opportunities for women, who often served as typists. The typist became the foothold position that changed America’s perception of women in the work force and helped usher in a new social concept, “the New Woman.” To illustrate my claim, I show how the typewriter allowed poets like E. E. Cummings to experiment with spacing. Cummings made the typewriter’s standardization of text and spacing into …

African-American Poetry, Music, And Politics, Tyler H. Macdonald

Honors Theses

The 2016 decision to award songwriter and musician Bob Dylan the Nobel Prize in Literature sparked a worldwide debate on the relationship between music and poetry and raised many questions about music’s place in literary canon. However, this debate is nothing new. Questions about the relationship between music and poetry have long been debated. Some scholars believe the two disciplines should be studied separately, while others prefer to consider the connections between the two.

My project begins with a question: if Bob Dylan’s songs can be considered poetry, what other forms of music might also be considered poetry? Rap implements …

Blooming Lotus, Brian Nguyen

Honors Theses

While reflecting on my poetry chapbook, Blooming Lotus, I ask myself what I was trying to accomplish by creating the chapbook. I have always been interested in my East Asian culture, but growing up as an Asian American has resulted in some ignorance in regards to the topic. I wanted to explore more of my own heritage through the creation of this chapbook by writing poems inspired by East Asian culture. Not only did I want to expose myself to East Asian culture but I also wanted to expose my readers to it as well. Most of my poems required …

Songs Of Innocence Versus Songs Of Experience: A Study Of William Blake, Rose Ray

Honors Theses

The purpose of this project is to compare and/or contrast the poems in the Songs of Innocence with those of like title or subject matter in Songs of Experience, using Blake's life and philosophies as a background to provide details which will give more meaning to the poems themselves.