Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Good Girls Don't, Tess Fresco

English Honors Theses

Set in the year 1980, "Good Girls Don't" is a bracing coming-of-age story about Cathy, a young woman in Los Angeles who dreams of escaping the city yet feels intimately bound to it. Los Angeles as a terrifyingly beautiful place, in this specific time, figures prominently in this novella; even as Cathy enjoys smoking pot with her best friend Heather, rolls her eyes at her boss at Jack In the Box, and moons over sexy surfer boys, the threat of a serial murderer targeting young women hangs over her mind. On a date one night with Jim, an older boy …

Storytelling & Holistic Mental Health: A Fiction Collection, Grace Holmes

Self-Determined Majors Final Projects

In this collection, I have used fiction to explore my academic focus on the holistic perception of mental health and healing. In my time at Skidmore College, I have explored all kinds of perspectives– religious/spiritual, psychosocial, medical, anthropological– what I have found is that the only generalizable thing is our need to tell a story about what we’re going through. My collection strives to show the value in the experiences of people with mental illnesses and addictions: how these experiences are often sidelined or seen as inferior/incorrect/out of touch with reality, but how these “alternative” realities can create inspiration, excitement, …

The Laurels, Emma Mackinnon

English Honors Theses

A Russian ice hockey player, Nikita Morozov, enlists the help of a retired, American goaltender, Tate Beacon, to defect from Russia so that he can play for the NHL team, the Laurels. Nikita struggles against pressures from his team and government to remain in Russia, while Tate confronts a past he thought he had left behind for good.

Carpenters: A Short Story Collection, Grace Keir

English Honors Theses

This collection of four short stories explores the interfamilial dynamics and internalized traumas of womanhood across three generations of mothers, sisters, and daughters. In doing so, these stories confront the raw, painful, and beautiful lives and experiences of women and girls.

Adapting To Adaptation: Turning Ya Literature Into Television, Adam Weinreb

English Honors Theses

I have always loved film and television, whether for casual consumption or academic pursuits. Throughout my time as an English and American Studies double major (and almost a Media and Film Studies minor), I have opted to study film and TV at every chance I could. In my junior year I began writing my own film, and I completed that film in the first half of senior year. When entering my final year of the English major and faced with making a decision surrounding my capstone, I was simultaneously deciding whether or not to pursue graduate studies in screenwriting. As …

Within A Farewell, Elsa Schollmaier

English Honors Theses

This lyric nonfiction capstone grapples with identity, loss, innocence, love, and the ways of the world (much like all other literary works). I see the influences on my mind without judgement, feigning to understand where exactly the ideas originate. I realize no story can be just mine, so I live within the area of uncertainty, or, may I say, the farewell to certainty.

Local, Jane Barnes

English Honors Theses

"Local" is a collection of poems broken into five sections: Locale, Catholicism, Maman, Death & Ghosts, and an epilogue. This collection explores the particular milieu of Allentown, Pennsylvania, and focuses on my experiences attending a Catholic school there and the deaths and losses I dealt with during that time. A number of these poems follow a long, narrative style and employ a confessional tone; the locale of rural Pennsylvania is present, either directly or indirectly as an undercurrent, in every piece. It was heavily influenced by Gwendolyn Brooks' work cultivating a poetic locale in her works, such as "A Street …

Blue Harbor (A Linked Story Collection), Sam Florsheim

English Honors Theses

Blue Harbor is a series of linked stories about the lives of people from a fictional town on the coast of Maine. These stories focus on the strangeness of small town life and the emotional, human moments that lead to personal growth.

Metamorphosis Of Rubbish: Eduardo Paolozzi's General Dynamic F.U.N., Michelle L. Paquette

MALS Final Projects, 1995-2019

This project incorporates the production of written materials that support a proposed art exhibit of curated selections from Eduarao Paolozzi's General Dynamic F.U.N. print series, a holding in the Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery' s permanent collection. Included in this project are reproductions of the curated artwork, a catalog introduction, introductory wall text and exhibit labels, and four creative essays.

Eduardo Paolozzi was a forceful proponent in the 1950s-1960s of the appropriation of American pop cultural iconography for works of art. His work bridged formal Surrealism and the inception of the Pop Art movement in Britain. The …