Arts and Humanities Commons^™

"The Stuff Of Thought" : Virginia Woolf's Object Lessons, Sam Mitchell

Honors Theses

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Of Horror And Humor : The Transformation Of The Grotesque Into The Gothic In The Novels Of Frances Burney, Brittany Taylor

Honors Theses

This year was ushered in by a grand and most important event,—for at the latter end of January, the literary world was favoured with the first publication of the ingenious, learned, and most profound Fanny Burney!—I doubt not but this memorable affair will, in future times, mark the period whence chronologers will date the zenith of the polite arts in this island! This admirable authoress has named her most elaborate performance “EVELINA, OR A YOUNG LADY’S ENTRANCE INTO THE WORLD.” (Ellis 212)

When 1778 dawned, twenty-five-year-old Frances Burney was not the egotist this pronouncement in her diary might suggest. She …

A Conversation Among Sisters : The "Dangerous Lover" In The Texts Of The BrontëS, Jennifer K. Patchen

Honors Theses

Since the Brontes first published their novels, critics and readers have often associated the male leads with the Byronic hero. Certainly, Arthur Huntingdon in Anne's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Edward Rochester in Charlotte's Jane Eyre and Heathcliff in Emily's Wuthering Heights are all, like Lord Byron's own heroes, brooding and damaged men. Each of these men, additionally, is fundamentally willing to flout social expectations. Their search for selffulfillment often leads them outside of the boundaries of conventional society, although the three sisters sometimes ascribe conflicting moral values to that search. For Charlotte and Emily, Rochester's and Heathcliffs strong personalities …

“Nothing That Is So, Is So”: Indeterminate Language In Shakespeare, Matthew K. Crane

Honors Theses

The Shakespearean canon is characterized by indeterminacy. His world is one where nothing is as it seems; men pose as women, nobles as commoners, and sisters as brothers. The resulting confusion challenges conventional norms, questioning gender, cultural, and other social boundaries. The surface uncertainty extends beneath the costumes and performers to the very foundation of theatre—language—as spaces emerge between words and meaning, and what is said and what is meant. Shakespeare’s use of ambiguous language opens his plays to multiple interpretations, creating a constant but fluctuating separation between the reader and text, the literal and figurative, and the expressed and …

Modernist Success In A Postmodern Failure: Jackson Pollock And Abstract Expressionism, The Avant-Garde And The Ascension Of Late Capitalism, Art After 1945, Russell Gullette

Honors Theses

It is hard to imagine the magnitude of the events at the end of World War II. The thought produced in the face of a myriad of deaths is almost unfeasible sixty years after the fact, but the energy was integral to the changing social landscape. Because of the country's prominence in and fortitude after the war, the U.S. was left responsible for reshaping and rejuvenating the international landscape that was destroyed by the years of brutal fighting and vile contestation. The American establishment was granted a major opportunity to establish itself amongst the global leaders. Such a grand responsibility …

Michel Foucault : Power/Knowledge And Epistemological Prescriptions, Martin A. Hewett

Honors Theses

In an interview in 1977, seven years before his death, Michel Foucault made the following profound and controversial statement:

Truth is a thing of this world: it is produced only by virtue of multiple forms of constraint.

Within this sentence lies perhaps his most contested assertion: that knowledge is not some property of statements or beliefs that exist separately from relations of power within societies and discourses, but is constituted by and constitutive of them. Foucault's genealogies of sexuality and punishment are the most notable means by which he develops this claim, and their own potent explanatory powers leave us …

The Victorian Construction Of Sappho, 1835-1914, Megan Kulp

Honors Theses

Sappho was an ancient Greek lyric poet writing on the isle if Lesbos in the seventh century BC. Her original works were contained in seven books; however, only a few fragments are extant. These fragments are mainly about women and are erotic in nature. Considering the homoerotic tone of Sappho's poetry, it is interesting that the Victorians were fascinated with her and a proliferation of biographies, artwork, plays, operas, translated poems, appeared in that era bearing her name. How did the Victorians reconcile the homoerotic tone of her poems with their own views on what was right and proper? The …

Ernest Miller Hemingway : Dimensions Of Death, Bruce R. Mcdonald

Honors Theses

The life and works of Ernest Miller Hemingway resemble the views of the people of Castile, Spain in many ways. From an early age, Hemingway took an "intelligent interest" in the concept of death. It was an interest that was to grow to encompass almost every aspect of his sixty year life and his literary career. For Hemingway, death was an essential component in his existence as well as a necessary consequence of living in our world. Hemingway's exploration of the notion of death gave meaning and security to his being. For Hemingway, death eventually became an all consuming obsession …

Zora Neale Hurston And The Emergence Of Self, Cheryl Y. Williams

Honors Theses

Abraham Maslow in his work From The Farther Reaches of Human Nature made the statement:

Every human being has (two) sets of forces within him. One set clings to safety and defensiveness out of fear, tending to regress backward, hanging to the past, afraid to grow... afraid of independence, freedom and separateness. The other set of forces impels him forward toward wholeness of Self and uniqueness of Self, toward full functioning of all his capacities, toward confidence in the face of the external world at the same time that he can accept his deepest, real, unconscious Self (45-6).

What makes …

Richard Brautigan : A Man In Search Of America, Elizabeth A. Howell

Honors Theses

Avant-garde writing tends to be an "iffy" thing these days, more a matter of cocktail chatter than execution. The resources for experiments seem used up, or ash John Barth put it, "exhausted" (Pinkser 75). Things and words increase in quantity but diminish in value and meaning, making the contemporary writer more and more unwilling to follow the old ways of arranging them. Though this is not a new predicament for an aspiring writer, it is one that seems threatening in an age of self-conscious art. Writers must look for new grammars and new semantics. Some writers turn this quest for …

Shaw's Comic Tone : From Laughter To The Broken Harp String, R. K. Thomas

Honors Theses

George Bernard Shaw's literary career lasted over seventy years. He wrote prolifically. The most complete collection of his work, the Ayot St. Lawrence Edition, runs to over thirty-one volume, yet it is not all inclusive. His efforts were always motivated by the desire to expand and expound his social and political philosophy. Although the canon of Shavian criticism approaches his motives from a wide of variety of angles and avenues, Shaw singled out "passion of pure political Weltverbesserungwahn (worldbettermentcrase)" as his "own devouring malady." Defining his artistic objectives as conveying a "feeling" to an audience and making "them sympathetic with …