English Language and Literature Commons^™

Exploring Instability In Dream-Based Narratives : A Comparative Analysis Of “Vanilla Sky” And "Inception", Sara Glemaud

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

This thesis aims to dissect the deliberate destabilization that emerges from Cameron Crowe’s Vanilla Sky and Christopher Nolan’s Inception. By stripping away stabilizing elements and weaving intricate dream sequences, Nolan and Crowe craft a cinematic experience that blurs the distinction between reality and imaginary. The means in which Nolan and Crowe execute this is through several ways. Firstly, through the exploration of the symbiotic relationship between the characters' bodies and minds within the dream narrative. Secondly, through the deliberate creation of spatial and temporal instability, which blurs the boundaries between reality and fantasy or the imaginary. Lastly, both films deliberately …

Playing With Every Sense Of The Word : Lolita Through The Lens Of Jacques Derrida, Noelle Marie Florio

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

This essay ties both the repetition and doubling found in Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita with the art of retelling to find a means of a center origin in Jacques Derrida’s “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences.” This essay argues how unreliable narration works to substitute and redefine a center origin of/for the novel, and in doing so, pulls the reader further from any reliable foundation from which to draw conclusions. Humbert Humbert, the protagonist, employs what readers recognize as Derrida’s theory of deconstruction not only to disorient readers of Lolita, but to provide a sort of …

Beyond Print : The Web Of Egan’S Narrative Universe, Cassandra Sardo

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

Jennifer Egan’s website greatly rewards readers and literary critics interested in A Visit from the Goon Squad and The Candy House. It hosts an interactive timeline filled with details like when and where she wrote each chapter of Goon Squad, a digital counterpart to her famous PowerPoint chapter, and excerpts from her handwritten first drafts of The Candy House. These digital epitexts, however, have been largely overlooked by critics, and a comprehensive analysis and close reading of Egan’s work in this important context remains uncharted territory. My thesis aims to bridge this gap by exploring the technological elements within Egan’s …

The Ghost Of The Neo-Slave Narrative : Jesmyn Ward’S Sing, Unburied, Sing And The Evolution Of The Black Gothic, Kabria Wimbush

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

Beloved by Toni Morrison, while clearly a neo-slave narrative, functions as a transition between the neo-slave narrative and the Black Gothic genre. Jesmyn Ward expands upon the Gothic elements in Beloved in her novel Sing, Unburied, Sing. When examined together, the two novels demonstrate how the Black Gothic was influenced by the neo-slave narrative. Where Beloved examines the effects of slavery on those who were directly victimized by it, Sing, Unburied, Sing shows how the lingering effects of slavery still exist in modern times. Ultimately, Ward offers possible courses of action to make the future more inclusive and diverse without …

Professional, Personal, Societal : The Detrimental Effects Of Identity Revolving Around Career In Kazuo Ishiguro’S Remains Of The Day, Salvatore Cerchio

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

In Kazuo Ishiguro’s Remains of the Day, Mr. Stevens immerses himself in his work as a butler until it becomes his identity. In Stevens’s quest to be superlative at his job, he accepts his role in society, adopting an extreme view of dignity that constrains him rather than providing him a sense of self. Although his interpretation of dignity and obedience to the social hierarchy helps him fulfill his desire to be a butler of the highest order, it hampers his development as a person. In discussing Stevens, critics have focused on his desire to fulfill his duties as …

Adult Women In The Wizarding World : Rowling’S Ideal Female In The Harry Potter Novels, Grace Ann Mccarthy

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

This study focuses on the perceptions of gender and its expressions in the Harry Potter series, primarily regarding the adult female characters in the novels. Through the Harry Potter novels, J. K. Rowling asserts her belief that women must fit into a traditional role that a heteronormative society dictates or else they are not a “true” woman. Rowling’s recent public transphobic statements also lend credence to this heteronormative perspective. This phenomenon is seen through the analysis of the “good” adult female characters—Lily Potter, Molly Weasley, and Minerva McGonagall. Their treatment in the text differs from the “bad” adult female characters—Dolores …

An Unfaithful Feminist : Neoliberal Feminism, Identity, And Postmodernism In Jenny Offill’S Dept. Of Speculation, Anne Bobis

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

Jenny Offill’s novel Dept of Speculation explores the life of a female college professor who looks back on her marriage after her husband has an affair. Events are told through brief fragments. Much of the critical discourse surrounding the novel is concerned with its fragmentary form or postfeminism. In this essay, I assert that Dept. of Speculation is a reaction to neoliberal feminism because of the narrator’s multiple challenges throughout the novel. Some vocal figures within neoliberal feminism assume a woman can balance upward mobility in a career and life as a mother. The ability to maintain this work-life balance …

Faculty’S Experiences Teaching English Language Learners In Higher Education, Chedia A. Ayari

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

Conducted in a large size four-year state university, the purpose of this qualitative study was to learn how faculty of multiple disciplines examined and made meaning of their instructional practices and decisions when teaching ELL students, how they modified their instruction to meet the needs of ELLs, and what they saw as areas of struggle when working with this student population. Critical pedagogy (Freire, 1970) was used as a theoretical framework to further investigate the complex nature of how higher education faculty make meaning of their instructional experiences when teaching ELLs within the hierarchical structures inherent in higher education and …

Racial Capitalism In Colson Whitehead’S The Underground Railroad, Daniel Paul Marx

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

In this thesis I examine how Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad attempts to denounce a system of racial capitalism, but the various tactics used to achieve this are often clouded in an inadvertent participation in this system regardless. I contend that this participation is indicative of a particular reading’s predominance in our current American social context that nevertheless reinforces the racial capitalism the novel attempts to denounce. This inescapable reading is explored in the sections devoted to the various states the protagonist Cora travels to on her journey toward supposed freedom from bondage, as each state represents various iterations of …

Ecocriticism And The Young Adult Audience In Dry And The Islands At The End Of The World, Nicole Marie Sysyn

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

This thesis focuses on exploring and analyzing two young adult novels through an ecocritical lens. The authors of the young adult novels, Dry and The Islands at the End of the Earth, bring awareness to young readers about the progression of global warming and effects this devastation has on humans and animals. Both of these novels show character’s relationships with nature, decision making skills in terms of crisis, and coping mechanisms which can translate to young readers. There is a great balance of teaching young readers the importance of their own relationship with the environment and how to cope in …

The Commercialization And Imposed Voices Of Femininity In The Summer I Turned Pretty, Danielle Mcclelland

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

This essay seeks to explore and analyze the novel The Summer I Turned Pretty by Jenny Han. The novel’s ability to maintain relevance as a piece of popular YA literature despite its release over ten years ago makes it an interesting title to study because it demonstrates the concept of a “formulaic text,” which is defined as having, “...simple syntax, frequent repetition, and explicit authorial interpretations” (Smith 31). Additionally, Han’s novel displays the commercialization of femininity and enforces the common heteronormative relationship narrative displayed in this strain of romantic fiction. This essay aims to explore these social phenomena and how …

Sylvia Plath As A Confessionalist Writer : The Queen Bee, Alexandra Tangarife

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

Sylvia Plath is a renowned Confessionalist poet from the early-mid 20th century in America. She frequently compares to her predecessor, Robert Lowell, and her friend and colleague, Ann Sexton. Confessionalism was an emotionally authentic form of poetry that split off from prior poetry, such as Modernism. Modernist founder T.S Eliot wrote in his “Tradition and The Individual Talent,” “Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality” (1). Despite this mentality, Confessionalists addressed the elephant in the room: the fragmented and emotionally disturbed nation. …

“I’M Not Like That!” : Reframing Contemporary Ecopoetic Criticism And De-Metaphorizing The Nonhuman Animal, Alexandra Franke

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

In this paper, I seek to highlight the benefits and necessity of reframing our critical approach to ecopoetry. In order to do so, I attempt to define “ecopoetry,” as well as terms like “nonhuman animal” and “anthropocentrism.” Historically, critics have routinely romanticized the nonhuman natural world, rendering it something two-dimensional, like a painting or landscape, rather than an encompassing environment. As a result, critics have often failed to consider the legitimacy of the animals who populate the nonhuman natural world. Instead, these animals are typically romanticized and metaphorized, ultimately furthering anthropocentric hierarchies and distancing us from them. When anthropocentric thought …

The Framing Of Black And White Masculinities In Toni Morrison’S Beloved, Felesha Beckford

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

This study is an examination of white hegemonic masculinity and its effect on tyrannized black male figures in Toni Morrison’s Beloved . These disenfranchised figures suffered psychological trauma through the perpetuation of marginalized and subordinate masculinities within the “blues epistemological” apparatus by means of self-realization. Blues epistemology is a term that Clyde Woods describes as “a longstanding African American tradition of explaining reality and change. This form of explanation finds its origins in the processes of African American cultural construction within, and resistance to, the antebellum plantation regime” (25). Beloved serves as a form of historical text by means of …

The Women Of Brewster Place : A Dream Deferred And Unactualized, Lauren Fuentes

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

Gloria Naylor’s The Women of Brewster Place is a landmark novel of black female empowerment, yet even as the novel affirms the necessity for black women to band together, Brewster Place simultaneously points to the idea that systemic racism and sexism may be a hurdle over which the community cannot leap—other systemic changes must be implemented before true equality can be achieved. This novel forces readers to grapple with questions that may present unsavory answers: Is it possible to eradicate systemic racism? To what degree do the subjugated have the ability to change the prejudicial system in which they live? …

The Eye’S Construction Of Power In Richard Ii, Julius Caesar And Macbeth, John O’Brien

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

This study seeks to analyze the optical performance of power in three of Shakespeare’s plays: Richard II, Julius Caesar, and Macbeth. Using a political framework via Kantorowicz’s King’s Two Bodies and Maus’s Inwardness and Theater in the English Renaissance, this paper explores the interior and exterior personas as they pertain and interact with public and private spaces. This paper will track Shakespeare’s contribution to this developing “modern” shift in the understanding of appearance and its role in the presentations of power in these three plays. In each of these plays, I argue, Shakespeare provides us with a series of presentational …

Resisting Dominican Motherhood Across Julia Alvarez’S How The García Girls Lost Their Accents And Junot Díaz’S The Brief Wondrous Life Of Oscar Wao, Ana Hilario

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

This paper endeavors to explore the distinct ways in which the Dominican motherhood ideology promoted by Rafael Leónidas Trujillo Molina’s regime is resisted by women of different social classes and race through a close reading of the characters Laura and Beli in Julia Alvarez’s How the García Girls Lost Their Accents and Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, respectively. Using Adrienne Rich’s concept of motherhood ideology as a theoretical framework and engaging in discussion of how these ideologies were constructed, engendered, and enforced by the Trujillo regime, I found that these texts depict voluntary and involuntary resistance …

The Wide-Reaching Appeal Of Fan Fiction And Its Merits In Popular Culture, Summer Nawaz

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

This paper takes on the practice of fan fiction by introducing its origins, exploring the concept of it being recognized as a part of “real literature”—while also determining what makes real literature—as well as comparing literary retellings to fan fiction and questioning what makes distinguishes them from one another. The influence that fan fiction already has garnered within popular culture will also be explored, as well as the role fan fiction plays within fandoms.

By examining at primary texts such as E. L. James’s Fifty Shades of Grey, Anna Todd’s After, and the popular fanfic known as Heat Waves, this …

Caliban The Savage : Shakespeare’S Critique Of Colonialist Misappropriation Of Indigenous Identities, Leonard Aquil Hughes

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

This thesis engages with Shakespeare’s The Tempest, analyzing the character Caliban as a critique of British colonialism. I argue that Caliban is not intended simply as a begrudged antagonist, but as a figure intended to represent New World natives. Shakespeare’s “savage” also acts as an on-stage embodiment of Africans and other victims of British imperial exploits that suffered subjugation and hegemony. With this character, Shakespeare provides a demonstration of the relationship between Europeans and the colonized, while challenging the very institution of colonialism. Such a work provides valuable post-Shakespearean insights as well. Caliban contributes directly to the dialogue surrounding the …

Muslim Young Adult Graphic Novels : Destabilizing Perceptions, Sidra Habal

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

This paper seeks to analyze common trends in the Muslim Young Adult graphic novels Huda F Are You? by Huda Fahmy and the Ms. Marvel comics by G. Willow Wilson. The main characters, Huda and Kamala, respectively, struggle to define their own identities beyond being Muslim as well as figuring out who they are, who they want to be, and how they wish to represent themselves. The common themes found within these novels include this question of identity as well as exploring family bonds, navigating romantic interests, and building strong groups of friends. These characters are trying to find a …

"Neither Here Nor There" : Migrant Women And The Cycle Of Cultural Masculine Superiority, Fiorella Medina

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

This thesis examines the way migrant fiction evolves the use of women's stories. By examining this evolution, I argue that many migrant women writers explore misogyny within their representations of their home and adopted cultures. Using The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros (1983), The Affairs of the Falcons by Melissa Rivero (2019), and The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts by Maxine Hong Kingston (1976), I explain the techniques these writers use to establish the mistreatment and marginalization their protagonists face. I clarify these works by presenting examples of women gaining agency despite the struggles they …

Literary Machiavellianism, The Vice Figure, And The Jewish Character : Anti-Semitic Perceptions In The Jew Of Malta And The Merchant Venice, Allison Schaechter

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

This thesis focuses on Anti-Semitism in Renaissance drama through the lens of attempting to weave an older literary idea into a newer one. By the Renaissance, the Vice figure, a literary tool to draw one-dimensional evil characters, began to raise questions about the rationale behind their villainy. Machiavellianism served to reclassify characters that were originally meant to be perceived by audiences as inherently evil, allowing them potentially to sympathize with them in the plight that led them to such deplorable acts.

Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare created Jewish characters who seek to remain in control of their families and wealth, …

“The Delta Is Filled Up With Death” : Death As Avoidance And The Construction Of White Identity In Lewis Nordan’S Music Of The Swamp, Sarah Sturm

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

Lewis Nordan’s Music of the Swamp has not been fully explored with an emphasis on Nordan’s personal history in relation to racism in the South. In Nordan’s autobiography, Boy With the Loaded Gun (2000), Nordan describes growing up in Itta Benna, Mississippi — just one town over from where Emmett Till was murdered in 1955 (Nordan 80). I argue Nordan’s depiction of death in the Music of the Swamp can be read as the early stages of him grappling with Till’s death through writing, along with the broader historical context of Southern racism. Nordan’s ambivalent relationship to this history informs …

Into The Roach’S Mouth: Beyond The Postmodern Discourse On Silence In Clarice Lispector’S The Passion According To G.H., Eman Halimeh

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

In Clarice Lispector’s novel The Passion According to G.H. the protagonist experiences a complete break from reality when she enters her maid’s room and encounters a cockroach. The entire plot is predicated on this encounter, but the existential crisis is filtered through a quest for a resounding silence – one that will liberate G.H. from the shackles of a preorganized existence. This thesis will explore Clarice Lispector’s use of silence as it functions in relation to a repurposed posthuman theory. By investigating Lispector’s preoccupation with the “thingness” of being, I expose the limitations of postmodern feminism and offer a way …

Freudian Melancholy And Bodily Mutilation In “Little Snow White” And “The Sleeping Beauty In The Wood”, Valmira Kaba

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

What is left to say about fairy tales that has not already been said before? In this essay, I answer this question by approaching two famous fairy tales, The Grimm Brothers’ “Little Snow White” (1812) and Charles Perrault’s “The Sleeping Beauty in the Wood” (1897) with two theoretical frameworks in mind: Freudian psychoanalysis and disability studies. Both Freudian psychology and disability studies are mainstays in critical discourse of fairy tales, but neither Freud nor contemporary critics have combined the two in a way that addresses the pathological condition known as melancholia and its relationship to the perception of disabilities. My …

Marital And Maternal Mourning : Gravesite Domesticity In Sylvia Townsend Warner’S “Epitaphs”, Alexis Grainger

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

Modernist writer Sylvia Townsend Warner satirically immortalizes fictive English subjects, most of whom are female, in her epitaph poetry. Writing in the voices of the deceased, their survivors, and, in some cases, the omniscient third person, Townsend Warner places each buried body back into the heterosexual domestic paradigm, thus critiquing earthly gender roles and expectations in these eternal etchings on the metaphoric gravestone. Rather than escaping their material conditions, the deceased are re-homed by Townsend Warner, though not in any romantic way. In these pithy epitaphs, the burial site mirrors the domestic site as it assumes the politics of marriage, …

“True Darkness And True Womanness” : A Study Of Sisterhood In Marlon James’ The Book Of Night Women, Jessica Schwartz

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

This paper focuses on the obstacles to building sisterhood and community in Marlon James’ novel The Book of Night Women (2009). I examine the acts of violence that the enslaved women at Montpelier Estate perform against one another and consider the influence the plantation environment has on these relationships. The violence that takes place among the enslaved women is especially prevalent within the group of “night women,” which consists of Lilith, Homer, Pallas, Iphigenia, Hippolyta, Callisto, and Gorgon. Despite the biological and symbolic sisterhood between these women, they more frequently express feelings of enmity than ones of community. By highlighting …

Wound And Weight : “Cumbrous Flesh” And Pain In Paradise Lost And Paradise Regain’D, John Robert Jenkins

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

The seventeenth-century poet, civil servant, and prose polemicist John Milton is well- known for his renditions of Satan and Jesus in his poems Paradise Lost and Paradise Regain'd. While scholars maintain a clear difference between Satan and Jesus, there is a surprising and unnoticed relationship between the fallen angel and the Son of God. While Milton shies away from explicitly illustrating Jesus’ crucifixion, the pain and weight of Jesus’ body hanging from the cross cannot go unillustrated. Left in the void and searching for a vessel to signify this touchstone of Christian theology, Milton employs Satan as a perfect candidate. …

Reflections Of A Broken Mirror : An Analysis Of The Mirror Motif In The Famished Road, Mama Day, And Us, Samira Pigford

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

According to Jacques Lacan’s mirror stage theory, the mirror is one device in which infants begin to develop an ego through self-identification. The mirror works as a double tool; it serves as a being’s introduction into selfhood but also creates a false interpretation of being. Lacan argues that paradoxically, the mirror helps people discover who they are while also creating feelings of self-alienation (as the infant does not recognize the being in the mirror as themselves). Furthermore, Lacan’s study of psychoanalysis suggests that when people see visions of themselves, through dreams or hallucinations, it further helps reveal aspects of the …

The Island Remembers : Land Memory, Collective Memory & Trauma In Gloria Naylor’S Mama Day, Justine Prusiensky

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

The purpose of this project is to define the concept of land memory in Gloria Naylor’s Mama Day, considering it in relation to scholarship by Jeffrey Andrew Barash, Paula Gallant Eckard, Patricia San José Rico, and others. This exploration of the relationship between land and memory alongside the magical realistic novel, Mama Day, reveals how the island’s memory constructs, preserves, and coveys the past while influencing the present. The island of Willow Springs retains and remembers the events that transpired there in 1823, which tethers the past to the present and exposes a ripple of consequences felt by Naylor’s characters. …