Arts and Humanities Commons^™

It’S Better To Have Loved And Lost: Exploring The Creation Of Emotional Connections Between Inanimate Film Characters And The Spectator In “The Window Display”, Kamyn Asher

Scripps Senior Theses

This thesis project examines the way that cinematography can create an emotional connection between the film’s characters and the audience. The main component of the project is a film I wrote, directed, and shot, about a stool that falls in love with a pair of pants, titled “The Window Display.” While it is clear that the typical film relies on the emotional impact of the fictional story, this film attempts to create the same effect but with inanimate objects. Thus, “The Window Display” illustrates the ways in which different visual language, especially images from the silent film era, work together …

The Genre Formerly Known As Punk: A Queer Person Of Color's Perspective On The Scene, Shane M. Zackery

Scripps Senior Theses

This video is a visual representation of the frustrations that I suffered from when I, a queer, gender non-conforming, person of color, went to “pasty normals” (a term defined by Jose Esteban Munoz to describe normative, non-exotic individuals) to get a definition of what Punk meant and where I fit into it. In this video, I personify the Punk music movement. Through my actions, I depart from the grainy, low-quality, amateur aesthetics of the Punk film and music genres and create a new world where the Queer Person of Color defines Punk. In the piece, Punk definitively says, “Don’t try …

Queering The Freeways: Deconstructing Landscape And The Potential In Spaces Of Destabilization, Anna R. Aqua

Scripps Senior Theses

Abstract

This paper begins by introducing the concepts of urban anthropology and poststructuralism that lay a basis for my project and referencing some of the themes that will be explored in further chapters. Chapter I analyzes conceptualizations of Los Angeles in terms of center and edge, and discusses the ways in which Greater Los Angeles can be an interesting site in terms of queer possibilities of built spaces. In Chapter II the focus shifts to Los Angeles freeways, distinguishing them as in-between spaces of the built landscape and examining how they have been conceptualized by prominent scholars and artists. Chapter …

Musical Missteps: The Severity Of The Sophomore Slump In The Music Industry, Shane M. Zackery

Scripps Senior Theses

This study looks at alternative models of follow-up album success in order to determine if there is a relationship between the decrease in Metascore ratings (assigned by Metacritic.com) between the first and second album for a musician or band and the 1) music genre or 2) the number of years between the first and second album release. The results support the dominant thought, which suggests that neither belonging to a certain genre of music nor waiting more or less time to drop the second album makes an artist more susceptible to the Sophomore Slump. This finding is important because it …

The Pacific Crest Trail: A History Of America’S Relationship With Western Wilderness, Jenn Livermore

Scripps Senior Theses

The Pacific Crest Trail has become increasingly popular since Clinton Clarke first envisioned such a trail in the 1930’s. By comparing the original motives and experience of the trail to the realities of the trail today, the trail’s fluid narrative becomes apparent. While this narrative is ever changing, over the course of the trail’s history one theme has remained constant – a notably problematic relationship with wilderness rooted in an exaltation of the sublime and post-frontier ideals. This thesis focuses on how the Pacific Crest Trail’s development over the past eighty years has created an experience that, on the surface, …

The Biomorphic Grotesque In Modernist And Contemporary Painting, Audrey Howell

Scripps Senior Theses

This paper looks at the concepts of the biomorphic and grotesque in art from the start of the 20^th century to the present with a focus on painting and drawing. Included in the discussion of the grotesque throughout history are the works of Dadaist Otto Dix, painter Georg Baselitz, and feminist artists Judy Chicago, Hannah Wilke, and Ana Mendieta. Each used grotesque imagery to comment or react to a larger sociopolitical issue. Biomorphic artworks from the 20^th century are mentioned as well, with specific examples of work by Lee Krasner, Willem DeKooning, and Hans Bellmer. These artists together …

Rieglematica: Re-Imagining The Photobooth Through Female Performativity And Self-Portraiture, Allison E. Riegle

Scripps Senior Theses

This paper explores the historical significance and advancements of automatic photobooth portraiture from the late 1800s onwards, focusing specifically on the intention behind the photobooth’s creation and the significance and cultural implications of its introduction into society. As it gradually became a staple of modern society, regularly visited by citizens to have their portraits taken, numerous artists sought out the photobooth as both a studio and a stage in which to document performative self-portraiture. The space and aesthetics of the photobooth have inspired artists to re-envision the confines of the booth and use its automatic function as a point of …

William Morris And The Kelmscott Chaucer: Design, Production, And Conservation Analysis, Gretchen Allen

Scripps Senior Theses

William Morris’s Kelmscott Press was founded specifically for the purpose of producing handmade printed works in a rapidly industrializing age. The techniques he and his confederates employed to make the Kelmscott books resulted in beautiful publications with remarkable material fortitude, as exemplified in the Press’s masterwork, “The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer Now Newly Imprinted”. This thesis examines the condition of the copy of the Kelmscott Chaucer in the Scripps rare book collection from a book conservator’s perspective to analyze the connection between William Morris’s personal philosophies, his resulting artistic decisions, and the longevity of the book as an art object.

The Frozen Moment: Representations Of Space, Time And The Experiential In Installation Art, Alexandra Trimm

Scripps Senior Theses

This paper examines the history of installation art and explains the concept and themes within my installation component of the studio art major. It details how readymades, site-specificity, and an emphasis on experiential work all contributed to the creation of installation art as a medium. Next, I turn to my own work, exploring the theme of representing time and altering the perceptions of the viewer. Through a web of fishing line and tempered glass, the installation visually imitates a single, frozen moment of an explosion that the viewer can walk into and explore. The paper continues with a discussion of …

Reexamining The 1950s American Housewife: How Ladies Home Journal Challenged Domestic Expectations During The Postwar Period, Margaret Bonaparte

Scripps Senior Theses

My thesis examines the role that Ladies Home Journal played in challenging the ideals of domesticity that emerged in the postwar period in the United States. Originally founded in 1883, Ladies Home Journal emerged from World War II as the most popular and highly circulated women’s magazine. Husband and wife duo Bruce and Beatrice Gould served as co-editors-in-chief from 1935 to 1962, and populated the magazine with numerous ambitious and talented female writers and editors. Many of these female staff members also married and had children, while maintaining their careers. During an era where employees discriminated against women in the …

"Other Than Dead": Queering Vampires In Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Interview With The Vampire, And The Gilda Stories, Megan E. Gianniny

Scripps Senior Theses

This thesis examines three diverse vampire narratives from around the 1990s, arguing that the liminal figure of the vampire, forever in between life and death, is also then well-positioned to queer norms around gender, sexuality, and relationships. This queering, however, manifests differently in each narrative. My analysis looks at each of these three narratives in turn, while also considering how each text’s placement as mainstream or not mainstream affected the manifestation of the vampires’ queering.

Exemplary Equines: Gazes And Gesture Of Bovine Animals In Trecento Fresco, Elsa L. Bruno

Scripps Senior Theses

Horses were high status animals in the middle ages. Strong, costly, and used in war, they symbolized power and wealth. Yet in some Trecento Italian frescos, horses take on another role. Particularly through their eyes, ears, and body positioning they seem to communicate with each other regarding the religious scenes at hand. Additionally, horses are often the only beings paying attention to Jesus or God, or are the sole beings who break the fourth wall of an image to engage with the viewer. While the revolutionary use of gesture and eye movement has been examined in humans in these frescoes, …

Women At Work: Working Girl, Disclosure And The Evolution Of Professional Female Stereotypes, Hayley A. Strickland

Scripps Senior Theses

In this analysis, I examine how stereotypes of working women function in some of the most popular film and television shows made in past thirty years. A study of films such as Working Girl and Disclosure and television shows such Ally McBeal and Sex and the City within a second-wave and postfeminist framework ultimately reveals that Hollywood stereotypes of working women have evolved very little and simply become more creatively disguised.

Madrid Me Mata: Regional Identity Politics And Community Building Through The Music Of La Movida Madrileña, Winona A. Bechte

Scripps Senior Theses

Chapter 1: Formation and Early Beginnings of music in la Movida
-In the first chapter I am writing about how the early development of la Movida runs very much alongside political initiatives to stimulate cultural development in Madrid. Specifically I am writing about how popular songs and musicians at the time translated these messages of regional pride and identity that was being heavily stimulated by the government into a way that the general public could understand and support. Citing specific song lyrics and early bands of la Movida, I also track the years leading up to 1975 and how music …

“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.

The Transformation Of An Empire To A Nation-State: From The Ottoman Empire To The Republic Of Turkey, Sarah R. Menzies

Scripps Senior Theses

The transformation of the Ottoman Empire to the Republic of Turkey involved reforming the government, redefining the relationship between the population and the ruling elite, and navigating ethnic and religious identities and how those identities affected the national identity. Unfortunately, these processes were accompanied by the suppression of religious and ethnic minorities, deportations, violence, and murder.

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 …

Politicized Historiography And The Zionist-Crusader Analogy, Emma Kellman

Scripps Senior Theses

This study offers a look at the ways in which discourse shaped by the contemporary Israel-Palestine conflict serves as a framework for modern historiography on Palestine. It focuses specifically on the variety of historical narratives proffered as to the “truth” of the Crusade period in Palestine, roughly the eleventh through the thirteenth centuries, and their mobilization in political agendas through the Zionist-Crusader analogy. This comparison, a historical analogy likening Zionists to Frankish Crusaders or the State of Israel to the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem, appears frequently in contemporary dialogue on the Israel-Palestine conflict; it comes from a diverse range of …

Disidentified Masculinities, Jacqueline Hope Freedman

Scripps Senior Theses

My capstone is a conversation of the Millennial Generation’s views of individual identity and masculinity, with the hopes of deconstructing the socially constructed and exclusive notions of masculinity by defining a generation’s “common sense.”

My piece is inspired by the portraiture of Chad States in Masculinities (2011) as well as Loren Cameron’s work in Body Alchemy: Transsexual Portraits (1996). The theoretical basis of my project relies heavily on Antonio Gramsci’s concept of “common sense” as well as José Esteban Muñoz’s disidentification. Common sense refers to an instinctual, “uncritical and largely unconscious way of perceiving and understanding.” It “is a collective …

Disidentified Masculinities, Jacqueline Hope Freedman

Scripps Senior Theses

My capstone project is a multimedia audio and photography project that creates a conversation about the Millennial Generation’s views of individual identity and masculinity, with the hopes of deconstructing the socially constructed and exclusive notions of masculinity by defining a generation’s common sense.

My piece is inspired by the portraiture of Chad States in Masculinities (2011) as well as Loren Cameron’s work in Body Alchemy: Transsexual Portraits (1996). The theoretical basis of my project relies heavily on Antonio Gramsci’s concept of common sense as well as José Esteban Muñoz’s disidentification. Common sense refers to an instinctual, uncritical and largely …

Troika Of Fortune Tellers, Sophia D. Kalin

Scripps Senior Theses

This film is an oral history about the intergenerational relationship between three women: my grandmother, my mother, and I. Through our connection I explore the Russian traditions that my grandmother has cultivated and shared among the three of us, in particular, the tradition of fortune telling. I also explore my grandmother's struggle with dementia. Although her memory is fading, she can still remember the practice of reading fortunes and that tradition has preserved our bond and her legacy.

"Playthings Of A Historical Process": Prostitution In Spanish Society From The Restoration To The Civil War (1874-1939), Ann Kirkpatrick

Scripps Senior Theses

Spain underwent a series of tumultuous social and political changes in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Prostitute women directly experienced these changes as fluctuations in their social and legal status within Spanish society. The years spanning from 1874 to 1931 are known as the Restoration, when the Bourbon monarchy was reinstalled under King Alfonso XII (1857-1885) after the crumbling of the First Spanish Republic (1873-1874). During this time, Spain experienced a period of growing nationalism and urbanization, and prostitution began to be interpreted as a threat to the nation in terms of public health and decency. Between 1923 …

Beauty And The Body: Gendered Representations Of The Digitally Altered Image, Lauren Prince

Scripps Senior Theses

This work aims to explore how normalized gender representations in images are heightened through the use of digital manipulation technologies and how that influences a spectator’s relationship both to the image and to their own body. After constructing a theoretical understanding of the ways in which images influence and create a normative beauty ideology, a critical case study analysis of the ways celebrities are photographed and digitally altered provides for a grounding of theoretical material.

“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.

Mad Love And Narrative Uncertainty In The Twentieth Century: A Study Of The Good Soldier And Le Ravissement De Lol V. Stein, Rose Ducharme

Scripps Senior Theses

This thesis examines narrative uncertainty in the twentieth century novel as it relates to madness, adultery, and the convention of the unreliable narrator. The unreliable narratives of Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier and Marguerite Duras’ Le Ravissement de Lol V. Stein expose their characters’ investment in illusions, the doubling of the narrators’ and readers’ desires to interpret, the transfer of madness through narrative, and the possibility that a void of meaning underlies the text.

La Educación Como Camino Hacia La Revitalización De Lenguas Indígenas: Problemas Y Prospectivas, Isabella Hendry

Scripps Senior Theses

Many indigenous languages have suffered irreparable damage or even extinction due to the violence of colonization and the violences that continue to be perpetrated by its successor institutions of neo-liberalism and global “development” projects. This thesis focuses on the attempts of two groups of indigenous people, the Imazighen (or Berbers) of Algeria and Morocco and the Runa (or Quechua) of Peru and Bolivia, to break these cycles of repression and revitalize their languages. A close comparison of these two groups’ struggles reveals the difficulty of transcending this assimilationist, imperialist framework, but it also highlights several successes that bode well for …

Man Pain In The Man Booker Prize: A Quantitative Approach To Contemporary Canon Formation, Caitlin E. Powell

Scripps Senior Theses

This project examines the corpus of novels that have been nominated for the Man Booker Prize and, using the prize as a creator of a contemporary literary canon, attempts to develop a model of a contemporary best text. Using the distant reading techniques proposed by digital humanities scholar Franco Moretti to track and graph a variety of formal and structural variables across the corpus of nominees, it becomes apparent that the kind of novel that typically wins the Booker Prize and thus the kind of novel that qualifies as a contemporary best text fits a distinct mold. These novels are …

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 …

Politicizing Apollo: Ovid's Commentary On Augustan Marriage Legislation In The Ars Amatoria And The Metamorphoses, Tara N. Godzich

Scripps Senior Theses

Augustan propaganda surrounding Apollo provided the perfect literary device through which Augustan poets could express their sentiments about the new regime. Augustus transformed Apollo from a relatively insignificant god in the Roman pantheon to his own multi-faceted god whose various attributes were meant to legitimize his new position within the Roman Empire. In this thesis I discuss how Ovid uses Augustus’ political affiliation with Apollo to comment on Augustan marriage legislation in two of his texts. In Ovid’s manual on seduction, the Ars Amatoria, he denies poetic inspiration from Apollo at the beginning of his work, preferring instead to …