Digital Commons Network^™

Feminism And Female Identity In Adaptations Of Pride And Prejudice Throughout The 20th And 21st Centuries, Emily Suh, Emily Suh

Honors Theses

To many of her fans in the world, Austen is undeniably a feminist author, especially for her time in the nineteenth century. In a time where women were dependent upon male family members for their livelihoods, most of Austen’s heroines exhibit a sort of independence and strong will with a mind of their own, including in Pride and Prejudice. Elizabeth is the model for what an independent woman is, a woman who is not so concerned with the monetary value of matrimony and only falls in love because she wants to. Furthermore, female audiences tend to like Elizabeth more than …

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.

Interior Chinatown: Chinatown As A Performative Space, Audrey Fong

English (MA) Theses

This thesis focuses on Charles Yu’s Interior Chinatown: A Novel (2020), exploring the function of Chinatown in Los Angeles within the novel as a space of creation, that of “Asia” for Hollywood and home for Taiwanese immigrants. I argue that Interior Chinatown offers a unique look at the perception or notion of Chinatown, paying attention to the way Hollywood has shaped it and used it to create a sense of China and “Asia” in the cultural imagination. Through satire and the blurring of the reel and the real, Yu is able to criticize the inner workings of Hollywood’s relationship with …

“Beating Back The Past”: The Psychological Justifications Of Violence In Toni Morrison’S Fiction, Catherine Buhse

English Honors Theses

This thesis examines the traumatic experiences that consume characters’ lives and, in the absence of psychological healing efforts, manifest into violent actions in Toni Morrison’s three novels The Bluest Eye, Sula, and Beloved. I focus on the gendered experience of the female characters Pecola, Sula, Eva, and Sethe, except for the male character, Cholly in The Bluest Eye. Focusing on Morrison’s humanization of violent characters and her sharing of their full life stories, I establish the characters’ internal justifications for their violence to challenge the accepted depiction of all criminals as evil. The three chapters follow the manifestation of trauma …

The Female Werewolf: The Wolf, The Woman, And The Dunce Outcast, Melina Wallace

All Theses

This creative thesis blends literary theory, popular culture, and personal anecdote to create an analysis of feminist and disability rage through recent narratives of female werewolves. The form consists of paragraphs cycling among these three categories in a way that aims to be disruptive and without rhythm to create the sensation of transformation. These stylistic choices work together with the contents of the thesis to push thought forward regarding the absence of women’s presence within the depiction of the werewolves, which has traditionally been a male-focused image. The thesis aims to analyze not only the absence of women from the …

Performing Presidential Age: "It's About How Old Your Ideas Are", Valerie Barnes Lipscomb

English Sarasota Manatee Campus Faculty Publications

During a February surprise appearance on Late Night with Seth Meyers, President Joe Biden whipped out his trademark aviator sunglasses and traded quips with Meyers about a supposed conspiracy with Taylor Swift, much to the delight of the younger live audience. The next day, reviews were mixed about whether the president was trying too hard or did in fact manage to look hipper. To look younger. While US presidential nominees have been consciously performing their campaigns for decades, during this cycle, considering age as a performance has been especially prominent. Commentators and critics have specifically addressed the careful staging of …

The Millennial Novel: Examining A Generation Through Literature, Isabella Bokan

English Honors Theses

This undergraduate thesis examines the relationship between contemporary social circumstances and fiction novels. Generational novels are focused on cohorts or individuals who share traits that reflect recognizable social conditions of a specific era. The new generational novel is the Millennial novel. These Millennial novels generally depict American characters in American settings, but the characters are increasingly ethnically and racially diverse. These characters are often in economic precarity, they are generally highly educated and invariably find themselves at odds with traditional romantic, occupational, and domestic expectations. In many of these novels, new technologies play an important role in the narrative and …

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.

"Into The Womb Of Solipsism": The Spectrum Of Loneliness In Wallace's Infinite Jest, Michael Gieger

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

Academic critics and casual readers of David Foster Wallace’s 1,079-page novel, Infinite Jest, have long ruminated over the book’s daunting physical size and wide narrative scope. This paper offers an argumentative interpretation of the novel’s immensity through an exploration of Wallace’s thematic preoccupation with solipsism and human loneliness. Building primarily from the critical works of Frank Cioffi and Casey Michael Henry, this essay makes the contention that the length of Infinite Jest behaves mimetically, simulating for its attentive readership a sense of perpetual emotional isolation—an isolation reflective of the epic’s untold lonesome characters. The argument further suggests that length of …

Consequences Of A Dream: Interactivity And Agency Of The Reader/Player In Alice's Adventures In Wonderland And Undertale, Nicholas DáVila

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

In this thesis, I analyze Toby Fox’s 2015 roleplaying game Undertale alongside Lewis Carroll’s 1865 children’s novel Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. My reason for doing so is to investigate the narrative structures of the two stories, how they use metanarrative, and their use of game as a narrative tool in order to showcase the narrative lineage video games like Undertale share with Wonderland. Through this investigation I wish to show that the use of games and play as a vessel for or a part of narrative structure do not exclude works like video games from posing interesting questions and challenges …

Lawrence As An Orientalist Figure Of Empire In David Lean's Lawrence Of Arabia, Leen Khashashina

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

In this thesis, I examine the character of Lawrence in David Lean’s 1962 film, Lawrence of Arabia. I seek to break apart the legend, examining his individual characteristics and interest in Arabia as well as his imperialist motivations, whether unconscious or not. Lawrence struggles to find his identity and this film is an exploration of that multitude. Many of the characters in the film have conflicting ideas about who Lawrence was because he did not even understand himself. The combination of Lawrence’s defiance of British orders and society as well as his obsession with becoming an Arab marks him as …

Camus In A Post-Covid World: A Bibliotherapeutic Approach To Coping With Crisis, Jessica Titterington

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

This thesis examines the usage of absurdist literature, particularly a selection of works by Albert Camus, and their relevance to bibliotherapy. The three selected works are his novels The Plague and The Stranger, as well as his essay The Myth of Sisyphus. By analyzing these works through a psychoanalytic lens and with the consideration of generational theory, utilizing absurdist literature as an alternative “medicine” in times of crisis, especially in instances where immediate medical aid is not available, is shown to be beneficial. This thesis also uses the recent COVID-19 pandemic as a model for global crises and explores the …

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 …

The Beginning Of The End: The Cultivation Of Transchronological Perceptuality In Arcadia And “Story Of Your Life”, Sawyer Kelly

English (MA) Theses

This thesis explores the spatio-temporal landscapes of Ted Chiang’s “The Story of Your Life” and Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia. Both authors engage with intersections between past, present, and future, challenging readers to reframe the conventions of linear chronology in favor of a fluid, palimpsestic approach to time and space that reflects the past and future’s ongoing influence in constructing our impression of the “now.” To illustrate this temporal blending, Chiang and Stoppard implement alternative language modes predicated upon visual and sensory rhetorics, centralizing the politics of human perception as dually illuminating and obfuscating reality. This project employs an interdisciplinary approach, adopting …

“No One Likes A Mad Woman:” A Modern Reclamation Of Solitude In The Domestic Space Through Women With Invisible Disabilities In A Post-Lockdown World, Marley Ashton Bickley

All Theses

This project weaves together critical and creative writing to highlight personal narratives from women with mental illnesses and invisible disabilities. Through a historical recognition of the "madwoman" who is framed as hysterical to be a scapegoat for patriarchal control, I examine societal attempts to immobilize women’s rights to free will and agency from the nineteenth century until today. My analysis of "madwomen" in domestic space takes up fiction writing such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper and Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre where women are forced into confinement against their will. In a flipped-script narrative, I reexamine how domestic space …

The Cognitive Implications Of Literary Devices And Perspective-Taking On Reading Time, Amelia Ward

Psychological Science Undergraduate Honors Theses

The study of literary devices in the context of published fiction is unusual in psychology; however, some research has suggested that reading time may be influenced by cognitive challenges that come with the extra work that may be necessary to understand the meaning behind an author’s usage of literary devices (Miall & Kuiken, 1994; Egen et al., 2019). Jumping off of this suggestion, this present study aimed to answer the question of whether reading time is influenced by factors such as narrative perspective, the usage of literary devices, a person’s print exposure, and a person’s need for cognition, as well …

Cloaked Trannies On The Silver Screen: "Evolutionary Derangement" And Cronenberg's Approach To Shaping A Critical Mindset Towards Trans Bodies, John David Hunter

All Theses

This thesis engages David Cronenberg’s 2022 film, Crimes of the Future, analyzing the text through the lens of Saul Tenser (Viggo Mortensten) as a transgender allegory. Through this, the project investigates the way in which Cronenberg’s text visually creates a Deleuzian language of the body, which is the body of becoming. This queer analysis of the film does so by utilizing the perspective of the trans body, through the character of Tenser, which more clearly illustrates the human body as one which is in a continual process of evolution. Following in the footsteps of scholars such as Susan …

Creative Writing Pedagogy: Building Curriculum For High School Students, Elizabeth Lengel

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This thesis serves as a rationale for the creative writing pedagogy I use and how it serves my high school creative writing class. As my school district made the decision to overhaul our English curriculum, the English department decided to add Creative Writing as an English class elective.

The work for planning these new classes was spread around the English Department, and I was assigned to design the curriculum for the new Creative Writing class. Designing an entire class from scratch leaves a lot of room for creativity and innovation. However, as excited for this new course as I was, …

Obscured To Outspoken: Buchi Emecheta, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, And Akwaeke Emezi As Case Studies In Nigerian Feminism, Ava Chuppe

Honors College Theses

Though about two decades separate their ascents to global renown, Buchi Emecheta and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie represent two figureheads of the women’s literary tradition in Nigeria. While Adichie has embraced the “feminist” label to describe her work, Emecheta has proven more reluctant, divulging issues with the Western variety of the movement—namely, its deconstruction of the family. Nevertheless, Emecheta and Adichie engage with issues such as maternity, familial turmoil, and political unrest in the contexts of colonial and postcolonial Nigeria, respectively. In doing so, both writers demonstrate the unique manifestations of patriarchy brought about by colonial rule. In Emecheta’s novel The …

Bedeviled Beauty: My Journey Through White American Theater Institutions, J'Aila C. Price

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

Game console: Oculus Quest

World: American Theater Institutions

Player: Minority

Place: United States

Level: “Ain’t no way.”

This thesis explores the contrast between the Westernized philosophies ingrained in my education and my identity as a Black female artist. It sheds light on the difficulties of pursuing higher education in the arts and the gaps that arise from limited exposure to culturally diverse Black resources, revealing the systemic issues in Western performance education. The paper also discusses the insights gained from my journey as a Black female artist, focusing on my thesis performance of Blood at the Root, which is …

The Best Children's Books Of The Year [2024 Edition], Bank Street College Of Education. Children's Book Committee.

The Center for Children's Literature

Includes more than 600 titles chosen by the Children’s Book Committee as the best of the best published in 2023. In choosing books for the annual list, committee members consider literary quality and excellence of presentation as well as the potential emotional impact of the books on young readers. Other criteria include credibility of characterization and plot, authenticity of time and place, age suitability, positive treatment of ethnic and religious differences, and the absence of stereotypes.

Eng101 Research Essay Using Oral History As A Primary Source, Jayashree Kamble

Open Educational Resources

This assignment was included as the research essay component in an introductory composition course. The topic was the impact of AI on their desired career or profession. Students were required to find four sources: a primary source with whom they conducted an oral history, and three secondary sources; one from social media, one from a reliable but not peer-reviewed source, and one peer-reviewed scholarly source. They had to submit the oral history transcript and incorporate data from it into the essay. At the end of the semester, they also had an option to do a dramatic reading of the oral …

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 …

I Wrote This Instead Of Being Productive, Timothy Hill

Honors Scholar Theses

"I Wrote This Instead of Being Productive" is a poetry chapbook focused on the mythos of productivity in our modern era, from the perspective of a college student. What does productivity mean at the end of an empire? In recent years, culture has become obsessed with new forms of productivity and time management. We optimize our schedules, compete against each other, and attempt to dissociate from the harsher realities of our lives. An omnipresent internet culture motivates us to generate more value from our time, even if it feels hollow. ‘Scientific’ explanations point towards dopamine deficits and cultural narratives emphasize …

Visions Of Our Future: A Manifesto For Environmentalist Cinema In The Climate Era, Daniel Milovic

Honors Scholar Theses

Environmentalism has strengthened as a discipline during the climate era, a period defined by the ongoing effects of climate change, and it is time for a fully environmental activist cinema to emerge. This type of filmmaking must be committed to generating images of our future along a utopian or apocalyptic continuum. This approach allows filmmakers to maintain the gravity of the climate crisis while generating inspiring, alternative futures that are not tied to the current global culture of capitalist exploitation of natural resources and marginalized peoples. Environmentalist filmmakers must then articulate climate change as a cultural issue—one that is produced …

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 …

Composing From The Margins: The Breaking Of Writing Barriers, Empowering Voices & Broadening The Work Of Feminist Composition Studies, Jasmin Salgado

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

The concept of identity politics within Composition Studies acknowledge how a writer’s social identity (race, gender, sexuality, disabilities, etc.) influences their writing style and shapes their language. Understanding the relationship between social identity and writing practices means recognizing the diverse perspectives writers bring to the writing classroom. In alignment with this perspective, feminist composition studies emphasize the importance of centering marginalized voices and creating inclusive learning environments where students can safely express their identities through writing. However, research reveals that diverse perspectives haven’t always been welcomed in academic spaces. Feminist compositionists unveil how discourse around writing conventions and language norms …

The Beast In The Beauty: An Analysis Of Cultural Gender Biases And Stereotypes In The Classic Fairy Tale “Beauty And The Beast” And Implications In Modern Retellings, Lauren Lefler

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis looks at the fairy tale Beauty and the Beast to examine the way that this tale has been used throughout history to address the concerns of young women, as well as reinforce the culturally accepted gender roles of the time of their publication. The first chapter defines the fairy tale genre and features some of the most common criticism on the genre, it will then define and offer critical perspectives on the monster bridegroom motif which Beauty and the Beast is a part of. The second chapter will look at the first two publications of the text, the …

The Neoliberal Noirs Of Gary Indiana, Carson Morgan

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis is concerned with the two AIDS-era novels of Gary Indiana, a long-neglected yet essential literary figure who, as the critic Christian Lorentzen has argued, “connects the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in ways readers and critics are only beginning to apprehend” (xii). Beginning chronologically with a study of Indiana’s first two novels, Horse Crazy (1989) and Gone Tomorrow (1993), this thesis attempts to realize Lorentzen’s call to action, attending particularly to the ways in which Indiana’s novels write the neoliberal subject. More than exploring life under the AIDS crisis and embodying a radical queer approach to narrative, I contend, …

With Great Power: Using Comics To Facilitate Discussion Of Systemic Oppression In Higher Education Literature Classes, Keri Crist-Wagner

All Dissertations

Undergraduate student participation in general education classes constitutes a point of struggle for many educators, especially when it comes to lessons centered around systems of oppression like racism, sexism, or heterosexism. Using both constructivism and counter storytelling as theoretical frameworks, this multi-method phenomenological case study explored the experiences of undergraduate honors students in a semester long general education literature class. The purpose of this study was to 1) explore how comics can be used as a pedagogical tool in higher education classrooms to facilitate discussion of systems of oppression, 2) assess the ways in which students interacted with comics, and …