English Language and Literature Commons^™

"Not Gone Or Vanished Either:" William Faulker's Use Of Memory And Imagination, Kevin Daniel Gleason

Masters Theses and Doctoral Dissertations

This thesis examines the role that memory and imagination play in three of William Faulkner’s novels: The Sound and the Fury, Absalom, Absalom! and The Unvanquished. While most scholars perceive Faulkner’s characters as burdened, debilitated, and destroyed by the past, I argue that Faulkner presents a wide spectrum of engagement with the past which includes the potential for memory to serve as a tool of redemption and power. Henri Bergson’s notion of the fluidity of all time past, present, and future forms the center of Faulkner’s understanding of time, and in this paradigm, Faulkner’s characters are capable of creating and …

Care Of The Self And The Will To Freedom: Michel Foucault, Critique And Ethics, Stephanie M. Batters

Senior Honors Projects

Care of the Self and the Will to Freedom

Stephanie Batters

Faculty Sponsor:  Stephen Barber, English

What do subjectivity, power and ethics have in common?  For French philosopher Michel Foucault, each of these concepts inherently resides within the others.  His works, spanning from the mid-1950s to his death in 1984, offer a profound theoretical approach to the complex questions that obtain between the individual and society.  Foucault’s works present careful and intricate theories about the relationships of the past with the present, the individual with society, and power with truth.  Many of his writings explore how the individual is made …

Visual Symbols Of The Damaged Families In Sam Shepard’S Family Trilogy, Kathryn Ann Baran

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

Sam Shepard is a playwright who provides extensive stage directions for his actors. Although many literary critics disapprove of his control of the stage space through his stage directions, his specific notes on set design, costume, props and gestures offer a commentary on the characters and their actions in his dramas.

Metaphorically, Shepard’s clever positioning of his visual images in Curse o f the Starving Class, Buried Child, and True West suggests that his characters find it necessary to damage each other’s securities, to destroy their own haunted pasts, or to disrupt the family experience and the myth of the …

Hawthorne’S Independent Women : Individualism And Self-Reliance As Empowerment, Abigail Davis

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

This thesis will explore the ways in which Hawthorne addresses the role of womanhood in The Scarlet Letter and The House of the Seven Gables, by using constructs of 19lh-century domesticity and women’s position in society. In each novel, Hawthorne clearly depicts what society expects of women, as well as how they should behave according to social and religious standards. A historical and feminist lens will be used to examine the way in which a woman can be both restricted by and freed from a patriarchal society in both novels. Through the characters of Hester, Pearl and Mistress Hibbins in …

The Power Of The Subversive Female In Hawthorne’S The Scarlet Letter And Blithedale Romance, Jenifer P. Hecht

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

Nathaniel Hawthorne is an author who has caused much intrigue, especially among feminist critics, some of whom deem him to be misogynistic and wholly supportive of the patriarchy in his texts. Evidence for this has been cited in his choice of the demure and quiet Sophia as his wife, although it is known she was amongst many close women in Hawthorne’s life, most of whom were more outspoken female contemporaries like Elizabeth Peabody and Margaret Fuller. Additionally, the assertion that Hawthorne’s writing contains misogynistic undertones is oftentimes supported by the plight of his female characters, who often suffer from painful …

Burning Down The House : Reclaiming Homeplace In Gloria Naylor’S Linden Hills And Mama Day, Jenny Elizabeth Mundell

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

The last eighty years have been marked by a large body of work by black American women authors who contemplate the effects of place on character. These authors both use and transform the notion of space itself as a way to bring to light traditionally marginalized voices that have been denied a place amongst the annals of history and in literature. Gloria Naylor, whose body of work spans the 1980’s through the present day, is one such contemporary revisionist. My analysis of Naylor’s novels, Linden Hills and Mama Day, considers how Naylor employs geographic structure and landscape to expos e …

Without A Place But Always Trying To Be Placed: Between Hope And Impossibility In Samuel Beckett’S Molloy, Joseph Stepansky

English

No abstract provided.

Mary Shelley’S Frankenstein: The Creature’S Attempt At Humanization, Noelle Webster

English

No abstract provided.

The Backwards Making Of A Heroine: Mary Cowden Clarke’S Girlhood And Its Importance In The Shakespearean Conversation, Jillian Caramanna

English

No abstract provided.

Press Start & Small Things, Brian Mark Brown

All Graduate Plan B and other Reports, Spring 1920 to Spring 2023

This thesis project comprises two essay-length memoir pieces exploring the dimensions of fatherhood accompanied by a critical introduction. The essay “Press Start” explores the influence of video games on a young father, tapping his own childhood experiences to illuminate his relationship to the games as well as to his spouse and children. “Small Things” shows his efforts in preparing for the arrival of twins, an event which threatens to disrupt the family dynamic. Touching on issues of protection, separation, and control, the essays work together to comment on the complexities of the father-child relationship from a father’s point of view. …

The Muse Of Nigerian Poetry And The Coming Of Age Of Nigerian Literature, Chukwuma Azuonye

Africana Studies Faculty Publication Series

No abstract provided.

Hero/Heroine: A Study Of The Representation Of Womanhood In Victorian And Neo-Victorian Literature, Laura Depalma

Renée Crown University Honors Thesis Projects - All

In this paper, I compare two novels: Shirley by Charlotte Brontë and A Great and Terrible Beauty by Libba Bray. Shirley follows the lives of two girls navigating adolescence in the early nineteenth century; A Great and Terrible Beauty is the story of four girls, also transitioning into womanhood, in the late Victorian era.

The first interesting thing about these two pieces is that both authors choose to set them in their relative pasts: Brontë, writing near the middle of the nineteenth century, sets her work in 1812, while contemporary writer Libba Bray sets her piece in the Victorian era. …

Crossroads: A Novella, Patricia Ann-Marie Abraham

Renée Crown University Honors Thesis Projects - All

Crossroads is the herstory of Tahaj Marie, a woman-child who comes of age in Brooklyn, New York. The single daughter of a single mother, she rejects the pressures put forth by her strict, cold mother and defies her with a sexual relationship at 16 that leaves her pregnant and alone. Spending years raising her son Amir, and rekindling an unsuccessful relationship with his father leads her to the crossroads of her life. Despite the road blocks, she rebuilds herself to strive towards the woman she seeks to become. As a single mother who is Black, female, and disadvantaged, Tahaj Marie …

Citrustv Website Redesign Project, Alyssa Elias

Renée Crown University Honors Thesis Projects - All

Many students who live off campus at Syracuse University are unable to view the Orange Television Network. CitrusTV's news, sports and entertainment programming airs on this channel and is therefore unavailable to many students. To expand the viewing audience, the CitrusTV website is crucial.

The original goal of this honors capstone project was to enhance and improve CitrusTV’s website in order to simulate that of a local news station. Through a newly created content management system, students would be able to upload news stories with text, video and pictures.

Because of CitrusTV’s annually changing administration and technical hurdles, the project’s …

Investigating How Resource And Situation Type Influence The Sunk-Cost Fallacy, Jenae A. Richardson

Renée Crown University Honors Thesis Projects - All

Abstract Not Included

Examining The Magic Tree House Series For Historical Accuracy And Educational Implications, Nina Washington

HIM 1990-2015

Often teachers are faced with the challenge of teaching more content with less time and resources. The use of trade books within the content areas allows teachers to integrate multiple skills in one lesson. The Magic Tree House series has been popular with students and teachers on the elementary level. Using books such as these would be a good way for teachers to use their allotted time to teach all of the content that they are accountable for. This thesis will explore the historical accuracy and educational connections within the Magic Tree House series by Mary Pope Osborne. The purpose …

2011 Forces, Scott Yarbrough

Forces

No abstract provided.

Metaphasia: Shelley And The Language Of Remoter Worlds, Michael Andrew Howell

Master's Theses

The aim of this project was to trace the evolution of Percy Shelley's metaphasic narrative, or language of the dead, chronologically through the Hymn to Intellectual Beauty, Mont Blanc, and Prometheus Unbound. Proceeding from Earl Wasserman's detailed map of Shelley's mythopoeic structure, I charted this evolution while identifying a fifth discrete entity within the mythological hierarchy of what Harold Bloom has characterized as a "mythopoeic trilogy" (36). Concurrently, I examined the ongoing debate concerning Shelley's influences, as well as the early formation of his personality, as it pertains to the poems in question, and his fascination with worlds beyond the …

I Don't Know Why You Say Goodbye, I Say Hello: Concepts Of Place In Eudora Welty's The Optimist's Daughter And Elizabeth Bowen's The Death Of The Heart, Emily Frances Cooley

Master's Theses

The Optimist's Daughter and The Death of the Heart reveal that, for Eudora Welty and Elizabeth Bowen, place is· more than mere landscape. Place is both the scene upon which their novels unfold and the means by which they convey their abstract understandings of the world. Place provides the physical settings of their stories, but it also reveals something about their psyche or symbolic language. The settings used by Welty in The Optimist's Daughter reinforce traditional notions of place in Southern life and society whereas the settings employed by Bowen in The Death of the Heart exhibit a partiality for …

Using Young Adult Literature To Teach The Classics A Study On Pairing Young Adult Novels With The Classic Works In Secondary English Classrooms, Deanna Lynn Velazquez

HIM 1990-2015

Young adult literature is a genre of literature that is often overlooked. Adolescents would greatly benefit from reading young adult novels, academically and also for enjoyment. Educators are not using young adult literature as often as they should in the classrooms as a tool, due to strict curricula. However, young adult literature is a perfect tool for aiding with comprehension of the classic works. Pairing certain young adult books with classics would help adolescents understand the classic novel, but also assist in intriguing the student enough to pick up both books. After an online survey given to nine Seminole County …