Arts and Humanities Commons^™

“Of The Woman First Of All”: Walt Whitman And Women's Literary History, Vivian Delchamps

Scripps Senior Theses

This thesis contemplates Walt Whitman's role in the lives of 19th and 20th century women writers and his significance to early American feminism. I consider the ways women inspired him to develop pro-feminist ideas about maternity, womanhood, and female liberation.

Annie Proulx's Wyoming: Subversive Storytelling From The Bunchgrass Edge Of The World, Elizabeth P. Tyson

Scripps Senior Theses

Annie Proulx’s three Wyoming short story collections, Close Range, Bad Dirt, and Fine Just the Way It Is, tell regional stories that push against the myths surrounding the American West. Elements of Naturalism in her work reverse the paradigm of man’s dominance over the frontier. The cyclical nature of time in her stories shows the unfulfilling nature of nostalgia. She uses folk storytelling techniques to take an insider’s perspective and to utilize the subversive nature of dark humor.

Magical Me: Self-Insertion Fanfiction As Literary Critique, Melody Strmel

Scripps Senior Theses

This thesis examines the traditions of textual interaction that impact the forms of reading engaged in with fanfiction. This thesis continues by exploring how self-insertion fanfiction functions as a medium through which authors express their reading of the text primary through the emotional impact of the text through wish fulfillment, and the interaction of their cultural moment and the text. Furthermore, it argues that self-insertion fanfiction is a mode of literary critique in which the author acknowledges the effect of a mediated world on their perception of self and reality. Through this recognition of a constructed self, the author rejects …

“It Made The Ladies Into Ghosts”: The Male Hero's Journey And The Destruction Of The Feminine In William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! And Toni Morrison's Song Of Solomon, Catherine Ruth Schetina

Scripps Senior Theses

This thesis is a consideration of the intertextual relationship between William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! and Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon. It considers the objectification and destruction of women and female-coded men in the service of the male protagonist's journey to selfhood, with particular focus on the construction of race, gender, and class performances.

The Young Adult Dystopia As Bildungsroman: Formational Rebellions Against Simplicity In Westerfeld's Uglies And Roth's Divergent, Elena Sharma

Scripps Senior Theses

Young adult novels are undeniably popular and yet they are simultaneously dismissed as inconsequential or light – conventionally deemed low literature, these novels are generally not considered worthy to be discussed in the same spaces as the less popular, more traditional high literature. If a genre of young adult novels were given a place within literary history, it would not only legitimize these novels as more than guilty pleasures or the provinces of adolescent readers who will come to grow out of them, but it would also open up the possibility for other forms of literature to be similarly recognized …

How The Myth Was Made: Time, Myth, And Narrative In The Work Of William Faulkner, Katherine A. Macdonnell

Scripps Senior Theses

It is all too easy to dismiss myth as belonging to the realm of the abstract and theoretical, too removed from reality to constitute anything pragmatic. And yet myth makes up the very fabric of society, informing the way history is understood and the way people and things are remembered.

William Faulkner’s works approach myth with a healthy skepticism, only gradually coming to find value in a process that is often destructive; his works demand of their readers the same perceptive criticism. This thesis approaches myth through the lens of Faulkner's "A Rose for Emily," Absalom, Absalom!, and "The …

On The Matter Of God’S Goodness: An Examination Of The Failure Of Theodicies, Herman Melville, And An Alternative Approach To The Problem Of Evil, Marie Angeles

Scripps Senior Theses

Within Judeo-Christianity there is a belief in an all perfect God who is omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent. However, in this world evil and suffering exists, so how is it possible that an all perfect God can exist? This is called the problem of evil. This thesis examines the problem of evil and how philosophers like Alvin Plantinga, John Hick, and Richard Swinburne attempt to solve the problem of evil through different theodicies. In this paper I argue that all three philosophers and their theodicies fail to solve the problem of evil. I then turn to the writings of Herman Melville, …