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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
The Eternal Rehearsal: Judith Butler's Gender Performativity In Wilkie Collins, Sarah Waters, And Tana French, Jillian Slezek
The Eternal Rehearsal: Judith Butler's Gender Performativity In Wilkie Collins, Sarah Waters, And Tana French, Jillian Slezek
Honors Theses
Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble proposed the groundbreaking theory of gender as a constant performance: a series of cues observed, internalized, and repeated over time. Her argument benefits society’s desire to deconstruct gender, and her ideas apply to a vast array of texts and periods. In fact, whereas Butler’s text was published in 1990, over a hundred years earlier Wilkie Collins already toyed with gender performance in his formative novel, The Woman in White (1860). In this thesis, I examine The Woman in White through a Butlerian lens, illuminating how Collins began critiquing the concept of performative gender, especially with regard …
Desire In The Bildungsroman: Construction And Pursuit Of An Ideal Self Through The Ideal Other, Ethan Watson
Desire In The Bildungsroman: Construction And Pursuit Of An Ideal Self Through The Ideal Other, Ethan Watson
Honors Theses
The Bildungsroman, or “novel of education,” has remained popular since Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship. I examine this novel, as well as Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations, and Walter Moers’s Rumo & His Miraculous Adventures, focusing specifically on the relationships between the three male protagonists and the women that they encounter throughout their lives. Using the theories of psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, literary critic René Girard, and feminist philosopher Judith Butler, I draw parallels between and contribute to the scholarly conversation of all three works (or in the case of Moers's recent fantasy, Rumo, begin …