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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
Final Master's Portfolio, Savannah Packman
Final Master's Portfolio, Savannah Packman
Master of Arts in English Plan II Graduate Projects
This portfolio uses Marxist and feminist film theory to analyze various forms of visual media. It analyzes Mark Mylod's film The Menu (2022), Julie Taymor's film Across the Universe (2007), the historic V-J Day Kiss photograph, and popular TikTok videos. This portfolio focuses on the impact of capitalism in the political and economic sphere. It also analyzes images of women throughout history and critiques how these images have been used to formulate the American body politic.
Triumph In The Suburbs: Richard Ford And The Spaces Of New Capitalism, John Gorton
Triumph In The Suburbs: Richard Ford And The Spaces Of New Capitalism, John Gorton
All Theses
In his 1986 book America, Baudrillard noted that “the most banal suburb…is more at the centre of the world than any of the cultural manifestations of old Europe.” My thesis argues that this monumental shift from the suburbs as enclaves at the outer edges of cultural urban centers to “the centre of the world” is at the heart of Richard Ford’s realist project in his Pulitzer Prize winning Bascombe series starting with The Sportswriter in 1986. Emergent twentieth- and twenty-first-century literature scholars have been interested in the schism between the fictionalized representation and the lived experience of suburbia — while …
A Lesson In Mourning: The Evolution Of The English Anti-Elegy, K. Matthew Bennett
A Lesson In Mourning: The Evolution Of The English Anti-Elegy, K. Matthew Bennett
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
This thesis analyzes the evolution of the anti-elegy originating with Thomas Hardy’s elegiac sequence in memory of his wife Emma; Poems of 1912-1913. Using French post-structuralist Georges Bataille’s The Accursed Share as a theoretical lens, Hardy’s anti-elegies are analyzed and rhetorically connected to English war poet Siegfried Sassoon’s anti-elegies. Hardy’s anti-sentimentality, fatalistic outlook on death, and rejection of the Christian afterlife seeps into the language of Sassoon’s war poems which serve as a protest to the dehumanizing effects of late capitalism witnessed during the First World War. Hardy and Sassoon’s anti-elegies, with their hyper-focus on the elegized body, are …
A Sense Of Unending: Apocalypse And Post-Apocalypse In Novels Of Late Capitalism, Brent Linsley
A Sense Of Unending: Apocalypse And Post-Apocalypse In Novels Of Late Capitalism, Brent Linsley
Graduate Theses and Dissertations
From Frank Kermode to Norman Cohn to John Hall, scholars agree that apocalypse historically has represented times of radical change to social and political systems as older orders are wiped away and replaced by a realignment of respective norms. This paradigm is predicated upon an understanding of apocalypse that emphasizes the rebuilding of communities after catastrophe has occurred. However, in the last half-century, narratives that emphasize the destruction of human civilization without this restorative component have begun to overshadow the more historically popular post-apocalyptic models that were particularly abundant during the early days of the Cold War. In light of …
Does Money Indeed Buy Happiness? “The Forms Of Capital” In Fitzgerald’S Gatsby And Watts’ No One Is Coming To Save Us, Allie Harrison Vernon
Does Money Indeed Buy Happiness? “The Forms Of Capital” In Fitzgerald’S Gatsby And Watts’ No One Is Coming To Save Us, Allie Harrison Vernon
English (MA) Theses
Looking primarily at two critically acclaimed texts that concern themselves with American citizenship—F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and Stephanie Powell Watts’ No One is Coming to Save Us—I analyze the claims made about citizenship identities, rights, and consequential access to said rights. I ask, how do these narratives about citizenship sustain, create, or re-envision American myth? Similarly, how do the narratives interact with the dominant culture at large? Do any of these texts achieve oppositional value, and/or modify the complex hegemonic structure? I use Pierre Bourdieu’s “The Forms of Capital” to investigate the ways in which economic, cultural, …
"The Great Pleasures Don't Come So Cheap:" Material Objects, Pragmatic Behavior And Aesthetic Commitments In Willa Cather's Fiction, Bari Taylor Bossis
"The Great Pleasures Don't Come So Cheap:" Material Objects, Pragmatic Behavior And Aesthetic Commitments In Willa Cather's Fiction, Bari Taylor Bossis
Senior Projects Spring 2019
Senior Project submitted to The Division of Multidisciplinary Studies of Bard College.
Moral Margins: Ethics And Economics In American Northern Literature, 1837-1900, John Adam Stromski
Moral Margins: Ethics And Economics In American Northern Literature, 1837-1900, John Adam Stromski
Doctoral Dissertations
“Moral Margins: Slavery and Capitalism in American Northern Literature, 1837-1900,” focuses on the intersections of slavery, capitalism, and literature, building on recent historical scholarship on the myriad ways slavery impacted the growth of American capitalism. Nowhere is this relationship more prominent than in the nineteenth century, when slavery experienced its highest levels of economic and political influence. Scholars of capitalism and American slavery have tended to focus on the South, the obvious locus of slavery, but little attention is paid to the North, where this relationship is more veiled. I argue that Northern literature shows the ethical complexities of slavery-based …
"What, To A Prisoner, Is The Fourth Of July?": Mumia Abu-Jamal And Contemporary Narratives Of Slavery, Luis Omar Ceniceros
"What, To A Prisoner, Is The Fourth Of July?": Mumia Abu-Jamal And Contemporary Narratives Of Slavery, Luis Omar Ceniceros
Open Access Theses & Dissertations
Writing from a specifically Black postmodern perspective, former death row inmate Mumia Abu-Jamal composes his multimedia slave narrative as a postmodern Neo-slave narrative. From the Atlantic slave-trade to the United States prison-industrial complex, from Quobna Ottobah Cugoano to Mumia Abu-Jamal, the slave narrative exists as a critique against oppressive State powers and a collective affirmation of interiority and embodied significance. For Abu-Jamal, his incarceration is indicative of an ever-pervasive capitalist power-structure that in the past has, in the present is, and in the future will control designated groups of made marginalized masses in order that preeminent capitalist beneficiaries preserve elite …
The Dixie Plantation State: Antebellum Fiction And Global Capitalism, Katharine Aileen Burnett
The Dixie Plantation State: Antebellum Fiction And Global Capitalism, Katharine Aileen Burnett
Doctoral Dissertations
“The Dixie Plantation State: Antebellum Fiction and Global Capitalism” connects the development of literature of the U.S. South to the ideological tensions inherent in the southern plantation economy before the Civil War. Southern literary form during this time reflects an economy that was sustained by international capitalism but which imagined itself as a version of provincial feudalism. The antebellum southern economy was defined by slavery and individual plantations, which created a culture that was isolated, rural, and oppressive. However, with global trade through cotton plantations as the driving force behind regional profit, the southern economy was also shaped by a …