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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities

"A Complicated Story, An Unsolved Mystery": An Experiment In Poetry And The Ethics Of Representation, Darren Wood May 2019

"A Complicated Story, An Unsolved Mystery": An Experiment In Poetry And The Ethics Of Representation, Darren Wood

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The New York Juvenile Asylum, founded in 1851, was one of New York’s first institutional responses to the problems associated with the poor. It, and the theories of asylum that undergird the institution, still exist today in the form of Children’s Village. The location of Children’s Village, located just a few hundred yards from my home, prompted me to consider the distance between my family and the children who reside at Children’s Village; between my historical context and that of the children who resided at the New York Juvenile Asylum - and their parents who surrendered them there; and between …


Hearing/S: Will In The Carceral Archive, Kayla Morse May 2019

Hearing/S: Will In The Carceral Archive, Kayla Morse

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This long-form poetry project follows the human will — in this case the “criminal,” or captive will — as it is manhandled through an archive of reverends, wardens and superintendents narrating the future of prison reform. Drawing primarily from National Prison Association Conference archives between the years 1874 and 1895, these documents saturate the work with a will resistant but compelled towards subjugation by the state — as it appears within the text across forced labor economies, eugenic prison science that dictates starvation, classification, and isolation as the rule, the dehumanization of banal bureaucratic processes, the visceral and spectacular violence …


Existentialmd.Com: Building Towards An Embodied Internet Aesthetic, Natasha Ochshorn May 2019

Existentialmd.Com: Building Towards An Embodied Internet Aesthetic, Natasha Ochshorn

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

ExistentialMD.com is a website that aims to treat the body as an emotional and social subject in an online space that is purposefully bodied and fleshy. The website contrasts original creative nonfiction essays with a formal structure that alludes to the medical website WebMD. Mimicking WebMD’s symptom checker, which asks users to locate their discomfort with increasing specificity before suggesting conditions they might be suffering from, ExistentialMD uses a similar structure to yield results that are more exploratory than diagnostic, and which envision the body as a site of experience and emotionality. Form and content combine to create an …


Between The Living And The Dead, Laura Henriksen Feb 2019

Between The Living And The Dead, Laura Henriksen

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Throughout my studies at the Graduate Center, I have attempted to deepen my understanding of how some people, such as myself and my family, came to be white, and what that means, and how it can be undone. This question of whiteness has pushed me further back ontologically, or deeper down, to include how some people came to be human, and then even further, how some matter came to be living. In my thesis project I attempt to participate in dismantling one of the most fundamental binaries in binary thinking — the strict and uncomplicated division between the living and …


Reverse The Curse: Colonialist Legacies Of The Magic Poem, Karen E. Lepri Feb 2019

Reverse The Curse: Colonialist Legacies Of The Magic Poem, Karen E. Lepri

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation investigates the conceptual relationships between poetry, magic, and race and their effects on both intellectual and creative practices from modernism through the post-war era. In doing so, this study works cross-disciplinarily, tracing early anthropological and sociological characterizations of primitive religion in connection to early-to-mid-twentieth-century literary study and writing. In working across disciplines at this particularly fungible moment in the history of the academy, this dissertation attempts to understand how the concurrent colonial global context effects the production and organization of knowledge just prior to and during modernism. It ultimately seeks to de-colonize literary thinking about poetry by performing …