Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Le Devoir De Mémoire Ou Une Identité Ravalée Dans Cicatrices D’Alain Kamal Martial, Katharine Hargrave

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

This article examines the construction of identity in Alain Kamal Martial’s novel, Cicatrices. Conceived during a rape committed by a group of militiamen, the narrator struggles against a sense of obligation to avenge his mother’s assault, as well as a need to liberate himself from this event. However, under the onus of being a proxy witness, he realizes that he cannot forget his duty of memory because he embodies the inherited trauma of past generations. The crude and powerful immediacy of this text forces the reader to reflect upon his or her own role in the remembrance of past injustices.

Gender, Othering, And Loki 2015, Amanda Munson

Master's Theses

With many enigmatic characters and engaging stories, Norse literature and mythology have had a formative impact on English literature from the early Middle Ages in poetry like the Edda and many Icelandic sagas. A lot of scholarship has been done on Nordic myth and literature, including character studies on many figures, especially Odin and Thor. However, it is difficult to find studies of the figures who make up the "other" in Nordic tales, such as the trickster Loki. While Loki plays a significant role in many tales, his position as the "other" in general Norse mythology and folklore is perhaps …

"Casting Aside That Ficticious Self.": Deciphering Female Identity In The Awakening 2015, Anne L. Dicosimo

Master's Theses

Kate Chopin’s female protagonists have long since fascinated literary critics, raising serious questions concerning the influence of nineteenth-century female gender roles in her writing. Published in 1899, The Awakening demonstrates the changeability of the various representations of woman. In the nineteenth century, the subject of women may be divided into two categories: the True Woman and the New Woman. The former were expected to “cherish and maintain the four cardinal virtues of piety, purity, submissiveness and domesticity” (Khoshnood et al.), while the latter sought to move away from hearth and home in order to focus on education, professions, and political …

"Fire And Water Imagery" In Jane Eyre 2015, Shannon O'Loughlin

Master's Theses

Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre is a study in contrasts. Critics have argued the implausibility of the novel, that an orphaned governess who marries her dashing employer is too far-fetched to be believed. However, a proper understanding of Jane Eyre must be based not on a sequence of events, but on the thematic form of the novel in which the signifiers relate to each other and shift throughout. Ferdinand de Saussure explains in his "Course in General Linguistics," that the mental concept one has of a word is its "signifier" (62). Charlotte Bronte relies not simply upon a sequence of events …

L’Animal : Agent Du Biopouvoir Dans L’Imaginaire Postcolonial Alain Cyr Pangop Kameni Et Hervé Tchumkam, Alain Cyr Pangop Kameni, Hervé Tchumkam

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

This article seeks to understand the status of the animal and its relation to biopolitics in postcolonial fiction. Going beyond and against Graham Huggan’s notion of “postcolonial exotic”, the analysis of the relation between human and animal is twofold: first, describe and interpret the mechanisms of power, and second, show how the figure of the beast which is at the center of political struggle and social conflict makes more complex the understanding of the “discipline and punish” in postcolonial contexts. Ultimately, drawing on the study of selected novels and drama, the aim of this paper is to show that the …

Diario De Perla Jimenez, Brenda Dorantes

World Languages and Cultures

The aim of this project is to present the effect of the immigration issue in the United States, with a direct focus in San Luis Obispo, and including a spread of intercultural knowledge between the Hispanic and the Caucasian community. Through a fictional short story, the manifestation of these ideas will relate to current events occurring in our society today. These events focus primarily on immigration in California, deportation issues, socioeconomic issues in Mexico, and the cultural barrier seen in Mexican and American cultures; expressed through the main character: a young college student named Perla.

My primary goal in completing …

Through A Glass Darkly: Defining Love In A Nation Of Tolerance, Jonathan T. Hogue

Senior Honors Theses

This paper features an original one-act drama Through a Glass Darkly and analyzes its constructs and themes. The play, written in the contemporary style, depicts the tension between homosexuals and Christians in American culture through emphasizing the contrasting interpretations of love between both communities. It tells the story of Ben, a young gay man struggling to find fulfillment, whose new-found friendship with a Christian named Adam causes him to reevaluate his understanding of love. The play explores the variations of love in an attempt to not only answer what love truly means, but rather what form of love carries the …

Judging Laura, Rebecca E. Richardson

Senior Honors Projects, 2010-2019

Laura Audax is a sixteen-year-old girl who has an interesting set of characteristics. She is a dynamic mixture of compassion, stubbornness, brilliance, recklessness, imagination, and arrogance. The way the world understands these personality traits has transformed and evolved over time. If a girl like Laura lived in four different time periods, society would react differently to her in each era, but the overall question is how different these reactions really are. Does the definition of what makes certain personality traits “good” or “bad” change over time?

The following four stories take place in 1850, 1920, 2015, and 2100 respectively, and …

Bailamos Juntos: Salsa En Los E.E.U.U. Y El Mundo, Betty Tran

First-Gen Voices: Creative and Critical Narratives on the First-Generation College Experience

This composition traces the history of Cuban-American cultural identity formation through the lens of music and dance. As the author explains, Cuban immigrants cultivated a rich music and dance culture in New York City by creating a series of Latin and Afro-Cuban music genres and dances that brought diverse groups of people together. As a Vietnamese-American woman, Tran sees several connections between her family’s Vietnamese heritage and the cultural histories of Cubans who came to the United States as refugees seeking asylum from political oppression. As a first-generation college student, Tran believes it is important to share this composition as …

A Tres Pasos De La Muerte, Samuel Temblador

First-Gen Voices: Creative and Critical Narratives on the First-Generation College Experience

"A Tres Pasos de la Muerte" tells the story of a son of Mexican immigrants and his search for his roots. Here, Temblador attempts to communicate a bicultural experience through the frame of border literature (Literatura Fronteriza) born out of the intersection between Mexican and American culture.

Applications For Dummies, Carla M. Sanchez

First-Gen Voices: Creative and Critical Narratives on the First-Generation College Experience

This poem discusses the overwhelming pressure that is put on students to justify their right to be admitted into universities or to receive scholarships based on their extracurricular activities. Many working-class, first-generation college students are unable to participate in organizations and programs that offer students a more well-rounded college experience. This can lead first-gen students, like the author, to feel isolated, inadequate, or illegitimate. "Applications for Dummies" expresses Sanchez's incessant fear that she will never be able to compete with other students who were given the opportunity to build more worldly resumes, despite her strong academic commitment and intellectual potential.

It's Not Just A Leave, Genesis L. Montalvo

First-Gen Voices: Creative and Critical Narratives on the First-Generation College Experience

In this piece, the author sets out to explore the first-generation college identity through a gothic lens. In the early stages of this project, Montalvo had considered doing research on narratives from other first-gen college students as a way to trace the uncanny and the abject in their experiences. However, as she began reflecting on her own personal history, she realized that in a matter of only two years she had already experienced moments of distance, uncanniness, and confusion, which are recorded here. In presenting these installments in non-chronological order, Montalvo intends to insert a gothic element of disorder, which …

Flashlight, Min-Jung Kim

First-Gen Voices: Creative and Critical Narratives on the First-Generation College Experience

This poem illustrates the struggle of an undergraduate first-generation college student who knew little about the first-gen identity or the experiences she would encounter until she became a First To Go Scholar at Loyola Marymount University. The poet represents the First To Go Program as a flashlight that has helped her to navigate a once dark and unfamiliar environment.

Animals Among Us: The Lives Of Humans And Animals In Contemporary American Fiction Edited By John Yunker, Ashley E. Reis

The Goose

Review of Animals Among Us: The Lives of Humans and Animals in Contemporary American Fiction, edited by John Yunker.

After Alice By Karen Hofmann, Dania Tomlinson

The Goose

Book review of Karen Hofmann's After Alice.

Whitewashing Blackface Minstrelsy In Nineteenth-Century England: Female Banjo Players In 'Punch', Laura Vorachek

Laura Vorachek

Blackface minstrelsy, popular in England since its introduction in 1836, reached its apogee in 1882 when the Prince of Wales took banjo lessons from James Bohee, an African-American performer. The result, according to musicologist Derek Scott, was a craze for the banjo among men of the middle classes. However, a close look at the periodical press, and the highly influential Punch in particular, indicates that the fad extended to women as well. While blackface minstrelsy was considered a wholesome entertainment in Victorian England, Punch's depiction of female banjo players highlights English unease with this practice in a way that male …

Dangerous Women: Vera Caspary’S Rewriting Of 'Lady Audley’S Secret' In 'Bedelia', Laura Vorachek

Laura Vorachek

Considering Vera Caspary's Bedelia as a reimagining of Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret allows for a new critical interpretation that refutes the typical view of Bedelia as reinforcing traditional gender roles. Instead, Caspary critiques World War II America by bringing Victorian concerns with female roles into the twentieth century.

Crossing Boundaries: Land And Sea In Jane Austen's 'Persuasion', Laura Vorachek

Laura Vorachek

Jane Austen suggests in Persuasion the pressures that the increased mobility of the middle class placed on the established aristocratic society in her time. Anne Elliot especially brings to light the inherited assumptions of her society. She can marry within her social rank (Mr. Elliot or Charles Musgrove) or marry below her (Wentworth at age 23), but either is a choice within the limits established by her society. One owns land or one does not. But when Wentworth returns a man of name and wealth, he is not a member of the landed gentry nor is he below Anne in …

Speculation And The Emotional Economy Of 'Mansfield Park', Laura Vorachek

Laura Vorachek

At the midpoint of Mansfield Park (1814), the Bertram family dines at the Parsonage, and card games make up the after dinner entertainment. The characters form two groups, with Sir Thomas, Mrs. Norris, and Mr. and Mrs. Grant playing Whist, while Lady Bertram, Fanny, William, Edmund, and Henry and Mary Crawford play Speculation, This scene is central not only because Speculation reveals certain characters' personalities, but also because another type of “speculation” occurs during the game as the players contemplate or conjecture about one another. Moreover, “speculation” in the sense of gambling functions as a metaphor for the vicissitudes of …

Playing Italian: Cross-Cultural Dress And Investigative Journalism At The Fin De Siècle, Laura Vorachek

Laura Vorachek

This examination of late Victorian journalism reveals that one type of clothing offered middle-class women protection from street harassment: cross-cultural dress. In appropriate ethnic attire, reporters and social investigators ventured into the immigrant communities that made up a part of England’s urban poor, exploring such trades as Jewish fur-puller or Italian organ-grinder. This incognito ethnic attire afforded women both the means and the authority to carry out their investigations into the Italian constituency of the Victorian working poor. This study also examines how costumes enabled female investigators to manipulate class- and gender-based assumptions about who had broad access to the …

Finding Aid To The Collection Of James Brendan Connolly Materials, James Brendan Connolly, Colby College Special Collections

Finding Aids

The Connolly Collection contains the writings and personal library of James Brendan Connolly (1868-1957). The collection includes Connolly's reminiscences, newspaper articles, and galley and page proofs as well as scrapbook clippings. There are also notebooks containing holograph notes on schooners and the navy, letters from Connolly's personal correspondence, and books from Connolly's personal library. James Brendan Connolly (1868-1957) was an Irish-American author of sea-related stories, novels, and nonfiction such as The Book of the Gloucester Fishermen. Born in South Boston, he attended Harvard and was a medal-winning athlete in the first modern Olympics, held in Athens in 1896. He …

Male Development In Young Adult Novels: Mapping The Intersections Between Masculinity, Fatal Illness, Male Queerness, And Brotherhood, Ruth Nelson

Departmental Honors Projects

Since 2000, Young Adult (YA) literature has grown exponentially. The subgenres of cancer novels (teen “sick-lit”) and LGBTQ fiction, in particular, have experienced a recent surge in popularity. The novels in these subgenres that feature young men as the affected characters (diagnosed with cancer and/or identifying as gay or queer) are particularly interesting because of the threats that these experiences pose to heteronormative masculinity. Because this fiction is directed at an impressionable audience in the process of forming their identities, the novels’ representations of gender could have a strong influence over readers’ gender identity development. Researchers have begun exploring the …

In Solidarity: Collaborations In Lgbtq+ Activism, Lisa M. Tillmann Ph.D., Kathryn L. Norsworthy

Faculty Publications

What follows is a fictional account. Our “characters” bear our real names; the other eight are composites of students we have taught and from whom we have learned; activists with whom we have worked; and staff, faculty, and administrators we have trained in venues such as Safe Zone. We portray our ally (Lisa)-lesbian (Kathryn) relationship this way for two reasons: one, we had not secured permission from real students, colleagues, or community members to represent their lives and experiences, and two, we seek a way to show our partnership, both personal and professional since 2000, in action. To each of …

Review Of E-I-E-I-O: How Old Macdonald Got His Farm By Judy Sierra, Austin C. Becton

Library Intern Book Reviews

No abstract provided.