Arts and Humanities Commons^™

A Sermon Writ In High Heaven: Astrology And Interpretation In Moby-Dick, Amanda Gallop

Scripps Senior Theses

This thesis explores Herman Melville's use of astrology in Moby-Dick in relation to the novel's stance on meaning-making and interpretation. It analyzes Ishmael and Ahab's respective methods of interpretation established in the first half of the novel, then explores Stubb's use of astrology in "The Doubloon" chapter. I propose that Stubb's astrological soliloquy poses a potential solution to the conflict between Ishmael and Ahab's diametrically opposed methods, thus offering an avenue into a new understanding of the novel's epistemological project.

Black Resistance: Interpretive Agency Enacted Against Mutable Violence, Meera Kolluri

Scripps Senior Theses

Titled Black Resistance: Interpretive Agency Enacted Against Mutable Violence, my research discusses a reformed understanding of racial trauma and autonomy. I elaborate on the common reading of slavery in political thought and defend my argument with modern examples of resistance and theory. This text aims to shine light on assumptive narratives by classifying and redefining mutable violence against black America.

Assuming We Cause The World To End, Emma Ambler

Scripps Senior Theses

Four short stories about women dealing with apocalypse in its various forms.

Traumatized Characters In Traumatized Environments: A Look At Repression And Horror, Rebecca L. Goldman

Scripps Senior Theses

Using Sigmund Freud’s theory of ‘return of the repressed’ as a theoretical basis, this paper takes a case study approach using three critically acclaimed horror films. These films include Nicholas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now (1974), Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980), and Ari Aster’s Midsommar (2019). With use of each film, the interaction between the repressed trauma of the protagonists’ and the film environment is explored, utilizing the notion that repressed trauma will always manifest itself as a symptom of the unconscious mind. Supporting theories include Slavoj Zizek’s notion that dreams must be read in terms of their form, stemming from …

Terrifying Tales From The Code: The Anti-Comics Movement, Mass Culture, And The Impact Of The Comics Code On American Comic Books, Kc Welsh

Scripps Senior Theses

This thesis details and analyzes the history of the Comics Code of 1954 and its impact on American comics as a whole. Included is the history of the anti-comics movement and an analysis of 20^th century mass-culture debates. This thesis also argues that the underground comix movement was an unwitting successor to pre-code comics and was responsible for growth in the comics medium by working around the oppressive Code. The second argument is that the Code’s impact is still present in current comics, and issues of mass culture still hang over the medium’s head, resulting in stagnation and an …

Language, Memory, Place: Building On Disappearance, Alexi Butts

Scripps Senior Theses

Language, Memory, Place is an investigation into clay’s therapeutic and tactile qualities. When combined, these attributes make clay an effective tool for priming spoken communication, increasing connectivity and serving as a tangible means of accessing and physically grounding abstract memories of home.

Conducted in France throughout the summer of 2019, my research set out to engage French speakers in a reflective dialogue on what it means to transform empty spaces into ones filled with feeling and meaning of home. In addition to verbal conversation, I simultaneously directed individuals of different ages, origins and living in seven different cities through an …

Tracing Biometric Assemblages In India’S Surveillance State: Reproducing Colonial Logics, Reifying Caste Purity, And Quelling Dissent Through Aadhaar, Priya Prabhakar

Scripps Senior Theses

Tracing Biometric Assemblages in India’s Surveillance State seeks to understand the historical conditions that rendered the nation-state of India as having the world’s largest biometric surveillance system: Aadhaar. Surveillance practices used by the British Raj mirrors the current social order of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), as they use surveillance to similar ends in today’s political economy, through the intersecting forces of neoliberalism and ethnonationalism. This thesis is an exploration into how India’s current surveillance regimes cultivate biometric surveillant assemblages through Aadhaar. Contrary to claims that Aadhaar was created to empower the poor, I argue that these surveillance regimes …

Visual Archives Of The Aids Epidemic: Examining The Cultivation Of Anticipatory Mourning In The Works Of Nan Goldin, Cookie Mueller, And Vittorio Scarpati, Samantha M. Muckle

Scripps Senior Theses

In examining Putti’s Puddingand The Cookie Portfolioas independent yet intertwined projects of anticipatory mourning, this thesis identifies Witnesses: Against Our Vanishing as the artistic fulfillment of Vittorio Scarpati, Cookie Mueller, and Nan Goldin’s combined efforts to proleptically manifest collective memory within the visual archive of their shared experience with AIDS. Assisted by an exploration of both the AIDS epidemic and the three artist’s linked life histories, this study also recognizes the importance of creating an art history inclusive of social and personal history whilst considering materials so inextricably linked to their creator’s biographical contexts.

Embodied Narratives: An Exploration Of Ritual, Violence, And Brutality Through Jean Genet's "The Thief's Journal", Erin Delany

Scripps Senior Theses

An exploration of the embodied writing of Jean Genet's The Thief's Journal, examining the traces and impacts of ritual, violence, and brutality within the text.

Foster Rhodes Jackson And The Visual Conquest Of The West, Eve Kaufman

Scripps Senior Theses

Colonizers settled the Los Angeles and the Southern California region in part by using Modernism’s visual rhetoric and propagandic implications during the time of suburban sprawl. Suburban sprawl refers to the mass single family home development which took place from the 1920^[1]s until now but peaked from the 1970s to the 1990s. Los Angeles sprawl grew particularly in the 1950^[2]s as soldiers returned from WWII. It was a way for middle class white families to accrue generational wealth and follow through on the American Dream^[3].

The primary result however disenfranchised already marginalized groups. This …

Benevolent Feminism And The Gendering Of Criminality: Historical And Ideological Constructions Of Us Women's Prisons, Emma Stammen

Scripps Senior Theses

This thesis aims to connect and analyze primary sources that contain untold histories and experiences of people incarcerated in women’s prisons in the US and Britain, from the Victorian period to the modern era. By exploring, compiling and sharing various secondary and primary texts as evidence, I hope to contribute to a better understanding of the historical and ideological constructions of the American women’s prison as we know it today. In this thesis, I argue that analyzing and understanding the historical and ideological constructions of the modern women’s prison are critical practices for theoretical and activist frameworks that seek prison …

A Revision Of A Revision: Reading The Heroic Slave As A Response To Uncle Tom's Cabin, Isabelle Phan

Scripps Senior Theses

Frederick Douglass and Harriet Beecher Stowe have long been heralded as complementary contemporaries, working towards the similar goal of transforming antebellum society through abolitionist literature. This essay explores the ways in which their relationship is complicated by reading Douglass’ only work of fiction The Heroic Slave as a response to Uncle Tom’s Cabin. This argument is predicated on the separate argument that Uncle Tom's Cabin is its own revision of Douglass’ first autobiography Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave: specifically, I find that Stowe’s insistence on a Christian framework of abolition in her revision of Douglass' …

@Karlnarcs: A Comedic Critique On The Digital Age, Evelyn Davis

Scripps Senior Theses

An outline of the pre-production, production, and post-production of a five-minute comedic short on the digital age and its influence on Generation Z using Marxist theory.

The Continued Legacy Of German Naturalness Contextualized Within A Fraught History And Issues Of Inclusion, Eleanor Grosse

Scripps Senior Theses

Contemplating the place of remembrance and history within German environmentalism has driven the idea of this thesis and its research. My central aim is to capture at least a slice of how Germans today perceive nature, environmentalism, and themselves within the context of a cultural history that contains both a national socialist and an environmental narrative. These two narratives have, during periods of German history, intersected. While I originally thought the influence of national socialist environmental thought would still penetrate Germans’ perception of nature, my findings revealed instead that German perceptions of environmentalism and ideas of nature are rooted in …

Audre Lorde & The Ontology Of Desire, Lauren Koenig

Scripps Senior Theses

This thesis advances an understanding of the ontological impact of Western conceptions of sexuality guided by a model of reparative reading as outlined by Eve Kosofosky Sedgwick. Rather than multiply and magnify anti-patriarchal invective, I use deconstructive techniques as a means of analyzing selections from the poetry of Audre Lorde (including “Bloodbirth,” “Making it,” “Pirouette,” and “Therapy”) in order to explore how a consideration of lesbian sexuality can inform an understanding of the more widespread conflation between writing, creation, and birth of the self.

The investigation centers on a variety of paradoxes encountered in the felt sense-oriented language of desire …

Language Transfer Between English And German: A Phonetics-Based Study Of Interactions Between Speakers' Native And Second-Language Vowel Systems, Emelia Bensonmeyer

Scripps Senior Theses

The present study addresses language contact processes in which the phonetic systems of the languages that bilinguals speak interact. Specifically, language transfer with respect to English and German was examined, focusing on native German speakers (L1) who learned English as a second language (L2). It employed as its central method an analysis of their vowel systems, both language-specifically and cross-linguistically. Extralinguistic variables were also considered, ranging from speakers’ age of acquisition (AOA) of English to their length of residence in an English-speaking environment to their consideration of home. Results indicated statistically significant differences between speakers’ production of /ɪ/ and /ʊ/ …

(Re)Producing The Neoliberal Subject: Child-Rearing Advice Literature Following "The Great Risk Shift", Sophie Boczek

Scripps Senior Theses

Following neoliberal restructuring in the 1980s, parenting advice literature experienced a significant growth in popularity. As the state largely transferred responsibility to individual citizens for economic survival, child-rearing discourse encouraged the cultivation of a subject who was best-suited for the contours of neoliberal life. This thesis explores the implications of this parenting rhetoric, as well as of the rise in popularity of parenting advice literature in neoliberal circumstances.

Virginity, Elizabeth, And The Power Of Persona: Examining The Shift Of Queen Elizabeth's Image In The 1570s-1580s Where She Replaced The Virgin Mary, Defeated The Spanish And Became Immortal, Abigail Sorkin

Scripps Senior Theses

Why did Queen Elizabeth I portray herself as the Virgin Queen? Why were both elements, virgin and queen, essential to her longevity and her success? Scholars have traditionally argued that Elizabeth’s persona as the Virgin Queen is a result of the end of her last marriage negotiation in the mid 1580s as it was now clear she would never marry and remain childless. However, considering the religious and diplomatic implications of this image, this interpretation not only seems too simplistic, it neglects the ways Elizabeth deliberately represented herself in a way that would appeal to her public. The Virgin Queen …

The Business Of 19th Century American Landscape Paintings: A Case Study Of The Connection Between Art History And Economics, Claire Di Meglio

Scripps Senior Theses

This thesis explores the economic incentives of both businessmen and artists who shared a mutual interest in the business of producing 19th century American landscapes paintings.

The Trauma Of Dishonor: Exploring The Ramifications Of Dishonor In Classical And Modern Society, Tamara Wachsman

Scripps Senior Theses

Exploratory in nature, this thesis investigated whether dishonor can be categorized as traumatic. With a foundation of existing research in trauma and honor, primary source analyses were conducted on classical texts, and a psychological study was conducted with participants living in the United States. The main primary source analyses were based on case studies, centering on Achilles, an ancient Greek hero, and Dido, an ancient Roman queen, who both experienced severe dishonor. Specifically, the narratives of Achilles and Queen Dido served as portrayals of dishonor in the form of a male hero who has his honor seized, and a woman …

Woven By The Grandmothers: The Development Of The National Museum Of The American Indian Throughout The 1990s, Lucy Winokur

Scripps Senior Theses

In 1994, the National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) opened the George Gustav Heye Center in New York City, the first of what would be three campuses. Ten years later, in 2004, the NMAI opened its main campus in Washington, D.C., already having cemented their place as leaders in a movement to center indigenous voices within museums housing indigenous material culture. By examining the history of the NMAI from the first acquisition of George Gustav Heye to its earliest approaches to exhibition design and collections management policy in the 1990s, it is possible to track the development of the …

Wedded To Change And Tradition: Conservative Jewish Same-Sex Weddings And Ritual Change, Logan Kramer

Scripps Senior Theses

This thesis explores how the Conservative Jewish wedding ritual shifts in meaning during the creation of same-sex wedding rituals because of a re-definition of the Conservative Jewish community as a whole. This case study is then tied to ritual theory more broadly.

In Chapter 1, I discuss what makes a wedding a ritual. By defining the wedding as a powerful, transformative, and performative ritual, I examine how the creation of same-sex wedding rituals is an ideal example to help us understand the ways that a religious community might approach ritual change. I also interrogate how marriage has been used to …

Islam And The French Republic: Approaches To Laïcité In The Era Of Jacques Chirac And Nicolas Sarkozy, Jennifer C. Grady

Scripps Senior Theses

Often interpreted as the separation of Church and State that guarantees the freedom of public space from religion, laïcité is a foundational principle of French Republican ideology and is regarded as a central component of French national identity. This thesis focuses on the issue of laïcité that developed in the late 1990s and early 2000s, a period that witnessed a resurgence of debates on the purpose and function of laïcité after several decades of immigration from former colonies rendered Islam the second largest religion in France. Centering on the era of Jacques Chirac and Nicolas Sarkozy, I examine the approaches …

Reimagining Theories Of Nationalism: A Critical Examiniation Of Prevailing Nationalist Theories, Sarah Sanchez

Scripps Senior Theses

Traditional theories of nationalism tend to fall in one of two categories: 1) top-down, or official nationalism, which holds that nationalist sentiments are created by state actors, or 2) bottom-up, or popular, nationalism, which holds that nationalist sentiments originate with the people. However, there are major flaws in both of those theories, as well as a decent amount of overlap between them. This paper dismantles the supposed binary between these two theories, and looks for a way to view the theories in combination with one another. Looking at the places of overlap, as well as the elements of each theory …

The Necessity And Detriment Of Shame As Presented In John Calvin's Institutes, Tova Cohen

Scripps Senior Theses

In this senior thesis, I aim to explore the presence of shame in John Calvin's Institutes of the Christian Religion, via the excavation of the three main components that comprise of his edifice: original sin, grace, and predestination. Through a close reading of Calvin's Institutes, its application to Aristotelian ethics, and its consistencies (or lack thereof) with the biblical story of Genesis, I found that Calvin's theology not only suffers logical structure, but implores the Christian practitioner to embrace shame as a means to spiritually elevate the self. To conclude, I utilize Stephanie Arel's Affect Theory to uncover the …

(Re)Reading Fanon: Tracing Revolutionary Negotiations Within The Algerian Colonial Dialectic, Nina Zietlow

Scripps Senior Theses

A critical rereading of Fanon within the Algerian colonial context.

Migration And Women’S Relationships To The Land And Food In Myanmar, Allison Joseph

Scripps Senior Theses

Abstract

In the 21st century, Myanmar has become the largest migration source country in the Greater Mekong Sub-region. To achieve its economic and political goals, the government has conducted extensive confiscation and reallocation of communal lands, which has resulted in a growing class of landless and dispossessed citizens. Under the new laws, rural women are disproportionately impacted and more vulnerable to the processes of dispossession, often lacking the rights or resources of their male counterparts to fight for the land of their ancestors. This has resulted in the wide-scale disinheritance of Myanmar’s rural women from their land and food, as …

Remembering In Future Generations: American Holocaust Museums And Memorials, Miriam E. Bankier

Scripps Senior Theses

As the 75^th year anniversary of the Holocaust approaches, the generational shift and dwindling number of Holocaust survivors is becoming a prevalent issue in Holocaust memorialization. Holocaust memory has always depended on narratives from survivors, which are often made possible through institutions such as museums and memorial foundations. Yet, there is currently a shift in these institutions, as they face the needs of younger generations, who are pushing for more technology and community involvement. This thesis examines the consequences of these trends for Holocaust memorialization. These consequences are worrisome and scary for those closely linked to the Holocaust. However, …

Passe Pas: Rethinking The Passport, Miriam E. Bankier

Scripps Senior Theses

Filled with national symbols, stamps and basic identifying information, a passport can obscure the humanity behind the individual passport holder, inverting it from a symbol of citizenship and belonging to one of marginalization and xenophobia. In today’s political climate, the meaning of art has become intersected with politics and the law. Using the very tools and some processes of passport production, i.e. mixed media and printmaking techniques, my work responds to and disrupts the bureaucracy and impersonal settings involving passports and identification documents. I draw from my own experiences and privilege as having Austrian, Italian, and American citizenship, as well …

Sacred Flame: Meditative Mysticism In The Works Of Georges De La Tour, Elizabeth Carleton

Scripps Senior Theses

Georges de La Tour is famous for his Mary Magdalene paintings, but he remains one of the most mysterious figures in 17th Century French art. In my thesis, I elaborate the ways in which La Tour's unique painting style was impacted by Counter-Reformation meditation theology and contemporary French mystical literature. While La Tour's artistic inspirations include Caravaggio, the Caravaggisti, and French and Lorrainese Mannerists, his late-career nocturne style is a striking departure from his early career, demonstrating an intense, reflective spirituality. In his use of light and flame to symbolize holiness, La Tour positions himself as spiritual intercessor to the …