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James Baldwin's Classroom And What He Can Teach Educators About Queer Representation, Matthew Callahan May 2025

James Baldwin's Classroom And What He Can Teach Educators About Queer Representation, Matthew Callahan

Honors College Theses

This is an extended analysis of James Baldwin's "A Talk to Teachers" about how to bring representation into the classroom. I use Baldwin's other essays and fiction along with educational research to look into the way Baldwin understands education and the importance of bringing healthy queer representation into the classroom. I provide both theoretical observations along with practical implications of what this means for educators in the classroom and what they can do to help all their students feel seen, represented, and welcome in the classroom.

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Defying Normativity: Reclaiming A Narrative Of Queer Resistance In Young Adult Literature, Christopher Morabito Jun 2024

Defying Normativity: Reclaiming A Narrative Of Queer Resistance In Young Adult Literature, Christopher Morabito

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

At the heart of this dissertation lies a single question: how Queer is Queer Young Adult Literature? As many scholars have argued, Queerness is, in many ways, a literacy, and literature is one of the greatest sponsors of Queer Literacy. While there is certainly no one comprehensive definition of what it means to be queer, it is also true that the general understanding of queerness has changed quite drastically in the last few decades. What was once used as a term to describe someone who is outside of social conventions has slowly begun to lose its sense of “otherness,” and …

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Beyond Me: Class, Sexuality, And The Work Of The Autobiographical Fragments Of Audre Lorde, Dorothy Allison, And Eileen Myles, Erin E. Heiser Jun 2024

Beyond Me: Class, Sexuality, And The Work Of The Autobiographical Fragments Of Audre Lorde, Dorothy Allison, And Eileen Myles, Erin E. Heiser

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation looks at what I am calling the “autobiographical fragments” of three working-class, lesbian (or queer) authors: Audre Lorde, Dorothy Allison, and Eileen Myles whose writing is stylistically quite different from one another’s, but who nonetheless have all produced bodies of work that represent bits of their lives over and over and in different ways, sometimes overlapping in time and narrative detail. While there are certainly other writers whose work shares many of the same characteristics, I argue that the autobiographical fragment has special significance for marginalized subjects. Woven throughout the dissertation are many of my own autobiographical fragments …

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Project Maplemon: Peeling Back The Secrets Of Queer Writing Through Stylometric Demographic Identification, Theodore D. Manning Jun 2024

Project Maplemon: Peeling Back The Secrets Of Queer Writing Through Stylometric Demographic Identification, Theodore D. Manning

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Project MapLemon is a corpus for stylometric demographic identification of 54,000+ words across 345 participants, originally created to obtain a baseline corpus for linguistic variation among North American English speakers. The corpus contains responses from 30 linguistic backgrounds, and 40 US states and 6+ Canadian provinces. Project MapLemon has innovated a new method for data collection for linguistic variants in the natural, digital written word. Project MapLemon utilizes a hand-drawn map and asks the participant to give directions via this map, as well as asking participants for a recipe for lemonade. In addition to its novel collection methods, MapLemon contains …

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The Redemption Of History: Poetics And Politics In The Modern Epic, Giacomo R. Bianchino Jun 2024

The Redemption Of History: Poetics And Politics In The Modern Epic, Giacomo R. Bianchino

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation, “The Redemption of History: Poetics and Politics in the Modern Epic.” provides a materialist theory of the modern epic, focusing on the way that the poets deployed this form towards political ends. Building on theories of the epic going back to the German Romantics, it argues that the modern form is predicated on the idea that it has departed from the conditions that made the ancient form possible. It examines the way that writers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century developed the idea that the immediacy of the social “totality” expressed by the ancient epopee was …

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Ekphrasis: An Exploration Of Poetry Inspired By Art, Caitlin Cacciatore Jun 2024

Ekphrasis: An Exploration Of Poetry Inspired By Art, Caitlin Cacciatore

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

“Ekphrasis: An Exploration of Poetry Inspired by Art” is an Open Educational Resource (OER) that occupies the underdeveloped niche of freely available teaching and learning materials about the interdisciplinary poetic medium of ekphrasis. Ekphrastic poetry is a form dating back to Book XVIII of the Iliad, experiencing a revitalization in the latter half of the 18th century, when demand for written descriptions of paintings was in high demand, and again taking on a new, modern meaning in the early 19th century, with poems like John Keats’ 1819 “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” Ekphrasis is …

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Good Girls Don't, Tess Fresco May 2024

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 …

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“Class And Consciousness”: An Application Of Marxist Theory And Posthumanism To Kazuo Ishiguro’S The Remains Of The Day, Never Let Me Go And Klara And The Sun, Renee Elizabeth Samuel May 2024

“Class And Consciousness”: An Application Of Marxist Theory And Posthumanism To Kazuo Ishiguro’S The Remains Of The Day, Never Let Me Go And Klara And The Sun, Renee Elizabeth Samuel

Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs)

Kazuo Ishiguro’s works are introspective explorations of how one’s prescribed role in society shapes one’s identity; this self-reflection is evident in three of his novels, The Remains of the Day, Never Let Me Go, and Klara and the Sun. All three novels heavily rely on the point of view of a member of the subservient class, and this perspective provides insight into the unnamed hierarchies within society and the relationship, or lack thereof, between divided classes. Despite their similarities in structure, each novel explores class relationships in different ways. The Remains of the Day focuses on an individual living …

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Open Letters & Impersonal Forms: Diaries, Letters, And Self-Disclosure In Rilke’S Prose, Abigail Svetlik May 2024

Open Letters & Impersonal Forms: Diaries, Letters, And Self-Disclosure In Rilke’S Prose, Abigail Svetlik

English Honors Theses

This paper places Letters alongside two other works of prose by Rilke — The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (1910) and Diaries of a Young Poet (1997). The first is Rilke’s only novel, in which a young man inscribes his thoughts, feelings, and activities in a series of journal entries; the second is a series of private journals which Rilke maintained between 1898 and 1900. Notebooks’ narrator resembles Rilke in several ways, but the novel’s fictiveness impedes upon readers’ instinct to treat the story as entirely autobiographical. In his actual diaries, published at the opposite end of the same …

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She Has Green Eyes & Trauma: Problematic Depictions Of Mental Illness In Young Adult Novels, Diane G. Mcdonough May 2024

She Has Green Eyes & Trauma: Problematic Depictions Of Mental Illness In Young Adult Novels, Diane G. Mcdonough

College Honors Program

This thesis discusses the problematic ways in which male authors write about female mental illness, and the damage that these portrayals can have on adolescent girls who read them. My first two chapters discuss, respectively, Looking for Alaska and Turtles All the Way Down, both by John Green, with reference to two of his other young adult novels, Paper Towns and The Fault in Our Stars. In these chapters, I explore Green’s depictions of female characters who suffer from mental illness. My third chapter focuses on It’s Kind of a Funny Story by Ned Vizzini and The Perks of Being …

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Mythos And Meaning: Medieval Appropriations Of Mythological Types In The Consolation Of Philosophy And Later Western Literatures, Francis J. Hunter May 2024

Mythos And Meaning: Medieval Appropriations Of Mythological Types In The Consolation Of Philosophy And Later Western Literatures, Francis J. Hunter

Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs)

Often referred to as the last Roman and first medieval, Boethius, author of The Consolation of Philosophy, has been widely received as an unoriginal philosopher who sought to preserve Platonic thought as the Western Roman Empire fell. However, this essay features an investigation into the literary originality of Boethius who initiates a line of Christian and Platonic literatures to follow in the medieval European tradition. Boethius demonstrates himself to be a poet who makes great use of philosophy rather than as a philosopher writing poetry. Boethius’ poetic influence is felt most strongly in major aspects of Dante’s Divine Comedy and …

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Abcs: American Born Chinese Stories, Ethan Peng May 2024

Abcs: American Born Chinese Stories, Ethan Peng

English Honors Theses

Inspired by life as an Asian American in New York City, ABC and Other Stories explores family dynamics and perspectives, public perceptions, and emotions throughout twenty-six stories, one for every letter of the alphabet. Real memories and fantastical elements intertwine throughout the collection, all falling under the theme of “ABC,” representing both the English language and “American Born Chinese.” Many of the narrators, left nameless and genderless, recount their stories of growing up in an immigrant household. One recalls the last time their parents physically punished them. Another thinks of being unsettled by a stranger on the subway. Other narrators …

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Fallen Creator And Failed Christ: An Exploration Of Religious Imagery And Metafiction In Ian Mcewan’S Atonement, Tabitha Robinson May 2024

Fallen Creator And Failed Christ: An Exploration Of Religious Imagery And Metafiction In Ian Mcewan’S Atonement, Tabitha Robinson

Student Research Submissions

This paper examines the religious imagery in Atonement by Ian McEwan through a close reading of the structure and main characters Briony, Cecilia and Robbie. The novel is deeply concerned with questions of sin and redemption, which intersect with religious symbolism and metafiction to create the story. This paper reads Briony as both a creator god and a failed Christ figure and Cecilia and Robbie as Adam and Eve characters, showing the text’s self-awareness through its use of narrative to create meaning. It argues that the field of religious studies offers many theories and terms that enrich the field of …

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Exploring Fragmentation In Ali Smith’S Autumn, Emily Koberlein May 2024

Exploring Fragmentation In Ali Smith’S Autumn, Emily Koberlein

Student Research Submissions

This paper seeks to explore the effect of fragmentation in Ali Smith’s Autumn. Through examination of academic literature that compares traditional fragmentation utilized in modernist literature to the effects of fragmentation and its reappearance in contemporary literature, this essay seeks to examine the effects, implications, and practice of using fragmentation in contemporary work. As seen in Autumn, the fragmented nature of contemporary works functions as a method of consistency rather than to create a disconnect between the author and their text. The use of fragmentation is seen in this text’s structure, the relationship of its main characters, and the disjointed …

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Generational Awareness Of Folk Figures In The American Midwest, Addison L. Jensen May 2024

Generational Awareness Of Folk Figures In The American Midwest, Addison L. Jensen

Honors Thesis

The popular folklore of a region can clearly reflect how its citizens understand themselves and their nation. The goal of this study was to determine the number of individuals who can be considered “well-versed” in traditional folklore and to speculate on the possible reasons for the differences in recognition that arise. Five figures (Johnny Appleseed, John Henry, Paul Bunyan, Annie Oakley, and Rip Van Winkle) were selected to serve as a representative sample of folk characters that have been historically significant to the country. An online survey of 279 Midwesterners and interviews with various age groups in South Dakota, found …

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Diaspora And Identity In Jhumpa Lahiri's Unaccustomed Earth, Riley Prater May 2024

Diaspora And Identity In Jhumpa Lahiri's Unaccustomed Earth, Riley Prater

Student Research Submissions

My paper, entitled “Identity and Diaspora in Jhumpa Lahiri’s Unaccustomed Earth” was written for and approved by Dr. Haffey in her 21st Century Fiction (449U) seminar class. The paper explores the complex relationship between first generation Bengali American characters and their identities in the wake of diaspora. This paper shows that Lahiri works to create a kind of liminal space in which her first generation characters exist - a space between being both Bengali and American. Lahiri does so through exploring family relationships, culture, and the pull between heritage and assimilation in order to highlight a new culture of existing …

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Cognitive Borderlands: Understanding Marginalized Identity In The Work Of Ada Limón, Ashley Hope Pérez, And Carmen Maria Machado, Monica Barbay May 2024

Cognitive Borderlands: Understanding Marginalized Identity In The Work Of Ada Limón, Ashley Hope Pérez, And Carmen Maria Machado, Monica Barbay

English Theses

Gloria Anzaldúa’s groundbreaking theoretical and creative collection of essays entitled Borderlands / La Frontera: The New Mestiza provides foundational ideas and principles to consider the physical, mental, and emotional struggles of those living along the U.S.-Mexican border. This thesis furthers this discussion by contemplating what happens psychologically to those residing in physical and cognitive borderlands, including but not limited to the U.S.-Mexican border. Specifically, I develop a framework to conceptualize borderlands of the mind, focusing on people-groups who experience multiple kinds of marginalization. I argue that these layers of marginalization negatively impact one’s sense of self, fostering a cognitive divide …

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The Story Of Identity: Narrative Self-Fashioning In Kazuo Ishiguro’S A Pale View Of Hills And When We Were Orphans, Hayley Angle May 2024

The Story Of Identity: Narrative Self-Fashioning In Kazuo Ishiguro’S A Pale View Of Hills And When We Were Orphans, Hayley Angle

English Theses

The moments we remember from our lives are the foundation of the stories we tell about ourselves. I have spent many a night trying to fall asleep by running through my memories like the montage scene of a movie—clips of a funny moment with a friend, the smile of a loved one, a stupid thing I said to someone I was supposed to impress. These moments I remember portray, at the deepest level, who I want to be, who I am scared to be, and who I most understand myself to be. Intentional remembrance, as opposed to actual experience, tends …

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Final Master's Portfolio, Ayotunde Afolabi May 2024

Final Master's Portfolio, Ayotunde Afolabi

Master of Arts in English Plan II Graduate Projects

This portfolio explores themes of gender and race, identity representation, and agency within various literary texts. It encapsulates a series of analytical essays that scrutinize how these themes intersect and manifest across diverse literary landscapes, emphasizing the ways in which authors address and challenge societal norms and structures through their narratives. Each essay within the portfolio not only mirrors the engagement with these themes but also showcases the development of a theoretical approach that bridges classical literary analysis with contemporary issues of identity politics and social justice.

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Sacrifice And Emotional Communities In Early Modern Literature, Kathryn C. Patton May 2024

Sacrifice And Emotional Communities In Early Modern Literature, Kathryn C. Patton

English Theses

The early modern period in England was a time of intense political, religious, and cultural upheaval. Between the Protestant Reformation and urbanization, England experienced significant ideological changes as well as the growing pains of overpopulation and plague in its major cities. The literature of the time illustrates the emotional complexity that many of the authors and citizens experienced firsthand as a result of the tumult in England. This thesis focuses specifically on the period during the reigns of Queen Elizabeth I and James I, using the works of Sir Philip Sidney and John Donne as structural buoys for the paper, …

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Navigating Identity Through Education In Literature And In The Classroom, Sofia Sakzlyan May 2024

Navigating Identity Through Education In Literature And In The Classroom, Sofia Sakzlyan

English (MA) Theses

This thesis explores the intricate relationship between education, identity formation, and oppression, drawing from psychosocial and sociocultural perspectives. I delve into how education serves as a critical arena where individuals encounter various internal psychological conflicts and external social influences that shape their sense of self. By analyzing the perspectives of writers such as Paulo Freire, bell hooks, Kate Chopin Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Erin Gruwell, the thesis seeks to answer how education impacts the self and how it intersects with systems of oppression. Furthermore, I explore the role of education in fostering critical consciousness and empowerment, particularly in the face …

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Standing On The Front Porch Of To Kill A Mockingbird, Anna Mclain May 2024

Standing On The Front Porch Of To Kill A Mockingbird, Anna Mclain

Honors Theses

This thesis is an examination of the front porch in Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird. After providing background on the practical functions of the front porch in the South, I argue that this space serves as a synthesis between perception and reality in Lee’s novel. My thesis is divided into three sections that each explore different characters on the front porch: Boo Radley, Southern women, and Scout. Analyzing specific scenes with these characters on the front porch, I consider how the space exposes various tensions in the novel and highlights Lee’s larger themes.

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The New Westward Expansion: Settler Colonialism And Gentrification In Paula Fox’S Desperate Characters And Kali Fajardo-Anstine’S Sabrina And Corina, Miranda Roberts May 2024

The New Westward Expansion: Settler Colonialism And Gentrification In Paula Fox’S Desperate Characters And Kali Fajardo-Anstine’S Sabrina And Corina, Miranda Roberts

English (MA) Theses

This thesis explores two underexplored works of gentrification literature—Paula Fox’s novel, Desperate Characters (1970) and Kali Fajardo-Anstine’s short story collection, Sabrina & Corina (2019). Desperate Characters offers a nuanced and critical examination of characters with privilege who move into Brooklyn in the 1960s, which involves the displacement of Black and Latinx communities; Fajardo-Anstine’s collection introduces Denver as a site of dramatic gentrification in the new century, by portraying Latinx characters from older neighborhoods who must adjust to the disintegration and cohesiveness of their communities in the face of gentrification. In my discussion of these works, I draw from pre-existing scholarship …

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Posthumanism In Literature: Redefining Selfhood, Temporality, And Reality/Ies Through Fiction, Eileen Kelley Pierce May 2024

Posthumanism In Literature: Redefining Selfhood, Temporality, And Reality/Ies Through Fiction, Eileen Kelley Pierce

English (MA) Theses

While fictional novels are often seen as a way to escape reality, their relation to reality and the ways in which they distort or reinforce our understandings of reality can provide significant insights into our cultural values and beliefs. Using posthumanist theory, I examine how understandings of selfhood and its relations to time and reality are complicated within three works of fiction and how those complications represent and articulate a societal shift in meaning and knowledge that is supported by posthumanist ideologies. The three works, No One Is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood, Wolf in White Van by John …

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Jane Austen And A Biographical Study Of The Historical Narrative Process, Serena Young May 2024

Jane Austen And A Biographical Study Of The Historical Narrative Process, Serena Young

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

Jane Austen, beloved national literary icon of Great Britain, is world-renowned for her fiction. Biographers have attempted to authentically piece together her life and often, try to connect her narrative to when and how her fiction was written, as well as point out circumstances within her personal life and speculate their influence on her work. Literary analysts and critics that have examined the historical narrative process, Hayden White and Kevin Gilvary, have found that the way in which a historical account is presented plays a significant role in how history is understood and perpetuated. When examining Jane Austen’s life, many …

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Gentleman Death In Silk And Lace: Death And The Maiden In Vampire Literature And Film, Emily Wilson May 2024

Gentleman Death In Silk And Lace: Death And The Maiden In Vampire Literature And Film, Emily Wilson

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis contains an examination in the psychosocial significance of Hans Baldung Grien’s “Death and the Maiden” art motif, created during the Renaissance period following the Black Death, and its resurgence in the vampire fiction genre of both literature and film. I investigate the motif in Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) and Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire (1976) as well as their film adaptations by Francis Ford Coppola (1992) and Neil Jordan (1994), respectively. By examining the presence of the motif in art, literature, and film, I found that the common threads across all investigated works were the dominant social …

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Final Master's Portfolio, Savannah Packman May 2024

Final Master's Portfolio, Savannah Packman

Master of Arts in English Plan II Graduate Projects

This portfolio uses Marxist and feminist film theory to analyze various forms of visual media. It analyzes Mark Mylod's film The Menu (2022), Julie Taymor's film Across the Universe (2007), the historic V-J Day Kiss photograph, and popular TikTok videos. This portfolio focuses on the impact of capitalism in the political and economic sphere. It also analyzes images of women throughout history and critiques how these images have been used to formulate the American body politic.

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Stretching The Hard-Boiled Detective: From Hammett And Chandler To Paretsky And Himes, Chloe Moore May 2024

Stretching The Hard-Boiled Detective: From Hammett And Chandler To Paretsky And Himes, Chloe Moore

Undergraduate Honors Theses

This thesis investigates transformations of the hard-boiled crime fiction genre by analyzing the works of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, and how authors Sara Paretsky and Chester Himes adapt and manipulate the genre to suit their intentions and voices. By examining the construction of Hammett's Continental Op and Sam Spade, and Chandler's Philip Marlowe, the foundation is laid for understanding the defining characteristics of a hard-boiled detective in the 1930s and 40s. This thesis then explores how Paretsky's V.I. Warshawski and Himes' Coffin Ed and Grave Digger Jones adapt these qualities to suit new demographics of detectives: a white woman …

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Conflicting Ethe In _Anna Karenina_: A Reexamination Of Tolstoy’S Complex Female Protagonist, Hannah Diles May 2024

Conflicting Ethe In _Anna Karenina_: A Reexamination Of Tolstoy’S Complex Female Protagonist, Hannah Diles

Honors Theses

Tolstoy’s novel Anna Karenina depicts the world as an endless array of choices and experiences to which one assigns meaning to. His characters, like real people, must navigate their world of complex ethical systems using their own moral ethos. Readers and critics alike critique Anna as a heroine for living out her moral ethos, pitting it against the social and feminist ethos of late 19th century upper class Russian society. Anna’s story is either interpreted as a cautionary tale or Anna is portrayed as a feminist heroine who tragically died for love. Throughout this paper, I argue that Anna is …

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Little Cricket On The Hearth: The Quiet Feminism Of _Little Women_, Caroline Anderson Klein May 2024

Little Cricket On The Hearth: The Quiet Feminism Of _Little Women_, Caroline Anderson Klein

Honors Theses

Since the advent of the cult of domesticity, the stakes for female characters in domestic literature have been notoriously high. There was no room for flaws, rebellious decisions, and certainly no room for mistakes—whether of the woman’s own accord, or simply as collateral damage of a male character’s immorality. In this shallowly Calvinist domain, women were never more than one broken guardrail away from social ruin or death. In writing Little Women, Louisa May Alcott breaks these molds through unflinching kindness to her female characters from childhood to adulthood, even unto death. Alcott achieves this quietly feminist feat by …

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