Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Professional Development, John Chorazy

New Jersey English Journal

Written from the perspective of a teacher, this poem reflects on the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic.

“I’M Not Like That!” : Reframing Contemporary Ecopoetic Criticism And De-Metaphorizing The Nonhuman Animal, Alexandra Franke

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

In this paper, I seek to highlight the benefits and necessity of reframing our critical approach to ecopoetry. In order to do so, I attempt to define “ecopoetry,” as well as terms like “nonhuman animal” and “anthropocentrism.” Historically, critics have routinely romanticized the nonhuman natural world, rendering it something two-dimensional, like a painting or landscape, rather than an encompassing environment. As a result, critics have often failed to consider the legitimacy of the animals who populate the nonhuman natural world. Instead, these animals are typically romanticized and metaphorized, ultimately furthering anthropocentric hierarchies and distancing us from them. When anthropocentric thought …

The Framing Of Black And White Masculinities In Toni Morrison’S Beloved, Felesha Beckford

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

This study is an examination of white hegemonic masculinity and its effect on tyrannized black male figures in Toni Morrison’s Beloved . These disenfranchised figures suffered psychological trauma through the perpetuation of marginalized and subordinate masculinities within the “blues epistemological” apparatus by means of self-realization. Blues epistemology is a term that Clyde Woods describes as “a longstanding African American tradition of explaining reality and change. This form of explanation finds its origins in the processes of African American cultural construction within, and resistance to, the antebellum plantation regime” (25). Beloved serves as a form of historical text by means of …

The Women Of Brewster Place : A Dream Deferred And Unactualized, Lauren Fuentes

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

Gloria Naylor’s The Women of Brewster Place is a landmark novel of black female empowerment, yet even as the novel affirms the necessity for black women to band together, Brewster Place simultaneously points to the idea that systemic racism and sexism may be a hurdle over which the community cannot leap—other systemic changes must be implemented before true equality can be achieved. This novel forces readers to grapple with questions that may present unsavory answers: Is it possible to eradicate systemic racism? To what degree do the subjugated have the ability to change the prejudicial system in which they live? …

The Eye’S Construction Of Power In Richard Ii, Julius Caesar And Macbeth, John O’Brien

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

This study seeks to analyze the optical performance of power in three of Shakespeare’s plays: Richard II, Julius Caesar, and Macbeth. Using a political framework via Kantorowicz’s King’s Two Bodies and Maus’s Inwardness and Theater in the English Renaissance, this paper explores the interior and exterior personas as they pertain and interact with public and private spaces. This paper will track Shakespeare’s contribution to this developing “modern” shift in the understanding of appearance and its role in the presentations of power in these three plays. In each of these plays, I argue, Shakespeare provides us with a series of presentational …

Tlamachiliztlahtolçaçanilli: A Performance Translation Of The Náhuatl "Wisdom-Discourse Fables" From The Manuscript Of 1558, Willard Gingerich

Department of English Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

The 10 page Náhuatl manuscript included at the end of the so-called Codice Chimalpopoca and commonly referred to since 1903 as Leyenda de los soles, “Legend of the Suns,” or the “Manuscript of 1558,” is a fundamental witness to indigenous Nahua- Mexica memories of their own cosmogony and earliest history as they recalled these things some twenty-five-plus years into the colonial era. As supplement to the later Anales de Cuauhtitlan manuscript (ca. 1570-73) which accompanies it in the Chimalpopoca, the 1558 manuscript provides a privileged view of Nahua-Aztec genesis myths, from a Mexica informant. The narrative frame of this retelling …

Resisting Dominican Motherhood Across Julia Alvarez’S How The García Girls Lost Their Accents And Junot Díaz’S The Brief Wondrous Life Of Oscar Wao, Ana Hilario

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

This paper endeavors to explore the distinct ways in which the Dominican motherhood ideology promoted by Rafael Leónidas Trujillo Molina’s regime is resisted by women of different social classes and race through a close reading of the characters Laura and Beli in Julia Alvarez’s How the García Girls Lost Their Accents and Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, respectively. Using Adrienne Rich’s concept of motherhood ideology as a theoretical framework and engaging in discussion of how these ideologies were constructed, engendered, and enforced by the Trujillo regime, I found that these texts depict voluntary and involuntary resistance …

The Wide-Reaching Appeal Of Fan Fiction And Its Merits In Popular Culture, Summer Nawaz

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

This paper takes on the practice of fan fiction by introducing its origins, exploring the concept of it being recognized as a part of “real literature”—while also determining what makes real literature—as well as comparing literary retellings to fan fiction and questioning what makes distinguishes them from one another. The influence that fan fiction already has garnered within popular culture will also be explored, as well as the role fan fiction plays within fandoms.

By examining at primary texts such as E. L. James’s Fifty Shades of Grey, Anna Todd’s After, and the popular fanfic known as Heat Waves, this …

Caliban The Savage : Shakespeare’S Critique Of Colonialist Misappropriation Of Indigenous Identities, Leonard Aquil Hughes

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

This thesis engages with Shakespeare’s The Tempest, analyzing the character Caliban as a critique of British colonialism. I argue that Caliban is not intended simply as a begrudged antagonist, but as a figure intended to represent New World natives. Shakespeare’s “savage” also acts as an on-stage embodiment of Africans and other victims of British imperial exploits that suffered subjugation and hegemony. With this character, Shakespeare provides a demonstration of the relationship between Europeans and the colonized, while challenging the very institution of colonialism. Such a work provides valuable post-Shakespearean insights as well. Caliban contributes directly to the dialogue surrounding the …

Muslim Young Adult Graphic Novels : Destabilizing Perceptions, Sidra Habal

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

This paper seeks to analyze common trends in the Muslim Young Adult graphic novels Huda F Are You? by Huda Fahmy and the Ms. Marvel comics by G. Willow Wilson. The main characters, Huda and Kamala, respectively, struggle to define their own identities beyond being Muslim as well as figuring out who they are, who they want to be, and how they wish to represent themselves. The common themes found within these novels include this question of identity as well as exploring family bonds, navigating romantic interests, and building strong groups of friends. These characters are trying to find a …

"Neither Here Nor There" : Migrant Women And The Cycle Of Cultural Masculine Superiority, Fiorella Medina

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

This thesis examines the way migrant fiction evolves the use of women's stories. By examining this evolution, I argue that many migrant women writers explore misogyny within their representations of their home and adopted cultures. Using The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros (1983), The Affairs of the Falcons by Melissa Rivero (2019), and The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts by Maxine Hong Kingston (1976), I explain the techniques these writers use to establish the mistreatment and marginalization their protagonists face. I clarify these works by presenting examples of women gaining agency despite the struggles they …

Literary Machiavellianism, The Vice Figure, And The Jewish Character : Anti-Semitic Perceptions In The Jew Of Malta And The Merchant Venice, Allison Schaechter

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

This thesis focuses on Anti-Semitism in Renaissance drama through the lens of attempting to weave an older literary idea into a newer one. By the Renaissance, the Vice figure, a literary tool to draw one-dimensional evil characters, began to raise questions about the rationale behind their villainy. Machiavellianism served to reclassify characters that were originally meant to be perceived by audiences as inherently evil, allowing them potentially to sympathize with them in the plight that led them to such deplorable acts.

Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare created Jewish characters who seek to remain in control of their families and wealth, …

“The Delta Is Filled Up With Death” : Death As Avoidance And The Construction Of White Identity In Lewis Nordan’S Music Of The Swamp, Sarah Sturm

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

Lewis Nordan’s Music of the Swamp has not been fully explored with an emphasis on Nordan’s personal history in relation to racism in the South. In Nordan’s autobiography, Boy With the Loaded Gun (2000), Nordan describes growing up in Itta Benna, Mississippi — just one town over from where Emmett Till was murdered in 1955 (Nordan 80). I argue Nordan’s depiction of death in the Music of the Swamp can be read as the early stages of him grappling with Till’s death through writing, along with the broader historical context of Southern racism. Nordan’s ambivalent relationship to this history informs …

Into The Roach’S Mouth: Beyond The Postmodern Discourse On Silence In Clarice Lispector’S The Passion According To G.H., Eman Halimeh

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

In Clarice Lispector’s novel The Passion According to G.H. the protagonist experiences a complete break from reality when she enters her maid’s room and encounters a cockroach. The entire plot is predicated on this encounter, but the existential crisis is filtered through a quest for a resounding silence – one that will liberate G.H. from the shackles of a preorganized existence. This thesis will explore Clarice Lispector’s use of silence as it functions in relation to a repurposed posthuman theory. By investigating Lispector’s preoccupation with the “thingness” of being, I expose the limitations of postmodern feminism and offer a way …