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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
American Dream Gone Wrong: Patricia Highsmith’S Dark Suburban Domesticity, Katie Liggett
American Dream Gone Wrong: Patricia Highsmith’S Dark Suburban Domesticity, Katie Liggett
Honors Projects
This thesis explores how Patricia Highsmith’s novels, The Blunderer and Deep Water, critique the American suburbs and show how the American Dream is more of a fantasy, than a realistic goal that people can achieve. Her novels reveal how the American dream becomes unattainable, or one’s pursuit of it somehow goes wrong, leaving their lives unfulfilled and them resentful. Furthermore, I argue that the American Dream, itself, goes wrong for some individuals, and the pursuit of this unrealistic Dream can lead individuals to trouble in their personal or professional lives. Ultimately, through my analysis of Highsmith’s texts, it becomes …
Where Woman Is Her Center: Interrogating Morality And Spatiality In The Works Of Joan Didion, Hannah Nicole Martin
Where Woman Is Her Center: Interrogating Morality And Spatiality In The Works Of Joan Didion, Hannah Nicole Martin
Honors Projects
This project outlines new and expansive critical categories for discussing Joan Didion’s work through an interrogation of Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking and earlier personal essays using an interplay of close reading and affect theory. This paper seeks to help move the critical conversation in new directions by shifting the focus towards an analysis of Didion’s unique spatialization of memory, articulated through her use of particular details. Divided in two parts, the first section of this paper discusses The Year of Magical Thinking while the second engages in a dialogue with the critical voices surrounding Didion, as well as …