Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Restorative Practices In English Language Arts: My Journey Towards Linguistic Justice, Ariana Skeese

Master of Arts in English Plan II Graduate Projects

In this final portfolio, I examine anti-racist pedagogy in English Language Arts Education.

The Bengali Oil-Eaters: A Speculative Approach To New Materialism And The Nonhuman In Contemporary Petrofiction, Jenna Wayland

Honors Projects

Despite oil’s heavy saturation within the context of contemporary global life, novelistic registrations of oil frontiers and extractive drilling in contemporary world literature remain proportionally barren with regards to oil’s political and geographical importance across the world-system. Petro-cultural production, transnational in scale and imposing in material basis, relegates oil to a paradoxical literary deferment. The general invisibility of petrofiction within the petro-sphere suggests that the materialist basis of petroleum and its fraught geopolitical history has culturally transformed oil into a repressed, peripheral, and hidden material that subsequently renders the oil-encounter unseen in contemporary literature. This creative synthesis of the oil-encounter …

Trauma Is A Wound: Demonstrating The Use Of Character Analysis To Practice Clinical Analysis, Madisyn Beare

Honors Projects

Evidence-based treatments of trauma require clinicians to base their treatments on the client’s specific and individual needs, experiences, cognitions, and place in recovery. Essentially, each new client is a new and unique case, and the practice of understanding how trauma may affect an individual only comes from clinical exposure.Literature provides the public with somewhat of an aid in these circumstances: fictional characters are not real people, and therefore can undergo limitless character analyses. Analyzing a fictional character allows clinicians the ability to practice their exploration of various behavioral indicators of mental health concerns while honoring the ethical code of non-maleficence, …

Analyzing The Cynical Perspective Of Death In The Book Thief, Dorothy Elizabeth Hollar

Masters Theses

In The Book Thief by Markus Zusak, death is used as a theme and a character to convey the plot of the story. The character of death is used as a device to show the life of a young girl living in Nazi Germany through the eyes of something more sinister and pessimistic. The story explores trauma, friendship, and the power of words when it seems all hope is lost. This thesis will explore the aspect of death as a character and will examine how it works in the story. The creative portion of my thesis will examine the themes …

Antisemitism & Vampires: The Surprising Roots Of A Popular Cultural Monster, Hannah Ross

English

This essay was for Justin Shaw’s fall 2023 English major capstone class. The essay examines antisemitism and vampires, specifically Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula, John Polidori’s short story The Vampyre; A Tale, and the episode “Monster Movie” from the TV show Supernatural through the lens of antisemitic stereotypes. By looking at the literary history of the vampire one can trace its physical antisemitic stereotypes and the influence of fear of the “other” with reverse-colonization by Jews. Starting with historically classic 19th century texts and ending with a modern day television show, it is evident that the antisemitic physical stereotypes …

Miscellaneous Literary Works By Alabama Authors: Finding Aid, Bethany Latham

Finding Aids

This collection contains miscellaneous literary works by Alabama authors and biographical information about them. For the purposes of this collection, “Alabama author” can include those born in other states who published works while living in Alabama. Types of works include poetry, short stories, essays, articles, song lyrics, etc. In some cases brief biographies have been compiled or newspaper clippings are included with the works; with some only a bibliography and brief biographical information is provided. Some of this biographical information appears to have been compiled by Thomas J. Freeman, a Library department head, in his capacity as chairman of the …

Law And Its Limits: Ethical Issues In Mary Shelley’S Frankenstein Or, The Modern Prometheus, David S. Caudill

St. Mary's Journal on Legal Malpractice & Ethics

The law and literature movement is frequently associated with the use of literary images of law as a point of reflection upon the ethical obligations of lawyers. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818)—the story of a young scientist whose unorthodox experiments end up creating the famed “monster”—is not, at first glance, a likely candidate for that enterprise. However, Dr. Frankenstein’s ambition and ruthless pursuit of knowledge has become a contemporary image of science out of control and the need for ethical limitations on scientific progress. Consequently, the novel raises currently important issues of regulating science and technology. Given the lawyer’s ethical obligation …

Requiem: Heart-Wrenching “Mass Song” Or A Smoke Screen?, Marie Peteuil

Quest

Bibliographic Trace

Research in progress for ENGL 2333: World Literature II

Faculty Mentor: W. Scott Cheney, Ph.D.

In an 1870 letter, Emily Dickinson described poetry this way: “If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only way I know it. Is there any other way?” During the twentieth century, the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova wrote poetry that embodies Dickinson’s intense definition. My …

Challenging Dominant Ideologies In Order To Center Marginalized Voices And Enrich Learning: Theorizing Social Justice In English Studies Teaching, Heather Holliger

Master of Arts in English Plan II Graduate Projects

This portfolio explores the reproduction of and challenges to dominant ideologies in popular culture and scholarly contexts and examines pedagogies for advancing social justice in the field of English studies through three distinct but interconnected projects. The first project considers pedagogy in the public sphere, examining the power of the meme genre to serve as “critical public pedagogy” within movements for social change. The second project focuses on the role of dominant norms in reproducing social injustices through classroom writing assessment, offering insights from antiracist, queer, feminist, decolonial, translingual, and disability justice scholars. The paper also reviews composition scholars’ strategies …

Witchy Politics: Witches And Witchcraft As Political Tropes From Malleus Malleficarum (1487) To Les Sorcières De La République (2016) And The Mercies (2020), Mallaury Joëlle Marie Gauthier

Foreign Languages & Literatures ETDs

The focus of this thesis are two recent novels featuring witches: Chloé Delaume’s Les Sorcières de la République(The Witches of the Republic, 2016) and Kiran Millwood Hargrave’s The Mercies (2020). The first is a futuristic dystopia set in 2062, during the witch trial of the Sibyl of Cumae. The second is a work of historical fiction based on witch trial records and set in seventeenth-century Finnmark (Norway). Both are feminist novels, and both emphasize the political valence of the witch as a gendered figure. This figure emerged from the misogyny of early modern demonology but acquired its contemporary contours …

Cinematic Camouflage, Jared Valdez

English Language and Literature ETDs

There is a war for recognition happening on the Hollywood battlefield. Traditionally, in every war there is an enemy and an alley; in this study, the enemy is systemic racism, and the alley is Black culture. That is, this dissertation seeks to detail the past, present, and future implications of this battle for truth, inclusion, and recognition in American pop culture. This discussion examines how various multi-media forms like literature, film, television, and comic books work as tools to combat racism in American society. More importantly, the theories presented in this text are all linked to actual tactics of military …

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.

“She Didn’T Know I Was In The Room”: The Effects Of Hatfield’S Illustrations On Readers’ Interpretations Of “The Yellow Wallpaper”, Mason Repas

The Downtown Review

When Charlotte Gilman's short story, "The Yellow Wallpaper," was first published in New England Magazine in 1892, staff illustrator Joseph Hatfield created three realistic-style images to accompany the text. Research suggests that Gilman had no control or influence over these images, which altered readers' perception of her story about the dangers of the rest cure for female hysteria. While Hatfield faced artistic limitations and his intentions are not discoverable today, the choices and details in his illustrations support interpretations of the short story as a piece of horror fiction in which his cohesive series of images is a more reliable …

Owning The Body: Bodily Autonomy And Consent In The Works Of Octavia Butler, Korryn Plantenberg

Theses/Capstones/Creative Projects

During the 1980’s the Second Wave feminist movement provided more interest in interdisciplinary movements towards equity in the case of gender. One movement that slowly grew was Womanism, which included the intersection between race and gender. Specifically, the experiences of black women in the United States. Inspired by this movement authors such as Octavia Butler was a black science fiction author who wrote literature focused on black women. Alongside her preoccupation, with race in science fiction, Butler explores the nature of consent and bodily autonomy in utopian and dystopian futures. Within her novels, she uses Womanism to engage with futuristic …

Humanization Of The Refugee As The Modern Subject In Mohsin Hamid’S Exit West, Ani Gazazyan

English (MA) Theses

This thesis discusses the central concern of the global refugee crisis through the fictional novel Exit West by Mohsin Hamid. The novel tells the story of two protagonists who are portrayed as the modern subject that Hamid comes to humanize, which reflects on current society’s representation of the refugee as dehumanized or “the Other.” Hamid takes his readers on a journey that represents his characters as normal everyday humans that are forced into the process of refugeehood and displacement. Throughout this thesis, I discuss what makes the novel so unique in representing the modern-day refugee. In the first section titled …

Veiled Victorian Vampires: What Literary Antagonists Reveal About Societal Fears Of 19th Century England, Jenna Harford

Honors Theses

In my thesis paper I look at three primary texts, Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations, and Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray to analyze their main antagonists through a vampiric lens. I explain how the characters of Bertha Mason, Miss Havisham, and Dorian Gray are all written with veiled vampiric traits that revolve around themes of sexuality, secrecy and seclusion, and unbridled physical and emotional violence. Although none of these texts is obviously a “vampire novel”, the authors lean into vampire tropes including eerie physical description, doubled relationships, and other vampire lore that can be best …

The Enigmatic Self: An Ongoing Exploration Of Literary Selfhood From The American Renaissance To Contemporary Young Adult Literature, Helene Leichter

Honors Theses

Assuming the near impossible task of sorting through and delineating various conceptions of the self in and throughout literary and civil history, literary critic Irving Howe adopts a highly perceptive and profoundly analytical approach to the enigmatic individual. In the article quoted above, "The Self in Literature," Howe consolidates what he believes to be the most promising attempts at coding and decoding abstractions of the self across numerous literary, philosophical, and sociological texts. The success of Howe’s analysis lies in his ability to simultaneously embrace and scrutinize seemingly incompatible notions of bodily and spiritual discourse. With the knowledge that such …

Pecan Grove Review Volume 21, St. Mary's University

Pecan Grove Review

Creative writings by students, faculty, and staff of the St. Mary's University community.

Psychological Criticism And Shakespearean Allusions In J.M. Barrie’S Dear Brutus: A Neverland For Adults, Kathryn Alley

Senior Honors Theses

In Peter Pan, Sir James Barrie welcomes readers into Neverland, the realm of eternal youth. Barrie’s lesser-known play, Dear Brutus, ushers audiences into a supernatural garden free of responsibility, reality, and permanence. Referring to Cassius’ words in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, the 1917 tragedy explores the consequences of romantic escapism and the seductive power of second chances. Through the lens of Freud’s and Lacan’s psychological criticism, and Barrie’s connection to his might-have-been daughter, Margaret, Dear Brutus unveils the plight of eight mysterious strangers by illustrating that all adults are lost children. Dear Brutus feels in many ways like …

"Real Women Have Bodies": A Study In Adaptation, Madison Ephlin

Honors Projects

The art of adaptation is a difficult process, and is often hard to please general audiences that have a connection to the source material. As a student who studies both English Literature and Film Production, the question asked through this study is what does it take to write a “successful” adaptation? What qualifies as “successful”? How does an adaptation balance the themes, characterization, and plot of a piece of literature with the continuous momentum and visual complexity that the medium of film requires, all in 120 pages or less? This study engages with these questions by actively practicing adaptation, adapting …

Bad Blood: Octavia E. Butler Takes A Bite Out Of Gender And Racial Stereotypes In Fledgling, Abigail Cole

Senior Theses

For contemporary audiences the word “vampire” typically conjures two figures: a Damon Salvatore-esque[1] man with devil may care eyes, dark hair and an equally dark past. Dripping with sex and charm, he struggles with an internal dilemma, his animalistic urge to kill constantly at war with his human morality. On the other hand, we have the sexy, scantily clad white female vampire who uses her feminine wiles and socially “perfect” body to prey upon poor, unsuspecting men, until she is eventually corralled into domestic submission, or killed. While this description fits the broader scale of what the vampiric figure …

Sherwood Anderson And The Industrial Corruption Of Midwestern Individualism, Hudson Rice

Senior Honors Theses

Sherwood Anderson’s literary Midwest reflects many of the idealistic characteristics resulting from the region’s frontier, agrarian origin. The most prominent of these characteristics is the region’s emphasis on and appreciation of human particularity. His novels Winesburg, Ohio and Poor White document the region’s unique relationship with individual particularity and how this particularity clashed with a new industrial lifestyle. The two novels reflect the Midwest’s unique understanding of individuality and offer an explanation for why the region’s response to an industrial cultural overhaul was so damaging for the Midwest’s identity, as the traditional identity was supplanted by an industrial one.

Redeeming Femininity: A Steinian Catholic Feminist Reading Of Flannery O'Connor's Short Fiction, Amanda Pugh

Dissertations and Theses

By situating an analysis of Flannery O’Connor’s short fiction in conversation with Edith Stein’s theology of gender, this project contributes to the critical conversation that interprets O’Connor’s fiction through various feminist frameworks. I respond by proposing an alternative feminist framework that centers O’Connor’s sacramental or incarnational vision of the human body and her characters’ movement from fallenness to redemption. Stein’s theology posits that men and women live their fallenness and redemption in differentiated ways that correspond to their embodied masculinity and femininity, respectively. For men, participating in redemption involves imitating the sacrificial love of Christ’s crucifixion. For women, participating in …

Samozvanets (The Pretender), Matthew Garrell, Alikzandr Malakov

Dartmouth College Master’s Theses

he Russian word Samozvanets most directly translates to Imposter in English. However, for this thesis, I have selected the alternative interpretation of Pretender. Imposter implies the taking or assuming of another’s position. Pretender, more personally, carries the meaning of presenting self as something one is not. It is through the lens of the Pretender that I examine the idea of what it means to be a member of a particular ethnicity, and to engage with one’s cultural heritage. I do this through a collection of fictional stories, investigating various lives within the Russian diaspora following the dissolution of the Soviet …

Parnassus 2023

Parnassus

The 2023 edition of the student literary journal, Parnassus, published by Taylor University in Upland, Indiana.

The Victorian Crisis Of Faith: Uncertainty, Pessimism, Morality, And Monsters. A Look At Nineteenth-Century British Gothic Horror And The Unassailable Unknown, Jay Schroeder

Dissertations and Theses

This work investigates how Gothic narratives employed negative aesthetics, monstrous bodies, exploded meaning, and an unshakable mood of uncertainty to explore rising fears of dwindling morality and impending human doom during the long nineteenth century. Using Eugene Thacker’s cosmic pessimism, Sianne Ngai’s concept of tone, and Stephen Greenblatt’s theories of resonance and wonder, combined with monster theory, Gothic criticism, biological studies of fear, and nineteenth-century studies in medicine, science, and literature, I investigate how these texts constructed monstrous bodies to create an atmosphere of fear that reflected a culture of pessimism and a crisis of faith to contend, albeit unsuccessfully, …

A Black Prometheus Among The Gods: Illuminating African American Literary Tradition In Sam Greenlee's The Spook Who Sat By The Door, Kenneth L. Rainey Iii

Cal Poly Humboldt theses and projects

In his hard-hitting novel The Spook Who Sat by the Door Sam Greenlee aims to help his target African American audience to succeed and thrive as their true selves with the novel functioning as a guide to resisting the ever-present physical and spiritual threat faced daily. On the one hand the novel functions as a manual for civil uprising, but underneath that surface, Greenlee argues that true African American resistance comes through nurturing self-determination, self-love, and self-esteem. This project also argues that Spook ought to be located closer to the center of the African American literary canon and provides comparisons …

Fascism In Sci-Fi: "Mobilizing Passions" In Robert A. Heinlein's Starship Troopers, Alton C. Ayers

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis responds to criticism of Robert A. Heinlein’s Starship Troopers (1959) as a “fascist” novel by further investigating the claim through a close reading of the novel that applies political theory scholarship on fascism. Chapters I and II introduce the novel along with its general reception and controversy. These chapters consider the accusations of “fascism” given to the novel while at the same time understanding that a clear, exact definition of “fascism” has long been grappled with by scholars since the rise of the regimes in Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. Chapters III and IV apply political theory to …

The Contemporary "White Trash" Memoir In Literary, Social And Political Contexts, Ursula Hansberry

Student Theses and Dissertations

This senior thesis is about class in the United States, as expressed and represented in three critically and popularly successful memoirs published by white working-class writers between 2005 and 2018. My thesis explores how these memoirs and their critical and commercial reception demonstrate a profound shift in cultural and social representations of white working-class upbringings in the United States, although not in any simple or obvious way. While readers intuitively grasp that a memoir is not the truth in a directly literal sense, but rather a document that is constructed, edited, framed, shaped, and dramatized, readers and critics at the …

Censorship In Schools: Reading's Position In The Landscape Of Policy Creation, Rachel Beckham

Honors Theses

Censorship is not new to current issues. It has affected authors and speakers for centuries, but it is especially prevalent today, especially in schools. Teachers and librarians are often challenged for the materials they choose to provide to students. Concerned parents object to the materials for containing sexual content, profanity, or LGBTQ+ characters or themes. This study aims to answer the question, “What role, if any, do books containing controversial topics serve in the literature classrooms of today’s students?” To answer this question, the author of this study conducted a literary analysis on the top three most banned books of …