English Language and Literature Commons^™

Understanding Travis Bickle: The Incel Prototype, Abigail Lydia Oakley

Undergraduate Honors Thesis Collection

In this essay, I analyze the character Travis Bickle from the 1976 film "Taxi Driver." I use theory from and about masculinity in the 1970s, context of the Vietnam War, psychology of incels, character analysis of Travis, critical reviews from the time, and primary sources from incel forums to connect Travis to the modern day incel.

Greta Gerwig And The Chick Flick Revival, Syndey Walker Neis

Undergraduate Honors Thesis Collection

The "chick-flick" is derived from decades of movies known as "woman's film". It's evolution is most obvious in the creation of female-centric movies that place a primary focus on platonic and familial relationships, such as the "Female-Friendship Film". This subgenre was wildly successful until it became co-opted by the Romantic Comedy during the late-90s and early-00s and ultimately transformed into the "Chick-Flick" we are most familiar with today. Gerwig's three films re-establish the "Chick-Flick" as a film that de-centers romantic relationships in favor of developing the female protagonists in terms of individuals and through their platonic and familial relationships. My …

What We Need: A Poetic Study In Struggle And Self-Healing, Grace Anne Calabria

Undergraduate Honors Thesis Collection

In many ways, this thesis examines the eternal, repetitive inevitabilities of life. In a collection of poems, these inevitabilities are examined through the eyes of an observant and omniscient narrator: a girl, long in love with a boy, facing the struggles and rewards of learning to be alone in various ways after the 2020 pandemic. Because this thesis provides an examination of struggles and self-healing alongside its creative centerpiece of the collection, the poems are accompanied by a compilation of memoiristic reflections. This thesis contributes to conversations of mental health, love, growth, and finding legitimacy and value in creative work, …

Reshaping The Canon: How “Insta-Poets” Are Creating A New Literary Space For Readers Using Social Media, Hannah Salsbery

Undergraduate Honors Thesis Collection

Reading and analyzing poetry can be an equally beautiful and frustrating experience. Interacting with a poem allows a reader to access untapped emotions through the words on the page; yet, when not given the tools to understand canonical poetry, young readers are often left at a loss. The rise of “Insta-poetry” gives younger generations of readers access to poems that are both relatable in experience and language. Using Rupi Kaur as a vehicle towards unmasking the importance of the rise of poetry on Instagram, this thesis highlights the importance of reshaping the literary canon to become a more inclusive, diverse, …

Subversion Of Form: Mixing Poetry And Prose, Darby Alexandria Brown

Undergraduate Honors Thesis Collection

My honors thesis project is called Subversion of Form: Mixing Poetry and Prose. The purpose has been to research how writers have interwoven poetry and prose, to write a creative nonfiction piece that uses both genres, and to improve as a writer through committing myself to this piece and solidifying writing as a daily practice. In my introduction, I outline the research I conducted on poetry and prose and my takeaways from the writers I read. I conclude that the purpose of prose is to tell, while the purpose of poetry is to search.

The piece that I have worked …

Terrible Am I, Child?, Camille Arnett

Undergraduate Honors Thesis Collection

The modern period of intergenerational strife between the aging-out Baby Boomers and the Millennials who have come forth to replace them in an infrastructure that cannot support them is a struggle that carries with it unique psychological implications ripe for literary exploration. Understanding these conflicts in a profound way is an important challenge to take on, and one which can, in my belief, be best achieved through literature. My work, a draft of a novel entitled Terrible Am I, Child?, is a family drama which takes the symbolic generational divide and uses it as a framework for exploring issues of …

A New Happiness?: Reading Literature With Deleuze And Guattari In 2020, Fiona Connolly

Undergraduate Honors Thesis Collection

Gilles Deleuze is one of the most influential French philosophers of the twentieth century. He collaborated with political activist and radical psychoanalyst, Felix Guattari to create Anti-Oedipus (1972), A Thousand Plateaus (1980), and What is Philosophy ? (1991), among other works. At the center of Deleuze and Guattari’s thought was the belief that philosophy is the production of concepts, such as territorialization/deterritorialization, lines of flight, and rhizomes. In this thesis, I will use Deleuze and Guattari to examine three seemingly unrelated literary texts: Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s White Nights, Lucy Maud Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables, and John Green’s Paper Towns. By …

Flash As Fiction: Exploring Jennifer Egan’S Nuanced Portrayal Of Photography, Matthew Del Busto

Undergraduate Honors Thesis Collection

Photographs are everywhere. They’re blown up on billboards, airdropped via iPhones, and slapped on the sides of semis, telling stories of war, politics, sport, and most everything in between. Yet, how much credence should we allow photographs, which display not reality itself but a two-dimensional abstraction of a single moment’s reality? As the ubiquitousness of images continues to increase, it is more critical now than ever to understand photography as a cultural force having measurable influence on both society as a whole and the individuals within it. In the writing of Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jennifer Egan, ideas about photography and …

Invisible Minds: Marginalizing Minority Women In The American Academy Of Higher Education, Gianna Kujawski

Undergraduate Honors Thesis Collection

"The year 2018 witnessed the evolution of the #MeToo movement, which spurred more women to run for U.S. political office than ever before and women to ascend to the position of CEO in male-dominated fields. The representation of female voices has grown with the times, but there is one institution that continues to silence women: the American Academy of Higher Education. The world of academia remains a male-dominated field which marginalizes women and people of color, and thus leaves little to no room for women of color. Unfortunately, the problem is deep-seated within the academy, and is continuously perpetuated by …

A Glimpse Of Casual Queerness: The Radical Progress Of Queer Visibility In Weimar Film And The Inevitable Backlash That Followed, Claire Colburn

Undergraduate Honors Thesis Collection

In looking back at German history, the Weimar Era and the 1920s, in particular, are often regarded as a time of unrestricted frivolity and the catharsis of post-war anxiety. In retrospect, it can be temptingly easy to credit the changing political landscape and liberalization of German society between 1918 and 1933 as a brief but inherently doomed moment of progressivism that necessarily would give way to a strident, reactionary backlash. Often, the increased visibility and acceptance of LGBTQ individuals during this time is regarded as a symptom of the “anything goes” attitude for which the Weimar Era has been famous. …

Fans And Adaptation: An Analysis Of The Use Of Interactive Storytelling In The Lizzie Bennet Diaries, Margaret Brodbeck

Undergraduate Honors Thesis Collection

By using adaptations of Jane Austen’s classic novel Pride and Prejudice (1813) as a frame of reference, my thesis will demonstrate that transmedia narratives are most effective in tandem with original texts that have a history of successful adaptations due to the perpetual audience of fans and their previous knowledge of the story to meaningfully, as well as canonically, interact with the narrative. This thesis will first introduce theories surrounding adaptations and look at previous Pride and Prejudice adaptations in light of a devoted fan base. It will then introduce the concept of transmedia narratives and examine the culture of …

Narrators Of Change: A Contemporary Study Of Patrisse Khan-Cullors, Malala Yousafzai, And Emma Watson, Evan Davis

Undergraduate Honors Thesis Collection

Though they champion different social movements—race discrimination, gender inequality, and girls’ education—Patrisse Cullors, Emma Watson, and Malala Yousafzai are each extremely effective activists. Patrisse Cullors is a self defined Artist, Organizer, and Freedom Fighter, but most importantly Cullors is a theatre artist. Cullors uses her agency as an artist to give theatrical life to issues of race discrimination, creating a virtual reality in which her audience can see and understand issues that are new to them. Malala Yousafzai shares her story because such stories of girls being denied their basic right to education are ubiquitous in third world countries and …

Narrative Technique In The Works Of The Pearl Poet, Karl Agger

Undergraduate Honors Thesis Collection

In the fourteenth century, the so-called Pearl Poet created such masterpieces as Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Pearl. Though his surviving body of work comprises only four poems, these are enough to have him considered among the greatest medieval English writers. Much scholarship has focused on the poems’ sources, style, symbolism, and thematic content, but comparatively little has approached these works as narratives. The Pearl Poet was a masterful storyteller who employed a consistent yet flexible set of narrative techniques. Borrowing the theories developed by Wayne C. Booth in The Rhetoric of Fiction, I present an analysis of …

“While The Imagination Strains / After Deer”: William Carlos Williams’S Interrogations Of The American Transcendental Imagination And The Proto-Suburban Scene, Tyler Wagner

Undergraduate Honors Thesis Collection

Oftentimes the American suburbs are considered through the lens of architecture, economics, fiction, and visual media. And, typically, the conversation centers on their cultural zenith in the 1950s. One literary form is neglected in this conversation: poetry. This omission is peculiar, as a fascination with the vastness of the continent’s landscape—and its significance—pervades the history of the American verse. For Ralph Waldo Emerson, the apparently endless expanses of space and rejuvenative qualities of the American landscape provide the poet’s ideal inspiration, and Walt Whitman, in perhaps the most important collection of poetry of the nineteenth century, Leaves of Grass, is …

Speculative Literature In Modern Society: Octavia Butler And The Tragedy Of The Commons, Katherine Elyse Miller

Undergraduate Honors Thesis Collection

What leads to peaceful prosperity and what leads to destructive collapse in any society? While it may seem daunting or overwhelming to dissect the success or collapse of a multi-faceted society, there are lenses and tools through which we are able to do so, such as political theory and speculative dystopian fiction. By using lenses to analyze the society in which we live, we are able to recognize the seeds of both prosperity and destruction in our society that may otherwise be overlooked or ignored. The speculative dystopian fiction of Octavia Butler may be considered as building upon the political …

White Shadows: Perception And Imagination In Poetry, Madison Chartier

Undergraduate Honors Thesis Collection

In the spring of my sophomore year, I enrolled in the introductory course to writing poetry here at Butler University. I am not naturally a poet, but I have an appreciation for reading poetry and, at the time of the course, was curious to try my hand at the craft, despite having had little experience prior to the collegiate level. As may be expected, I ran into obstacles.

I enjoyed playing with language in experiments of sound and rhythm, but, despite the vast array of assonance, consonance, enjambment, and every other technique I employed, the poems I created throughout the …

Revisiting Modernism And The Ballets Russes: What Contemporary Choreography Can Learn From Diaghilev, Kelly Oden

Undergraduate Honors Thesis Collection

In order to discover some of the features of what contemporary choreographers, dancers, artists, and musicians can learn from the Ballets Russes and the defining artistic movement of which they were a part-modernism-we must first take a journey back to Paris in the early twentieth century and work to unravel modernism's meaning in relation to different artistic media. We must ask complicated questions: What is modernism? What defines artistic success? What does it take to make something truly new? By asking such questions we can come to a deeper understanding of the conditions necessary to create a thriving artistic environment …

Witnesses To Trauma: Kakfa's Trauma Victims And The Working Through Process, Emily Allison Kile

Undergraduate Honors Thesis Collection

In "The Metamorphosis" and "The Hunger Artist," Kafka has gifted us with two characters who, in Kafkaesque fashion, "pay a terrible price when, willingly or not, [they go] against 'nature, '" as Joachim Neugroschel writes in the introduction to his translation of The Metamorphosis, In the Penal Colony, and Other Stories (Kafka xix). Gregor awakes one morning to discover that he has been turned into a giant vermin, and the hunger artist attempts to cope with his tragedy of not enjoying the taste of food by putting himself on public display, likening his role in society to that of a …

The Stage Is The Court And All The Players Merely Copies: Shakespeare's Antony And Cleopatra As Propaganda, Ginnye Cubel

Undergraduate Honors Thesis Collection

In 1603 the world as England knew it changed. After forty-five years Elizabeth I, Queen of England, and last surviving Tudor was dead and James VI of Scotland was ascending the throne. Despite several differences between the new king and the old queen, there were similarities in their patronage of the arts. Enthralled by theatrical performances, one of James' first acts as king was to offer royal patronage to William Shakespeare's theatre company and give them the title, The King's Men. But it is likely that James' love of the theatre wasn't his only reason for patronizing Shakespeare's theatre troupe. …

Modernist Women In Three Acts: The Stage For Political Protest, Jennifer B. Redmond

Undergraduate Honors Thesis Collection

In this essay, I will draw upon Katherine Mansfield's New Zealand Sh011stories, "Bliss" (1918), "The Woman at the Store" (1912), "Je Ne Parle Pas Francais" (1918), George Bernard Shaw's play Mrs. Warren's Profession (1893), and Virginia Woolf's extended essay A Room of One 's Own (1929), to defend Jeffreys's idea that "lesbianism" was, in many cases, nothing more than a bond of friendship between two women - a private experience that took on a different meaning in the public eye.

Additionally, I wish to support Gubar's notion that gender norms frequently existed secondarily to the importance of women gaining more …

The Vegetarian Question, Mary Elizabeth Sekela

Undergraduate Honors Thesis Collection

I wasn't raised in a vegetarian household. As a matter of fact, I have spent the majority of my life on a horse and cattle farm in central Kentucky. As a child, the process of raising our cattle for slaughter didn't strike me as a disgusting or unholy activity-my parents participated, after all, and they didn't seem to be adversely affected. Even when I became aware that some of the animals I had seen wandering the fields were slaughtered just down the road from our kitchen table, it never bothered me beyond an initial instant of discomfort. It wasn't until …

Darwin, Victorian Literature, And The Great Web: Analyzing And Dismantling The Human Superiority Complex, Farhad R. Anwarzai

Undergraduate Honors Thesis Collection

In my essay, I will argue that the discrimination and cruelty humans project towards other humans mirrors the discrimination and cruelty humans project towards other species. A moral justification exists behind the need to discriminate against another human or animal. Therefore, the concept of “morality,” which has long been thought to be the root of man‟s “higher” mental capabilities, and which is, I will propose, the cause of racism, sexism, classism, and speciesism, is not an advantageous, or “higher,” trait. Instead, “morality,” if we classify it in Darwinian terms, is a disadvantageous trait that could potentially lead to our devolution …

Shakespeare And Cervantes Are Dead: The Construction Of Fiction And Reality In Hamlet And Don Quixote, Joanna Parypinski

Undergraduate Honors Thesis Collection

The reason that Hamlet and Don Quixote can be studied so thoroughly on the poststructuralist notion of a false or constructed reality is because they were both works far ahead of their time, often reflecting extremely postmodernist ideas. Don Quixote is generally considered the first modern novel, and Hamlet is also identified with the beginning of the modern age (Oort 319). Yet beyond this, these authors play games with the reader and with the structure of the fiction itself, which would fit sensibly in a 20th or 21st century novel rather than an early 17th century work. These new methods …

Patriots, Plumbers, And Our Better Angels: The Establishment Of Ethos In The Rhetoric Of The 2008 Presidential Campaigns Of Sens. John Mccain And Barack Obama, Ryan Matthew Hehner

Undergraduate Honors Thesis Collection

The focus of this thesis will be the rhetoric of the candidates for the two major parties—Republican Senator John McCain and Democratic President Barack Obama (who in this thesis will be referred to under the title he held during the campaign, Senator Obama). This thesis will examine the various ways in which the two candidates attempted to establish ethos during their respective campaigns.

Social Analysis In The Ibsen Drama, Rebecca E. Pitts

Undergraduate Honors Thesis Collection

No abstract provided.